Fundamentalist Mormon Polygamist Found Guilty of Sexual Assault

Polygamist Warren Jeffs was found guilty of sexually assaulting two girls, aged 12 and 15, both of whom he joined in "spiritual marriage."  Warren Jeffs is the president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), which is a fundamentalist Mormon church that practices polygamy.

Jeffs, who is 55, argued that his religious freedom was being infringed upon.  My question is, what is more important?  The right of an ephebophile to rape 12 and 15 year olds under the guise of religion or the right not to be raped and forced into a marriage with some pervert that is 43 years older than you?  I am glad that, in this case, common sense prevailed.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) is the primary denomination of Mormonism.  Polygamy in the LDS Church was ceased in 1890.  About six years later, Utah was admitted to the United States.  The FLDS Church is not affiliated with the LDS Church.  Even when LDS practiced polygamy, it was practiced differently than as is in the FLDS Church:

The way FLDS currently practice polygamy differs in important ways from the way Mormons practiced polygamy in 19th-century Utah. A) Mormons always discouraged divorce, but Utah nevertheless had fairly liberal divorce laws so women could leave polygamous marriages if they so desired. B) Polygamous wives were encouraged to get a good education, and some early Mormon polygamist women became doctors and political activists. C) Polygamous marriages were not typically arranged or reassigned. Women were free to marry whoever they wished. Brigham Young stated the following in 1853: “I am free, and so are you. My advice to the sisters is, 'Never be [married] to any man unless you wish to be.' I say to you High Priests and Elders, 'Never from this time ask a woman to be [married] to you, unless she wants to be; but let the widows and children alone.'” D) Brigham Young came to detest the marriage of men with very young girls. In 1857, he stated, "I shall not [marry] the people as I have done. Old Father Alread brought three young girls 12 & 13 years old. I would not [marry] them to him. They would not be equally yoked together... this is the way that devils are made." E) Only an estimated 5%-30% of 19th-century Mormons were polygamists. The FLDS Church, on the other hand, has no liberal divorce laws, arranges and reassigns marriages, marries old men to young girls, and believes all members of the community should practice polygamy.

On a related note, Utah was the third state to grant women suffrage (after Wyoming and Colorado), which it did in 1895.  In contrast, Saudi Arabia does not allow women to vote.  

One Reason I Oppose Gay Marriage

It appears most gays have no respect for the institution of marriage.  In fact, according to a New York Times Op-Ed, the real goal of some gay marriage proponents, called liberationists, is to "knock marriage off its cultural pedestal altogether."  It also describes a mixture of conservatism and liberationism:

This vision embraces the institution of marriage, rather than seeking to overthrow it. But it also hints that the example of same-sex unions might partially transform marriage from within, creating greater institutional flexibility — particularly sexual flexibility — for straight and gay spouses alike.
This idea is most prominently associated with Dan Savage, the prolific author, activist and sex columnist who was profiled in Sunday’s Times Magazine. Savage is strongly pro-marriage, but he thinks the institution is weighed down by unrealistic cultural expectations about monogamy. Better, he suggests, to define marriage simply as a pact of mutual love and care, and leave all the other rules to be negotiated depending on the couple.
In “The Commitment,” his memoir about wedding his longtime boyfriend, Savage described the way his own union has successfully made room for occasional infidelity. “Far from undermining the stable home we’ve built for our child,” he writes, “the controlled way in which we manage our desire for outside sexual contact has made our home more stable.”

One thing curtails my pessimism:

But liberationism has been gradually marginalized in the gay community over the last two decades, and gay conservatism seems to have largely carried the day. The desire to be included in an existing institution has proved stronger than the desire to eliminate every institutional constraint.

That article also provides this:

The trouble is that straight culture already experimented with exactly this kind of model, with disastrous results.

Forty years ago, Savage’s perspective temporarily took upper-middle-class America by storm. In the mid-1970s, only 51 percent of well-educated Americans agreed that adultery was always wrong. But far from being strengthened by this outbreak of realism, their marriages went on to dissolve in record numbers.

This trend eventually reversed itself. Heterosexual marriage has had a tough few decades, but its one success story is the declining divorce rate among the upper middle class. This decline, tellingly, has gone hand in hand with steadily rising disapproval of adultery.

There’s a lesson here. Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature.

(h/t GayPatriot)

Homosexuals do not deserve marriage until they demonstrate that they are willing to abide by the moral standards it demands.  I previously talked about the importance of the traditional family to the health of society.

