How could it still happen? How could people let it happen?
The recent news from Texas about hundreds of girls locked up in a compound where they were raped and kept as slaves by much older men belonging to a polygamist sect was indeed mind-blowing.
It’s good one of the girls finally had the courage to speak the unspeakable and reported the matter to the authorities who then raided the compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in San Angelo, Texas.
US authorities rescued more than 400 children, most of them girls, from the clutches of the renegade Mormon splinter group.
They later found out that the sect requires girls at puberty to enter into polygamous marriages with much older men and produce children. The sect also teaches children to fear the outside world, including the very authorities who removed them. “You’re taught to fear everyone and everything,” one of the girls, a 16-year-old bride, was quoted as saying.
One could just imagine the unbelievable trauma and fear and stress that the girls must be undergoing up to this day. They will eventually be put in foster homes – a culture shock that will undoubtedly leave a scar on their minds.
One of the parents who left the sect in 1994 said the children “are so naive and they have been sheltered to the point that they don’t even trust their own judgment.”
Most of the rescued children are the offspring of the faith’s inner circle, including its now-imprisoned “prophet,” Warren Jeffs, the spiritual leader of an estimated 6,000 followers in two adjoining towns along the Utah-Arizona line
In 2003 and 2004, Jeffs was said to have plucked children under the age of 6 to bring to Texas without their parents. According to former sect member Isaac Wyler, “over age 6 they were too contaminated for the world to be of use to God.”
Wyler said Jeffs “picked the ones that would be the most obedient, the ones that would be qualified to go to Zion.”
Authorities raided the compound last April 3 after a girl from the clan made a whispered telephone call for help to a family violence shelter. The 16-year-old, who indicated she was a few weeks’ pregnant, said her 50-year-old husband beat and raped her. The girl has not yet been identified among the children who have been rescued.
In the call, the girl said that sect members warned her that if she ever left, outsiders would hurt her and force her to cut her hair, wear makeup and have sex with many men.
Most of the sect’s children have never attended public schools or worn modern clothing. The girls wear long, pioneer-style dresses and keep their long hair pinned up in braids.
This is like the discovery of living carnivorous, monstrous, atrocious dinosaurs in the 21st century, with Jeffs being the biggest dinosaur of all, perhaps a T-Rex.
Perhaps there are other areas in the world where these abominable human dinosaurs exist. They are surely a dark spot in human civilization.
All of these dinosaurs must be rounded up and thrown to the pits of hell – that’s what they deserve.
Caption:
A guard is seen at left as members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints walk along a covered porch at their temporary housing, Fort Concho National Historic Landmark, in San Angelo, Texas. (AP)