She was in the church before the seed bearers took effect-that has only been happening for a few years, since Warren Jeffs took over the church. I was reading about that ritual with the "seed bearers." Were all her children conceived that way? I believe she had 16 children-I don't want to misspeak-and she was able to tell me exactly which child was conceived in what she would call normal sexual relations and which child was conceived as a result of rape. She was wife number whatever in both marriages. One of the most painful interviews I conducted was with a woman who was about my age, 58, whose first husband left her and then she remarried. Did most of women you spoke to talk about sexual abuse in the church? It seems that, particularly, polygamy in which there's one man with many wives leads to the most harm, especially for women. That's his form of control over the women-and over the men, too. ![]() There's nothing like firsthand interviewing-we're talking about lots of interviews over many, many, many hours that gave Julia and me insight into the harm that's caused by cultural polygamy. That gave me, from my perspective, pretty exploratory accessibility and availability to these women and young girl's stories, in terms of trying to understand the ins and outs of the faith. ![]() I was introduced to them by an intermediary who arranged the interviews. That then lead to writing Polygamy: Not "Big Love" But Significant Harm.įor that I interviewed young adults-some men, but primarily women-who had left the faith. I met with a wide range of people from and that book project lead to another book project called Tolerating Intolerance. In the context of the United States, the group that I picked to research was FLDS, and that was my introduction to. A book I wrote called Freedom From Religion was published, and in the process of writing that book I was examining religious extremists in five different countries. The former temple at the FLDS ranch in Texas, before it was raided by the FBIīROADLY: What was the impetus behind going out and gathering all these interviews from the women and men who had left the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints ?Īmos Guiora: I had begun writing about the LDS church in 2009. Jessop was pulled out of school in the eighth grade. "Fighting for an education is seen as absolute selfishness ," Jessop said. One female member, Terrassa Wall, attributed the isolating secrecy of the church as a factor for abuse, and another, Carolyn Jessop, told Chamberlin and Guiora that young girls had no choice but to become mothers. In their remarkable study of the harmful realities of polygamy, professors Julia Chamberlin and Amos Guiora actually found and interviewed women of the church, in which they testified to this practice and other sexist traditions of FLDS. Along with the state of Utah, the FLDS has compounds in Texas, Arizona, and Canada. Following the Latter-Day Saint tradition of marriage and childbirth as a vehicle for men to achieve Godly status in the afterlife, Jeffs mandated that his cult's women were only allowed to copulate with chosen "seed bearers." This meant that only 15 hand-chosen males could impregnate FLDS women to insure that the children they gave birth to would be pure "spirit children." Court documents from the divorce of Warren Jeffs' brother and his wife explain that the practice required the husband "to sit in the room while the chosen seed bearer, or a couple of them, rape his wife or wives."Īccording to CNN, Jeffs is still running the church from prison. Jeffs' particular brand of Mormonism required women to undergo a bizarre and coercive from of procreation. In 2005, Jeffs was placed on the FBI's Most Wanted list for two counts of sexual conduct with a minor and accomplice to rape. ![]() Jeffs, now imprisoned for life, amassed 80 wives, completely severed the ties between members of the church and the outside world, and sexually abused young children, one of his sisters, and his daughter. But once Jeffs took over the Utah-based church from his father in 2002, he took it even further.
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