Overreaction of Titanic Proportions over Imaginary Homophobia

I just saw this on the news:

Professor and former Surrey-North federal Liberal candidate Shinder Purewal sparked a Twitter storm on Thursday by tweeting that he finds the Vancouver Pride Parade “vulgar.”

He posted on Twitter that “Vancouver’s so-called ‘Pride Parade’ should be banned. It is vulgar ... to say the least!”

The Kwantlen University professor and former citizenship judge received a flood of responses, all disagreeing with him.

In a telephone interview Thursday about his tweet, Purewal said: “If I can’t take my family to a place because of open sexuality, my opinion is that it’s simply vulgar.

...

 Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolin said people are entitled to their own opinion, but called Purewal’s comments “unfortunate.

He said Purewal “should understand how comments like this can turn into challenges for the community.

“It’s sad he chose to make this comment; it is going to be interpreted as homophobic by many in our community, even though he doesn’t see it that way.”

I question whether he has sat and watched the parade the whole way through, because there are families, brothers, sisters, moms and dads, who go together to support each other,” said Coolin.

Emphasis added.
Let me just say that I completely agree with Professor Purewal, and his comments are in no way homophic.  The parade is vulgar.  For photos that showcase the parade's vulgarity, click here, here, here, here, and here (warning: that last image contains nudity).  A simple Google search will reveal many, many more obscene photos.  Is that really an event you want to bring your family to?

The following tweets showcase the irrationality of some people (sorry for the atrocious formatting):

 Top @ShinderPurewal tweets:

jarrahpenguin Jarrah Hodge
@ShinderPurewal's #vanpride2011 "clarification" didn't help. You can't say you support #lgbt rights but find the sexuality "vulgar"
KSAcouncil Kwantlen KSA
Kwantlen prof @shinderpurewal views on #vanpride2011 dont reflect the @KSACouncil
anotherPurewal Tavleen Purewal
Yup, why doesn't everyone jump on the hate @ShinderPurewal bandwagon! His opinion, "something I wouldn't want my children to see"

@ShinderPurewal life long learner? How is that possible when your mind is closed so tight?

tuxforpm TuxForPM
@ShinderPurewal Sure, why not? Lets ban every way people have to express themselves because it offends our intransigent morality #cdnpoli
tdhross Jonathan Ross
@shinderpurewal @liberal_party As a proud Liberal, this ex-candidate's disgusting views on #vanpride2011 does not represent our party. Shame

Emphasis added.

In case someone reads this that isn't familiar with me, I am gay.  Seriously, some of these comments leave me absolutely astonished and speechless.  I don't even know what to say.  People are entitled to their views obviously (this isn't the Netherlands, for God's sake), but I have never seen such overreaction.  Wow.  That is really all I can say.  I no longer have any hope for the "gay community."  It is clear that they are self-absorbed and intransigent, and, since they are a minority, they have the responsibility to listen to the majority (within reasonableness, of course).  

See also: this post.

UPDATE: Please also note that Professor Purewal also said this:

“That does not mean that I don’t support same-sex marriage, which I do and voted for, or that I don’t support people of different sexual orientation, but for it to be in public is vulgar.”

UPDATE: I edited this post a bit.

The Importance of the Traditional Family

Here is an old post from 2005, written by Jane Galt.  It is about gay marriage, but that is not the reason that I linked to it.  It is quite long, but it is very well written and it contains a lot of useful information.  The information that I am primarily interested in refers specifically to families, and the importance of the traditional family unit to society.

To sketch a brief history of welfare, it emerged in the nineteenth century as "Widows and orphans pensions", which were paid by the state to destitute families whose breadwinner had passed away. They were often not available to blacks; they were never available to unwed mothers. Though public services expanded in the first half of the twentieth century, that mentality was very much the same: public services were about supporting unfortunate families, not unwed mothers. Unwed mothers could not, in most cases, obtain welfare; they were not allowed in public housing (which was supposed to be--and was--a way station for young, struggling families on the way to homeownership, not a permanent abode); they were otherwise discriminated against by social services. The help you could expect from society was a home for wayward girls, in which you would give birth and then put the baby up for adoption.

