Teen boys subtracted in polygamy math:
 Sect leaders drive out young males to sustain their polygamous lifestyles
 
By Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun
 
To make polygamous math work, teenage boys are an expendable commodity.

In the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- a breakaway sect of the Mormon church -- members believe a man can only enter God's Kingdom if he has three or more wives. So, at the very least, two out of every three boys born into FLDS are expelled from the sect-controlled towns like Bountiful, B.C. and the twin-city church headquarters of Colorado City, Ariz. and Hildale, Utah.

But lately, the number of disposable boys has been rising as the church's leaders indulge themselves. The prophet Warren Jeffs is believed to have as many as 80 wives. Other leaders -- including the excommunicated bishop of Bountiful, Winston Blackmore -- have 20 or 30.

The math is simple: The more wives the elders take, the more young men need to be eliminated from the community.

Dan Fischer -- a former polygamist, dentist and multimillionaire entrepreneur in Salt Lake City -- has recently taken up the cause of these lost boys and established a non-profit organization called Smiles for Diversity (www.smiles-for-diversity.org) to help the banished boys.

Fischer estimates there could be as many as 800 of them, because he knows of at least 400 who have been expelled within the last five years. So far, he and his brother Shem have had contact with 120 of them and they've helped 25 go back to school.

Fischer has no idea how many Canadian boys have been kicked out of Bountiful, which has a population of about 1,000 and is one-tenth the size of Colorado City/Hildale. But Fischer has no reason to believe that the proportion of boys would not be similar.

Creston Mayor Joe Snopek said recently that police have noticed increasing numbers of Bountiful boys living outside the community, drinking, doing drugs and picking fights with other kids.

Fischer is also helping seven "lost boys" who have filed two separate civil suits against FLDS prophet and leader Warren Jeffs and others. One was filed by Jeffs' nephew, 21-year-old Brent Jeffs, who is claiming that as a child he was preyed upon by his uncles, Warren, Blaine and Leslie Jeffs, who repeatedly sodomized him in the name of doing "God's work."

The other suit was filed in the names of six youths and 20 other "lost boys". It alleges that Warren Jeffs, former Colorado City police chief Sam Barlow, the church itself and its trust, and 20 other "John Doe" defendants conspired to rid the sect of surplus men and boys and used the "cruel, abusive and unlawful practice of reducing the male population by systematically expelling young males from the FLDS communities in which they were born and raised."

Of the boys whom the Fischers have been able to contact, most have been outside the faith for at least a year, maybe two years. It takes that long for the culture shock to abate and for them to trust enough to reach out for help. Those first months and years are usually taken up with smoking, drinking, keg parties and often drugs.

As many as 80 boys are believed to be living in Las Vegas and working as prostitutes. Some of the boys who Fischer is helping were 13 when they were told they were damned with no chance of salvation and given an hour to pack a suitcase. They were then taken outside the reclusive community they'd grown up in, dropped off at the roadside and forbidden to return home.

Others have been hounded out, harassed, insulted and physically or mentally abused until they could not stand it any longer. Others were shunned to the point where even they began to question whether they were visible any longer.

And if it isn't bad enough to be damned for eternity, separated from the only people they've ever known, these boys rarely have more than a Grade 6 education.

Fischer calls the FLDS "a Taliban-like society" that prohibits children from learning and demands absolute obedience. And while it was bad enough even 13 years ago when he finally left, Fischer says it's much, much worse under Prophet Warren Jeffs.

"Education was always a significant problem, because they [FLDS] have their own school and there was no science or history taught there. But in the last few years, they've gone bozo," says Fischer.

Jeffs has ordered loyalists to withdraw their children even from the church-run school. They are now being educated at home, but their entire education consists of listening to hours and hours each day of Jeffs' sermons, in which the main message is to be obedient and follow the Prophet -- him.

"They are taught that Warren Jeffs is as God to them," says Fischer. "They are taught to have perfect faith, perfect obedience or be destroyed ... Warren has told them that to go to college is to go to an evil place where they will get contaminated with unproven sciences. The only sciences they get are a bit of chemistry and some math. They don't get any physics, anatomy or even sex education."

There's another reason as well. Fischer says child labour is one of the main sources of income for the FLDS. Young boys are usually pulled out of school and sent to do construction work, often running large equipment. Others, he says, are put to work in sweatshops when they are as young as 10, while girls are forced to look after anywhere from eight to a dozen of their extended family siblings.

It's against the labour laws in both Utah and Arizona for children under 14 to work and those aged 14 and 16 are only permitted to work at non-hazardous jobs. But Fischer says, "They simply don't heed the law. They justify it in the name of building God's Kingdom. It's a tragic state of affairs."

B.C. provides no such protections for FLDS children or any others. It has the least stringent child labour laws in North America. Here, children as young as 12 are allowed to work up to 20 hours a week with the consent of one parent and even longer in the summer.

But on both sides of the border, these boys are ending up alone, damned, uneducated and unable to cope with a world that bears little resemblance to what they know from inside their closed communities. They have lost their faith and most times their moral compass as well. And trying to reset that is part of what Fischer and Smiles for Diversity mentors are trying to do for these boys.

Fischer says it starts by saying, "Look guys, a whole lot of what you learned at your mother's knee is not wrong. Those values of honesty, integrity and hard-work are good ones... . "We tell them they have learned good things and not to flush all that away with the bad. We tell them that contrary to what they were told that they will go to the Devil, they can prove that wrong by getting their own selves straightened out so that maybe they can even help their brothers and sisters."

Although Fischer's outreach to the boys has the support of people like Utah Attorney-General Mark Shurtleff and author Jon Krakauer, who have signed on as mentors, Fischer has been criticized for focusing on boys and not the girls, who are often forced to become plural wives as young as 14. Fischer says he's a pragmatist, which is why he's working with the boys.

"There is no way in hell of reaching the girls," he says. "We don't even know where most of them are. "A boy is kicked out if he is caught having a conversation with a young girl and the girl is married off within days... . It's virtually impossible to interface with most of the girls. And by 16, 17, 18, they have a child or two and have had to rationalize it as the best thing that has happened to them. Plus there is a very good chance of her having no more than a sixth grade education.

"So what is she going to do? Pick up anywhere from one to five kids and leave? ... Without some level of education to fall back on and some ability of self-sufficiency, it's not even in the cards."

Helping these lost boys is a long slog, since FLDS members are taught from birth that everyone outside the cult is evil and the most evil of all are guys like Fischer -- apostates, who have left the faith. But at least Fischer, with the support of Utah's attorney-general, has made a start.

In Canada, there is nothing at all for the lost boys of Bountiful.
 
Vancouver Sun
Originally published Friday, November 12, 2004
 
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