The Peanut Gallery
An event like the great raid on the Texas Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) Ranch on 3 April, 2008, is guaranteed to bring out the opinionated. Of course, the Texas Authorities began undermining the accused immediately. The Child Protective Services (CPS) people babbled some of the usual law enforcement mumbo jumbo, such as claims of grooming and forcing young girls into all sorts of things sexual. After the scale of the debacle became public, authorities need to save face and worked to produce self‑serving propaganda.
The Texas rangers added their silliness into the mix with affidavits that contained fiction, although they were attested to be true. Ranger Leslie Brooks claimed that a bed in the FLDS temple was used for sex with young girls. Brooks based that claim on one long hair found in a bed and since the bed was unmade, it must have been used to rape teenagers. Ranger Brooks obviously watches too much television. Later Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran, and others expanded the number of beds as proof of bad sex.
CPS workers claimed that underage girls were observed on the Ranch, and they were either pregnant or had been in the past. How they came to that conclusion is unknown. The falseness of these claims and subsequent events demonstrates the incompetence of the CPS as a whole.
The news organizations got into the act with their own undermining and gathering of dubious experts to tell tales and claim claims.
It was on the various message boards that the hype and hyperbole came into its own. I think that some of the most vociferous posters were employees of the State of Texas.
There is a group that insists that all the men were perverts; all the women were stupid and brainwashed; all the children were raped. This community of accusers has no real world information for such claims, but they don’t need any. They have their own world view.
Others were not too concerned about the adult females since they were adults but hated all the males nonetheless for their perversions with children. Even after the age identification procedures of the CPS were shown to be completely bogus, the claims of all males raping all underage females continued.
There are various issues that are pertinent. These are polygamy, underage marriage, and child abuse. Other issues surfaced such as expelling and shunning former members. Some of the peanut gallery chronically claim that all the polygamous families live on welfare.
The FLDS does practice a form of polygamy. And, for whatever reasons, polygamy is illegal in all the states. But, the FLDS practice skirts the law by using spiritual marriages. Thus, there is one official paper marriage. The others are marriages not on paper are termed spiritual. How many spiritual wives are involved? There have been no statistics, only guesses from Texas authorities. And, the Texas people have been notoriously dishonest.
Related is the practice in the mainstream Latter Day Saints of sealing marriages. These are Celestial marriages that will be valid in the Exaltation. The rules for these marriages are rather bizarre, but presumably there is no age limit. Under present rules, a male can seal multiple wives while he is alive and a woman can be sealed to multiple husbands only after her death.
But, the prosecution of polygamy must be limited to the earthly United States until it becomes legalized in at least one state. The regulation of marriage gets to be very murky (Wisconsin even has a law against pretend ceremonies). Demographics are changing and if present population trends continue long enough, polygamy could become legal due to a lack of available males.
The naysayers claim that females engage in polygamy because they are stupid and frightened or brainwashed. This is a rather absurd claim. It is based on the verbiage of feminists who need to undermine and demean women who do not jump through the gender‑feminist hoops.
Those who claim that biblically, marriage is one man and one woman need to read their Bible. Notably Jacob had to marry Esther’s sister before he could marry Esther. And many old‑timers had mistresses as well. I see no one quoting about Sarah insisting that her indentured slave Hagar bear a child fathered by the Patriarch Abraham.
Polygamy, or bigamy, is illegal and thus can be prosecuted. Realistically our courts have more pressing matters than tying up resources to argue what is and is not a marriage. If the unit is economically self‑sufficient, there is little to be concerned about.
The next issue is the underage marriages. Age based marriage laws are presumably there to protect the innocent and naive. Thus in Wisconsin, it was that an eighteen‑year‑old female could marry without parental permission, but a male had to wait until age twenty‑one for the same freedom. The age of consent for underage marriage is often tied to parental permission. Things get a little murky when a person can marry below the age of consent for sex.
The marriages being attacked by authorities are presumably paper marriages since spiritual marriages to underage persons would constitute statutory rape. Presently, Texas requires parental consent for persons sixteen and seventeen years old to marry. Until September, 2005, the age was fourteen. The change was aimed at the FLDS.
The age of consent in Texas is seventeen. If the youngest of a pair is over the age of fourteen and the oldest is less than three years older that is a defense against statutory rape.
Note that a legally married fourteen‑year‑old in September, 2005 could easily be a pregnant seventeen‑year‑old at the time of the raid. And they might have given birth in the previous two plus years and still have no Texas law violated.
The Texas CPS made their claims of underage mothers based upon the idea that the age of marriage was always sixteen. And, they have yet to verify their allegations anyway.
But, the peanut gallery folks don’t allow such things as fact to affect their claims and thinking. They just enjoy the community of making outrageous and false claims. They foolishly believe that they are exempt from the same kind of accusations from others.
The thoughtless behaviors and words that came out are not at all unique. I see them on many bulletin boards. They claim that the accused is guilty because they are too fat, ugly, or stupid. This is scary since these are the same sorts that engage in events like Kristallnacht or the Sudanese Teddy Bear riots.
When Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered by a psychopath, many of the peanut gallery proposed that the murderer should be set free for doing a public service. The killer also murdered another prisoner who was likely innocent. The psychopath would have killed more persons if released.
The same people who were so pleased were silent about the two Milwaukee police officers who allowed Dahmer to continue his killing when they released a fourteen‑year‑old back to Dahmer’s custody, characterizing the wounds on the youth were a result of a gay lover’s quarrel.
Perhaps it is a need for community that brings people to congregate on the bulletin boards and share their claims. These people often believe a different law should apply to the accused. How a different set of rules can be arbitrarily applied only to the persons tagged by the gallery crowd defies reason. But, the Christian mainstream of Germany had no problem with such a position.
These people will always be with us. These are the ghouls who applaud at convictions and executions. These are the people who ignore and excuse the large number of wrongful convictions. These are the people who would condemn a person to death with no evidence needed, particularly if the accused was a different social class, religion, or color.
When I think of these people, I realize that they are greater danger to our society than anything else.
by Brian McCorkle
in category Criminal Justice,FLDS