The description of public housing in the fifties is shocking to anyone who's spent any time in modern public housing. Big item on the agenda at the tenant's meeting: housewives, don't shake your dustcloths out of the windows--other wives don't want your dirt in their apartment! Men, if you wear heavy work boots, please don't walk on the lawns until you can change into lighter shoes, as it damages the grass! (Descriptions taken from the invaluable book, The Inheritance, about the transition of the white working class from Democrat to Republican.) Needless to say, if those same housing projects could today find a majority of tenants who reliably dusted, or worked, they would be thrilled.
Public housing was, in short, a place full of functioning families.

Now, in the late fifties, a debate began over whether to extend benefits to the unmarried. It was unfair to stigmatise unwed mothers. Why shouldn't they be able to avail themselves of the benefits available to other citizens? The brutal societal prejudice against illegitimacy was old fashioned, bigoted, irrational.

But if you give unmarried mothers money, said the critics, you will get more unmarried mothers.

Ridiculous, said the proponents of the change. Being an unmarried mother is a brutal, thankless task. What kind of idiot would have a baby out of wedlock just because the state was willing to give her paltry welfare benefits?

People do all sorts of idiotic things, said the critics. If you pay for something, you usually get more of it.

C'mon said the activists. That's just silly. I just can't imagine anyone deciding to get pregnant out of wedlock simply because there are welfare benefits available.

Oooops.

Of course, change didn't happen overnight. But the marginal cases did have children out of wedlock, which made it more acceptable for the next marginal case to do so. Meanwhile, women who wanted to get married essentially found themselves in competition for young men with women who were willing to have sex, and bear children, without forcing the men to take any responsibility. This is a pretty attractive proposition for most young men. So despite the fact that the sixties brought us the biggest advance in birth control ever, illegitimacy exploded. In the early 1960s, a black illegitimacy rate of roughly 25 percent caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write a tract warning of a crisis in "the negro family" (a tract for which he was eviscerated by many of those selfsame activists.)

By 1990, that rate was over 70 percent. This, despite the fact that the inner city, where the illegitimacy problem was biggest, only accounts for a fraction of the black population.

But in that inner city, marriage had been destroyed. It had literally ceased to exist in any meaningful way. Possibly one of the most moving moments in Jason de Parle's absolutely wonderful book, American Dream, which follows three welfare mothers through welfare reform, is when he reveals that none of these three women, all in their late thirties, had ever been to a wedding.

Marriage matters. It is better for the kids; it is better for the adults raising those kids; and it is better for the childless people in the communities where those kids and adults live. Marriage reduces poverty, improves kids outcomes in all measurable ways, makes men live longer and both spouses happier. Marriage, it turns out, is an incredibly important institution. It also turns out to be a lot more fragile than we thought back then. It looked, to those extremely smart and well-meaning welfare reformers, practically unshakeable; the idea that it could be undone by something as simple as enabling women to have children without husbands, seemed ludicrous. Its cultural underpinnings were far too firm. Why would a woman choose such a hard road? It seemed self-evident that the only unwed mothers claiming benefits would be the ones pushed there by terrible circumstance.

 ...

