Prophet vs President
 
The Eldorado Success
 
President George W. Bush renewed his efforts this week to pass a constitutional amendment that would define the institution of marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman, putting himself directly at odds with those in America's burgeoning homosexual community and his political adversaries in the Democratic Party.

The President may have also unwittingly staked out a position in a battle that is brewing here in Schleicher County, a battle emerging not between gays and straights, but between local residents and a polygamous sect calling itself the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS).

That sect, led by its Prophet Warren Jeffs, purchased some 1,600 acres a mere four miles north of Eldorado in November of 2003. Since that time, a massive building program has begun on the property.

One of the primary tenets of the FLDS faith is that of multiple or "plural" marriages. For decades FLDS members have skirted bigamy laws in Utah and Arizona by claiming only one "legal marriage" while maintaining numerous "celestial" or "plural" marriages. Often times the marriages involved teen-aged girls, some as young as 14, being wed to men three and four times their age. Numerous published accounts claim Prophet Warren Jeffs has taken many celestial wives, with numbers ranging from 35 to 75. No one affiliated with the FLDS will confirm these numbers. Neither will the Prophet who avoids all contact with the media.

The church's move to Texas caught many FLDS-watchers by surprise. But none were as surprised as the unsuspecting residents of Eldorado, who awoke one March morning to learn that a corporate hunting retreat being built just north of town was actually an FLDS compound. Soon word leaked out that fifty people were coming from the twin cities of Colorado City, AZ and Hildale, UT, and that they planned to take up residence at the compound, by then known as the YFZ Ranch, supposedly named after a tape recording Jeffs had made titled Yearning for Zion.

About the same time the FLDS was planning to move to Texas, a wave of judicial rulings swept across the nation in which various judges on the state and federal level held that same-sex partners were entitled to marry. Even as appellate courts overturned the rulings and state legislatures took up the task of redefining state marriage laws, some judges refused to back down. Soon, same-sex marriages were being performed from Boston to San Francisco.

President George W. Bush announced on February 24, 2004, that he would support a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as union between a man and a woman.

Recently, as the President stepped his reelection effort the term "a man and a woman" began to evolve into "one man and one woman," as political partisans debated the issue on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

"What we're trying to do is clearly define, once and for all what is and what isn't a marriage," a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said this week.

While passage of the proposed amendment is considered likely, it is forcing many of his political opponents, including Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to come out against the amendment. I has also elevated the discussion across the country about what constitutes a marriage.

It is unlikely that Prophet Warren Jeffs, who openly espouses plural marriages, albeit among members of the opposite sex, enjoys finding himself on the same side of the marriage debate with the National Gay and Lesbian Alliance.

But, as they say, politics makes strange bedfellows. Already FLDS attorney Rodney Parker has argued that the U.S. Supreme Court's overturn last year of the Texas anti-sodomy law bolsters the rights of his clients to practice polygamy without government interference.

"The national social order in the United States does not compel a conclusion that plural marriage is against public policy, especially when considered in light of emerging lifestyles," Parker argued in his defense of Colorado City, AZ police officer Rodney Holm. Holm was later convicted in a Utah court on a charge of bigamy and two counts of unlawful sexual relations with a 16-year-old girl.

The argument is an interesting one, and not one that President Bush or Prophet Warren Jeffs could have easily foreseen. Regardless of whether the U.S. Congress adopts a marriage amendment, the polygamous practices of the FLDS appear to have run aground here in Texas. Already calls have gone out to state legislators across Texas including Eldorado's representatives, State Senator Robert Duncan and State Representative Harvey Hilderbran, urging that they sponsor a bill outlawing polygamy in Texas.
 
MyEldorado.net
Originally published July 15, 2004
 
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