Hoax confirmed in Mormon case

The arrest of a Colorado woman for allegedly impersonating an abused girl has cast doubt on the tip-off that led to a massive police raid on a polygamist compound in Texas. A total of 416 children were taken from the remote 1,700-acre Yearning For Zion (YFZ) ranch after an April 3 raid on the breakaway Mormon sect of the jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs.

The controversial operation against the 10,000-strong Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was provoked by a call to an abuse hotline from a 16-year-old girl who identified herself as Sarah. The caller said that she had an eight-month-old baby and was pregnant with another child after her 50-year-old "husband" forced her to have sex. Authorities have been unable to locate Sarah despite interviewing the children, and doubts persist as to whether she really exists.

The whole operation has been thrown into question by the arrest on Wednesday of a Colorado Springs woman named Rozita Swinton. Ms Swinton, 33, is accused of making calls in which she claimed to be an abused child being held in a basement. She has also allegedly masqueraded as a desperate mother who threatened to abandon a newborn baby and commit suicide.

Flora Jessop, a former church member who runs a centre for teenage girls trying to escape the polygamist sect, told the Denver Post yesterday that she received a call from Ms Swinton claiming to be an abuse victim named Sarah on March 30. Texas authorities say that a girl with the same name also called a Texas hotline on March 29 claiming that she was suffering abuse in the polygamist compound. The hotline call was not made public until after the raid on the YFZ ranch. "It does kind of indicate [Ms Swinton] made those calls," Ms Jessop told the Denver Post. "There was no press on it at the time."

Ms Jessop said that she recorded between 30 to 40 hours of daily phone conversations with Ms Swinton, who alternately claimed to be Sarah, Sarah's twin sister Laura and Laura's friend. She would call after 8.30pm at night and speak softly, explaining that others in the compound were sleeping. "She was very convincing," Ms Jessop said. "She very much thought this out." Ms Jessop said that she confronted Ms Swinton when she called her two hours after her release on Thursday claiming to be Laura's friend. Ms Swinton admitted that her name was Rose, she said.

The raid has left a judge struggling to cope with the largest child custody case in American history. Judge Barbara Walther complained of a "free for all" as hundreds of state-appointed lawyers packed her courtroom and an overflow room three blocks away to represent each child. She must decide whether to return the children to their parents or to place them in foster care because of the risk of underage sex.

Angie Voss, a child welfare investigator, testified that the officials who raided the polygamist compound were told that there was no girl known as Sarah. But interviews have now identified five Sarahs, including three who could have been the girl who called to report abuse. "We learnt that a few of the girls know of the Sarah we were looking for and that she'd been seen last week and she had a baby," Ms Voss said. Ms Voss acknowledged that most of the children showed no signs of physical or sexual abuse. But she said that at least five girls under18 were pregnant or have children - with one becoming a mother at the age of 13.

She told the judge that they should remain in state care because they were "at risk". "They will continue to grow up in an environment where young women have sex with older men and young boys grow into adult men and have sex with young children," she said.

The sect is complaining that the raid - larger even than the infamous Short Creek raid in 1953, when 236 children were taken from the polygamist sect - violates its religious freedom.

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FLDS and the Oneida Commune

I teach a seminar on legal systems very different from ours. As it happens, today we will be discussing a student paper from a previous year dealing with the Oneida commune, the famous 19th century group marriage experiment. On the face of it, Oneida was guilty of the same offenses the FLDS is charged with. Sex between young women and older men (and young men and older women) was an explicit part of their system and they made no attempt to conceal it. Their marriage pattern was even stranger than polygamy, since everyone was married to everyone. Like the FLDS, they saw their sexual system as an important part of their religion. Like the FLDS, they had a charismatic leader with complete authority. The FLDS is charged with brainwashing its members, Oneida had a well organized system of criticism and indoctrination.