Divorce, in the nineteenth century, was unbelievably hard to get. It took years, was expensive, and required proving that your spouse had abandonned [sic] you for an extended period with no financial support; was (if male) not merely discreetly dallying but flagrantly carrying on; or was not just belting you one now and again when you got mouthy, but routinely pummeling you within an inch of your life. After you got divorced, you were a pariah in all but the largest cities. If you were a desperately wronged woman you might change your name, taking your maiden name as your first name and continuing to use your husband's last name to indicate that you expected to continue living as if you were married (i.e. chastely) and expect to have some limited intercourse with your neighbours, though of course you would not be invited to events held in a church, or evening affairs. Financially secure women generally (I am not making this up) moved to Europe; Edith Wharton, who moved to Paris when she got divorced, wrote moving stories about the way divorced women were shunned at home. Men, meanwhile (who were usually the respondants [sic]) could expect to see more than half their assets and income settled on their spouse and children.
There were, critics observed, a number of unhappy marriages in which people stuck together. Young people, who shouldn't have gotten married; older people, whose spouses were not physically abusive nor absent, nor flagrantly adulterous, but whose spouse was, for reasons of financial irresponsibility, mental viciousness, or some other major flaw, destroying their life. Why not make divorce easier to get? Rather than requiring people to show that there was an unforgiveable, physically visible, cause that the marriage should be dissolved, why not let people who wanted to get divorced agree to do so?
Because if you make divorce easier, said the critics, you will get much more of it, and divorce is bad for society.
That's ridiculous! said the reformers. (Can we sing it all together now?) People stay married because marriage is a bedrock institution of our society, not because of some law! The only people who get divorced will be people who have terrible problems! A few percentage points at most!
Oops. When the law changed, the institution changed. The marginal divorce made the next one easier. Again, the magnitude of the change swamped the dire predictions of the anti-reformist wing; no one could have imagined, in their wildest dreams, a day when half of all marriages ended in divorce.
There were actually two big changes; the first, when divorce laws were amended in most states to make it easier to get a divorce; and the second, when "no fault" divorce allowed one spouse to unilaterally end the marriage. The second change produced another huge surge in the divorce rate, and a nice decline in the incomes of divorced women; it seems advocates had failed to anticipate that removing the leverage of the financially weaker party to hold out for a good settlement would result in men keeping more of their earnings to themselves.
What's more, easy divorce didn't only change the divorce rate; it made drastic changes to the institution of marriage itself. David Brooks makes an argument I find convincing: that the proliferation of the kind of extravagent [sic] weddings that used to only be the province of high society (rented venue, extravagent [sic] flowers and food, hundreds of guests, a band with dancing, dresses that cost the same as a good used car) is because the event itself doesn't mean nearly as much as it used to, so we have to turn it into a three-ring circus to feel like we're really doing something.
A couple in 1940 (and even more so in 1910) could go to a minister's parlor, or a justice of the peace, and in five minutes totally change their lives. Unless you are a member of certain highly religious subcultures, this is simply no longer true. That is, of course, partly because of the sexual revolution and the emancipation of women; but it is also because you aren't really making a lifetime committment [sic]; you're making a lifetime committment [sic] unless you find something better to do. There is no way, psychologically, to make the latter as big an event as the former, and when you lost that committment [sic], you lose, on the margin, some willingness to make the marriage work.

From the above passages, I conclude that society exhibits sensitivity to initial conditions.  That is, a minor change can cause more minor changes, and, after a period of time, that series of minor changes adds up to a much more significant change.  Given that conclusion, any change to society (through a change in law, for example) has the potential to cause further change.  For that reason, change to society should not be engendered unless there is a good reason for it.  Society will always change and evolve on its own, but any engendered change may have unpredictable, and undesirable, results.

See also this post in which I talk about traditional gender roles and this post in which I talk about the innocence of children.

Gender Bending Diversity Training

Gender Spectrum Diversity Training sounds hideously politically correct on its own, but that was the name of a program targeted towards kindergarten students:

Redwood Heights Elementary School in Oakland, CA has joined the chorus of those wishing to mainstream 'gender-bending' by enacting a program this week that, according to a press release, tells kindergarteners 'there are more than two genders.'

 The kindergarten through fifth grade school hosted a 2-day program for students titled, 'Gender Spectrum Diversity Training,' in which single-sex Hawaiian geckos and transgender clownfish were brought in to teach children that 'there are different ways to be boys. There are different ways to be girls,' according to Redwood Heights principal Sara Stone. Students received gender diversity training as they learned about 'boy snakes that act 'girly'.' 

This is only the latest example of what seems to be a New-Age, gender-bending agenda pushed into the mainstream media by those who refuse to accept the traditional sex differences between men and women. A couple in Toronto, Canada has sparked outrage because they refuse to assign a specific gender to their infant 'Storm,' preferring instead to believe 'a child's sex should not determine his or her place in the world.

Firstly, I highly doubt kindergarten students understand what gender is.  If little boys act like girls sometimes, they are not self-conscious about it.  They don't understand that what they are doing is "gender bending."  Secondly, lizards and fish are not comparable to humans.  There are numerous species that exhibit transsexuality (called hermaphroditism in biology).  For hermaphroditic species, either having both male and female sexual organs simultaneously or changing sexual organs at some point is common, if not universal.  Clownfish, unlike humans, are hermaphroditic (they are born male, but may become female).  Obviously, kindergarten students would not be able understand that, but deriving a "lesson" from a flawed comparison seems unethical to me.  That is not to mention everything else that is horribly wrong with indoctrinating children with this politically correct "gender bending" agenda.  

