Young males often forced to leave
 Seen as a threat by older men, they are ill-prepared for the outside world, with minimal education.
 
The Arizona Republic
 
They are the forgotten victims of polygamy, young men pushed out of towns such as Colorado City as older men take on more wives.

Most have eight grades of education or less. Many of them are victims of abuse and have severe emotional scars. They have only rudimentary building skills and speak old-school English, straight out of the frontier 1800s.

Most of them bounce from low-end job to low-end job along 500 miles of the Interstate 15 corridor between Salt Lake City and Pahrump, Nev., west of Las Vegas.

"There's a percentage that eventually figures out how to make it," said James Black, a travel consultant in Park City, Utah, and former Colorado City resident. "But there's a lot more who never figure it out."

When Black was young, he was one of the designated men who could rise to be a future prophet in Colorado City's polygamist society.

But as Black got older, he started asking tough questions. For instance: Why should any man have multiple wives in modern-day America? And why are teenage girls mere chattels for some men who are old enough to be their grandfathers?

That is when he says the church hierarchy ratcheted up the pressure on the 15-year-old Black to leave. His secret love since the first grade "disappeared overnight" and was married to a polygamist in Canada. Shortly thereafter, his second girlfriend meekly submitted to becoming the fifth wife of a Colorado City polygamist.

After an altercation with his father, Black quickly moved to nearby Hurricane, Utah. Black had an eighth-grade education and no marketable skills.

He married and divorced quickly. Loneliness and self-destruction led him quickly to drugs. He finally enlisted in the Navy and straightened his life out over the next four years.

Some former Colorado City residents had their own problems caused by the locals before leaving town.

David Bateman, 19, said he had been in hot water with the church leadership since he stopped attending services two years ago. Word got out that he was going to movies in nearby St. George and listening to rock groups such as Creed at home.

"They really treat you bad if you don't conform to their way of thinking," he said. "People drive by your house and flip you off. Others give you stares and dirty looks. I had two young kids on bicycles ride by me on the street. One of them yelled, 'Hey, faggot, what are you doing here?' The other one called me an SOB."

Bateman left town shortly after graduation for Sandy, a suburb of Salt Lake City. He said he struggled mightily for a while but finally got a job at a plant that manufactures dental products in Salt Lake City.

Bateman said about 150 young males in his age group have been forced out of Colorado City and Hildale the past four years because the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints labels them as "problem children" who don't follow what the church dictates.
 
tucsoncitizen.com
Originally published Monday, September 29, 2003
 
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