Polygamists' family ties
Book on Bountiful, B.C., community delves into Mormon splinter sect's
U.S. links and Alberta origins
Richard Helm, The Edmonton Journal
April 13, 2008
As police swept through a secretive religious retreat in Texas this
week, Daphne Bramham watched the TV images and wondered how long it
will take before Canadian authorities crack down on a similar
polygamist settlement in southern British Columbia.
The veteran Vancouver journalist is the author of The Secret Lives of
Saints (Random House, $32.95), an exhaustive account of the founding
and flouri****ng of the breakaway Mormon sect in Bountiful, just
outside Creston, B.C. The Bountiful community has direct ties to the
group at the Yearn For Zion Ranch in west Texas, the site of police
raids this week that saw the removal of 416 children from the
compound.
The massive investigation was triggered when state child protective
services received a call from a 16-year-old girl at the ranch who
re****ted she had been ***ually and physically abused.
Bramham, a Vancouver Sun writer who has re****ted on Bountiful for
eight years, thinks some kind of similar complaint will have to
surface in B.C. for that community to finally get the sharp scrutiny
it deserves.
"It needs one brave person," Bramham said in an interview. "It's very
difficult for them to come forward because not only does their earthly
life, but also their salvation, depend on being loyal to the prophet
and to their families and to the group."
The closed communities of Bountiful and Eldorado are part of the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a splinter
sect not recognized by the mainstream Mormon Church, that practices a
form of plural marriage. Polygamy has been illegal in Canada and the
U.S. since 1890.
Warren Jeffs, the current FLDS prophet who exercises absolute control
over an estimated 10,000 followers across North America, is now in a
Utah prison, serving two consecutive terms of five years to life as an
accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl -- one of the sect's
forced brides.
In Bountiful, an enclave of about 1,000 followers, the self-appointed
spiritual leader is Winston Blackmore, a man who has said it's God's
will that he has 22 wives and more than 100 children. Canada's most
outspoken polygamist insists his faith left him no choice but to marry
and impregnate nearly a dozen teens, and he has publicly admitted
marrying girls as young as 15.
Other books, including Jon Krakauer's bestseller Under the Banner of
Heaven, have probed American polygamous communities and their leaders,
but Bramham's book is the first to examine the web of connections
between fundamentalist Mormons in Canada and the U.S. And it is
certainly the first to dig so deeply into the history of polygamy in
Canada -- including the movement's Alberta origins.
"There are still polygamists in Alberta," Bramham said. "There are
quite a few FLDS and Blackmore lumber companies working in Sundre. And
they send the boys there to work."
One fascinating passage in Bramham's book recounts the history of
Charles Ora Card, the Mormon who arrived in what is now Alberta in
1886, fleeing charges of polygamy in the U.S., and founded the
settlement of Cardston. Two years later, Card and two other Mormon
leaders travelled to Ottawa to meet with Sir John A. Macdonald and
asked him to legalize polygamy so that Canada might become a sanctuary
for Mormon men and their multiple wives. Macdonald refused, and
afterwards instructed the North West Mounted Police to watch out for
any men practicing polygamy. That was to be only the first of many
such cautions to go unheeded.
Bramham presents a compelling case that generations of Canadian
politicians have not only ignored the law-breaking polygamists, but
for more than 100 years have allowed them access to government funds,
appointed them to government boards and helped them gain local
acceptance and a modi*** of respectability.
Bountiful has operated with impunity for more than 60 years, despite
allegations of forced marriages of underage girls and the trafficking
of wives across the Canada-U.S. border, while successive governments
in Victoria have fretted over whether Canada's polygamy ban would
survive a challenge under the Charter of Rights. A multi-year RCMP
investigation continues to sit with the B.C. Crown prosecutor without
action, and B.C. Attorney General Wally Oppal has a second special
prosecutor now working the Bountiful file, after rejecting the
findings of the first special prosecutor he assigned.
"The RCMP finished their investigation a year and a half ago, so it's
starting to get stale-dated," Bramham said. "If there was a chance
that there were people who were willing to be witnesses a year and a
half ago, there's a good chance that they won't be now. But there's
just a complete lack of political will ....
"Of course, we know politicians never do anything without putting
their fingers up and seeing which way the wind is blowing. Unless
Canadians, and people in British Columbia and Creston stand up and
say, 'This is unacceptable to us,' the politicians aren't going to do
anything."
Bramham says it's difficult not to see a double standard when liberal
tolerance and religious freedoms somehow trump polygamy laws at home
while at the same time the country is absolutely fearless in attacking
human rights atrocities abroad.
"If we're going to go waltzing into Afghanistan to defend the rights
of women and children there, we better be defending them at home."
http://www.truthandgrace.com/polygamy.htm
|