In human culture, there is a reason for the social construct of gender: that males and females are fundamentally different and have fundamentally different roles.  I think women should have the same rights as men, but that does not mean that women are the same as men.  If small children have problems with their gender, then they should be allowed to deal with that on their own.  This is yet another example of the illusion that life is easy and everyone loves everyone that children are perpetually exposed to in schools.  Life is hard, and it is even harder when you think it is easy.  Instead of indoctrinating children with vile ideals and exposing them to sex at a disgustingly early age (see also, this post), schools should focus on teaching children things like science and math and let them establish their own ideals through their own experiences.  

Society is gradually becoming more accepting of deviance of gender roles.  What is wrong with the expectation that men act like men and women act like women?  In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with that.  School is a joke and parents are becoming so over-protective that their children are not mature enough that they can't function in the real world because they never had the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.  The world is gradually becoming an abhorrently progressive dystopia.  The traditional family unit is important to the health of society.  I will go into that in more detail in a subsequent post.  For now, I will conclude that, given that premise, traditional gender roles are also important for the health of society.  Exposing children to androgyny cannot be good.  

I also wanted to say something about this, the Toronto couple that is raising a "genderless" child that was mentioned in that article I linked to.  

A Toronto couple is taking their beliefs about parenting and gender stereotypes to new heights: They refuse to tell people the gender of 4-month-old Storm, reports the Toronto Star. Even the kid's grandparents are in the dark. “In fact, in not telling the gender of my precious baby, I am saying to the world, ‘Please can you just let Storm discover for him/herself what s(he) wants to be?!”

I do believe that parents (not schools) should be able to raise their children how they want to, but this seems almost criminal.  This has to be some form of child abuse.

Militant progressivism has reached a new low.

Think of the Children

I am hearing a lot about sexual abuse of children.  If there is something that makes me question whether I am a compassionate person, it is this.  I can think of few things that are greater injustices.  The people who commit these atrocities do not deserve to live.  They effectively took the life of their victims.  I am not sure if there is a difference between compassion and a sense of justice.  Compassion is an irrational thing.  I do not believe, however, that a sense of justice is.  I cannot be certain of whether or not what I am feeling is compassion.  All I know is that the sexual abuse of children makes me sick.  Like so many other things, it is a terrible injustice.  In a truly just society, the evil people who commit sexual abuse of children would be put to death for destroying the life of an innocent child. 

Society must give every child the opportunity to be successful.  Our society is disintegrating into one that caters to the often-immoral desires of adults, rather than one that caters to the healthy upbringing of a child.  It is not society’s responsibility to raise children, but, in my opinion, it is society’s responsibility to ensure that children are given equal opportunity to do what they want with their lives.  This opportunity can manifest itself in various ways.  I believe that the best thing that society can do to ensure that children are given an equal opportunity is to allow them to be free of what can take that opportunity away.  An observation that I have made is that many words seems to have an alternate meaning that is somehow sexual in nature.  I hypothesize that the disintegration of the English lexicon is evidence of the disintegration of society.  This is just one example of the increased sexualization of society.  I would hate to live in the past, but I believe we can, and should, learn lessons from it.  Society should move towards a moral existence where children may have the opportunities they should have; where their innocence cannot be corrupted.  I do not think, however, that the government should enforce this on the populace.  It is the responsibility of individuals to uphold this.  I am uncertain of how to approach this; there seems to be a fine line between enroaching on liberty and keeping society moral.  All I can be certain of is that society is becoming an increasingly hostile place in which to raise children.  I think, some way or another, that sexuality needs to leave the view of impressionable children and it needs to go behind doors.  The law must be enforced, but total reliance upon the government is the wrong way to go, in my opinion.  To me, this is a very difficult issue, and I can’t put forward a real solution.  I just know that something should be done, and society as a whole should focus on the children. 

And, to be clear, the information about me is not set in stone.  I am a young person, and I am malleable.  I apologize for this wavering post.  I am not sure what exactly I want to say, but I think that this issue is important and that the more people who discuss it, the better.  And, part of the reason I read blogs, and part of the reason I started one, is to learn more about myself and to learn more in general.  Writing this post is a way for me to try to judge what I think is ultimately important and to try to figure out what kind of person I am and what kind of person I want to be.  I do realize that this post is deceptively self-serving.  But that does not necissarily alter the unfortunate truth.  The reason I am saying this is that I want to be transparent and acknowledge my ulterior motives in writing this.  This blog is an experiment.  That is all it is.  But, if there is some way I can do some good, however small or large it may be, is a great bonus.  I hope this post may, somehow, do some form of good to someone other than myself.  At the very least, I hope it might cause anyone who might happen to read it to think about this issue.