Marvin Wyler's family has abandoned him
John Dougherty
May. 11, 2008
COLORADO CITY
Marvin Wyler turns up a recording of his fourth daughter, Zina,
singing one his favorite songs. Her crystal-clear voice fills the
kitchen and family room of Wyler's sprawling home, where he and his
plural wives raised 34 children.
The recording is the only way Wyler, 63, can hear his daughter's
lovely voice, even though she lives only a half-mile down the road in
this small town on the windswept Arizona Strip where a fundamentalist
Mormon offshoot has continued the practice of plural marriage since
the 1930s.
Wyler believes in the teachings of Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith
that included plural marriage as a necessary precursor to exaltation
and eternal life as a god in the "celestial kingdom."
But Wyler left the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day
Saints in 2002 over doctrinal differences with its leader, the now
imprisoned Warren Steed Jeffs.
Wyler's decision to quit the FLDS came with a high price. None of
approximately 50 children and grandchildren remaining in the sect that
has no affiliation with the mainstream Mormon Church, which disavowed
polygamy in 1890, has had any contact with him in six years.
Wyler said he doesn't know how many grandchildren he may have from
Zina. "It was 10 at last count, but I don't know," he said. "If they
found her in my home, they would cut her off (from the church)."
It's ironic, Wyler said, that FLDS members are now suffering the agony
of separation from loved ones after Texas last month removed 462 FLDS
children from their religious compound and placed them in foster
homes.
"I wish it on nobody, but the pain and suffering they are now feeling
is exactly what they put us through six years ago," Wyler said.
Few things are more painful in life than to have someone who once was
part of your family sever all contact, for whatever reason. But that
is what Warren Jeffs has caused to happen to an untold number of FLDS
families. Jeffs routinely, without explanation, excommunicated men he
deemed spiritually unworthy, banished them from town and gave their
wives and children to other men. The wives and children would take new
last names and refuse to communicate with the exiled man. This harsh
practice has left a swirling wake of agony, premature death, nervous
breakdowns and suicide.
Breaking apart and rearranging families is part of Jeffs' belief that
FLDS children do not belong to their parents. The children, he
repeatedly preached, belong to a male-only "priesthood" that re****ts
directly to the prophet, in this case, Warren Jeffs.
If Jeffs believed it was in the best spiritual interest to separate a
child from her parents and send her to another FLDS compound thousands
of miles away in Canada, where the child would be forced to work
without pay and pray continually, it would be done.
No FLDS parent would stand in the way of Jeffs' command. To do so
would risk op****tunity for eternal glory in the afterlife.
After spending much of the past six years covering the FLDS for
Phoenix New Times and now the New York Times, it is painstakingly
clear that, although FLDS parents may love their children, they have
ceded their parental rights and control to Jeffs and other church
leaders.
And there is no doubt that FLDS leaders were grooming all the children
removed last month from the Yearning for Zion compound to be willing
participates in a religious culture that wor****ps placing teenage
girls into polygamous marriages.
Texas authorities have found 31 girls under 18 who were either
pregnant or already have given birth. Records seized from the compound
show girls as young as 15 were pregnant, with re****ts of a 13-year-old
girl being "spiritually" married.
All these children were trapped on the YZF compound, although it
appears few, if any, wanted to leave or objected to their fate as teen
brides. It is considered the highest honor in the FLDS to have been
selected to live at YFZ, and for a young girl to be married to a
righteous man, no matter how old, is a ticket to exaltation in the
afterlife.
The parents of these children not only sup****ted this culture of
***ual predation of teenage girls by much older men, in some cases
court records indicate they actively participated in the exploitation
by bringing underage wives into their families.
The children now in the Texas foster-care system will no doubt face
more trauma as they adjust to the outside world that they have been
taught to believe is full of the wicked. The ultimate fate of the
children is far from certain. Legal battles over their custody will
drag on for months, if not years.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said Texas' decision to remove
all the children from the compound, based on the "possibility that
they might someday grow up to be an abuser," is going to unleash a
legal firestorm. "I think they have bitten off a huge constitutional
problem," he said.
Time will tell. The courts will determine, on an individual basis,
which parents, if any, should retain custody of their children.
Legal experts say the child-custody cases will likely withstand legal
challenges to the validity of the search warrant.
But FLDS attorneys may be successful in motions to suppress the search
warrant in ongoing criminal investigations of men who took underage
brides and the women who sup****ted the practice of allowing their
daughters to submit themselves to unlawful ***ual encounters.
Losing the op****tunity to prosecute these cases because of an
unconstitutional search warrant would be a major setback in efforts to
persuade polygamous communities in Arizona, Utah and elsewhere
throughout the West to stop underage marriages. Already, there are
re****ts that many men have slipped away from YFZ, one step ahead of
likely criminal charges, to pursue their religious beliefs elsewhere.
Although the dust hasn't settled from the Texas incursion into YFZ,
anti-polygamy activists and political op****tunists, including Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., have unleashed tirades against
Arizona and Utah for not launching similar raids on FLDS communities
in Colorado City and adjacent Hildale, Utah.
These shrill and somewhat hysterical demands ignore the very real
differences between the Texas compound that was sealed from the
outside world by guards and a locked gate and the conditions in
Hildale and Colorado City, where the public, and presumably church
members, are free to come and go.
Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said the state does not have
the legal authority to start rounding up polygamists in hundreds of
homes scattered across a town, based on an allegation of abuse in one
home - which is something we should all be happy to know.
Furthermore, although the Arizona Constitution bans polygamy, the
Legislature has never passed a corresponding criminal statute making
polygamy a crime. It's unlikely such a statute will pass anytime soon.
Arizona and Utah have instead focused on prosecuting cases involving
underage marriages.
It was this strategy that led to the arrest and conviction of Jeffs,
who is serving consecutive five-years-to-life prison terms for his
conviction last September in a Utah state court on two counts of rape
as an accomplice. The conviction stemmed from Jeffs performing the
spiritual marriage of an unwilling 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old
cousin.
Wyler says the late FLDS prophet Rulon Jeffs told men gathered in a
priesthood meeting around 2000 that the FLDS would no longer marry
underage girls.
But, according to Wyler and others at the meeting, Warren Jeffs
overruled his father and said the FLDS would never allow the state to
dictate religious decisions.
Warren assumed control of the FLDS when Rulon died in 2002, setting
the church on a collision course with law enforcement.
Jeffs has plenty of time to ponder his decisions as he sits in a
Mohave County jail in solitary confinement and suicide watch awaiting
trial on ***ual-abuse and ***** charges stemming from his performing
underage marriages.
The blame for the anguish, fear and uncertainty facing FLDS children
now living in foster homes across Texas - children first ripped from
their parents' souls by a religious fanatic before being physically
removed by the state - sits squarely on his frail shoulders.
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