Oneida functioned openly, publishing descriptions of what they were doing and why for a period of decades, and its final collapse seems to have been due more to internal problems-the founder was getting old, there was no well established successor, and the second generation, as with Israeli kibbutzim, was less enthusiastic about the system than the first-than to external pressure, although there was some of that.

The FLDS, on the other hand, functioned only by staying under the radar of the formal legal system. In both its recent collisions with the law, the treatment looks close to a presumption of guilt. The leader was charged and convicted with being an accessory to rape on the grounds that a woman claimed, some considerable time after she was married, that he had helped pressure her into the marriage-a result I find it hard to imagine in an ordinary case. The recent raid seized all of the children and took them away from their parents although the allegations, if true-and very likely they were true, whether or not the phone call that set off the raid was real-were only relevant to a small fraction of the children.

I do not think I have yet read any defense of the FLDS-any public statement arguing that they should be left alone to implement their very odd, and quite likely illegal, pattern of behavior. Yet Oneida, once established, functioned openly, propagandizing for its system, for decades. Why the difference?

Three possibilities occur to me. The first is that nineteenth century America was a more tolerant society than twenty-first century America, at least with regard to issues having to do with young people having sex. The second is that the Oneida commune was supported by the surrounding community, in part because it was an economically successful system providing employment, at its peak, for about 700 of its neighbors. The third is that its more symmetrical sexual arrangements-young men with older women as well as young women with older men-were less offensive.

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Odd sect targeted for destruction?

There's a lot to dislike about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Basically, any religion that seemingly tailors its theology to assure old men a steady stream of teenage brides is worthy of regarding with a hairy eyeball. Church members also have a reputation for milking social services, using taxpayers to subsidize their way of life. But does that mean that FLDS adherents don't have a right to raise and educate their children as they see fit, so long as they don't subject them to abuse?

That's the big question hovering over the hearings in San Angelo, Texas. When authorities raided the Yearnings for Zion Ranch FLDS settlement and made off with 416 children, they didn't confine their interest to adolescent girls forced into relations with older men. They took children of both sexes, and much younger than any at risk of coerced marriage. And when the women of the community tearfully demanded the return of their children, "experts" were trotted out to insist that the grown adults protesting their treatment at the hands of the state had been "brainwashed" through physical and emotional abuse, religious faith and fear of banishment. So, of course, there's no need to pay them any attention.

Not everybody buys the argument that people who choose to live differently should be assumed to have been forced into that life. Nancy Ammerman, a professor of the sociology of religion at Boston University and author of a book on religious fundamentalism told ABC News:

"Brainwashing is actually extraordinarily rare," said Ammerman. "It implies that the person has literally lost the ability to think independently and to make choices. "We really don't have any evidence that anything even vaguely resembling that is going on with this particular group or with most religious groups."

Some of the FLDS women went with the children to watch over them while they were held at a state shelter. But don't try to ask them how they and the sect's younger members are being treated -- they've been cut off from outside contact. According to the New York Times, "Officials first confiscated all the cellphones held by the children and mothers who went with them to shelter to prevent communication with outsiders. Later, they separated the mothers from children older than 6 in hopes of getting them to talk without a parent in attendance."

Increasingly, the Texas raid is looking less like an effort to assure the well-being of a teenage girl who called for help -- and who may or may not actually exist -- and more like a scheme to destroy an unusual religious community with some admittedly unsavory practices. Government officials targeted the FLDS for destruction once before -- in the wildly misfired raid of 1953 that turned sect members from reviled outsiders into sympathetic victims of the state. Now, in more government-friendly times, authorities seem dead-set on destroying the sect by depriving it of a next generation.

The hearing in San Angelo has been described as "chaotic" with upwards of 350 lawyers -- many of them volunteers -- involved. That's a good thing when there's so much at stake.

At the end of the day, any FLDS members involved in coercing and abusing church members should be severely punished. But the overall treatment of the sect's children will tell us whether there's still room in the U.S. for people who want to raise their families according to beliefs and customs at odds with those of the mainstream.

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(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)