First of four parts
It started in February 2007 with a letter by a former member of Davis County’s secretive Kingston clan to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other prominent national leaders. The letter, signed by anti-polygamy crusader Victoria Prunty, then executive director of Tapestry Against Polygamy, supported Reid’s call for a federal investigation of crime within polygamy groups and charged Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff with not doing enough to stop the abuses.
“A few months after Tapestry was organized,” the letter said of the Kingston clan, “a 16-year-old girl who was the 15th wife of her uncle made national headlines when her father maliciously beat her for running away from the forced marriage. This incident shone an ominous light onto the hidden abuses that are endemic in the Mormon polygamist subculture, inspiring newspapers around the country to conduct a series of investigative reporting. However, state and local law enforcement turned a blind eye to the results.”
Last week, the letter’s hope for federal action became a reality when Reid, D-Nev., and other government officials met in Washington, D.C., before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he denounced polygamist groups as a form of “organized crime” suspected of offenses against young women and children.
That hearing, and the federal investigations that are likely to follow, could reverberate all the way to Davis County.
Utahns have battled the stigma of polygamy for years. Most people know it still exists in places like Hilldale, Utah; Colorado City, Ariz.; and now in Texas.
But it’s an open secret that the roots of the large Kingston polygamist group took shape and grew in Bountiful.
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Forced marriage is a crime which should be enforced under
laws covering rape, since the marriage is not consensual,
in the vast majority of cases, sexual conduct would be rape.
What I want to know is whether the girls who married at 16, in many cases their families were poor, and they married, in part, to escape poverty–a Hinkley Grandneice, [West Salt Lake] had all of her girlfriends marry at sixteen, and so did a Cedar City neice.
Another friend married a 35 year old neighbor to get away from a abusive stepfather. [Delta] These were all monogamous cases, and include a niece in Foster Care who tried to get married to get out of the system and the judge declined. [She later married the same over age boy after he finished law school, at 24.]
It was a sad case of always a bridesmaid never a bride, until all of a sudden it became a big, terrible crime
to marry a girl under 18 in 1997. And now people in very
isolated communities are having their doors kicked in
by TAC squads.
I understand the big deal about forced marriages, but
cultural trend change slowly, particularly when it comes
to patterns of marriage in rural Utah.
All marriages among religious polygamous communities–
the Romany, Orthodox Jews and Fundamentalist Mormons
were legal and their children legitimate for about
twenty years under a federal law called the Smith Act.
It went out with Newt Gengritch’s sweeping return to the dark ages platform. I think it went to the Supreme Court,
so, when things cool down a better law could be
drafted.
Back to underage girls marrying older men–is it just a matter of polygamy? Maybe the state should pass a law
requiring everyone writing out marriage licences to
wear better glasses.
Why the ponderous spin. A newspaper campaign asking
all editors and managers of news outlets to carry content
on the change in law–letters to the Jeff’s type before
the fact.
The media circus has hurt a lot of innocent people and it
looks like it’s only getting worse.
Kathleen