“So Joanna is the wife who used to be FLDS?” Kurt asked.
“Yes,” Stephen said. “Joanna was married to a Fundamentalist man in Short Creek, Arizona, when she was only fourteen. According to the law of placing, the church authorities chose her husband for her and she had no choice in the matter. He was far older than she was, and her only role once she was married was to give birth to children for him as quickly as possible.” He sounded disgusted, but I couldn’t help but wonder how differently he saw his own wives’ roles. There were lots of children here on the Carter compound.
“So she had her first daughter Grace when she was fifteen,” Stephen continued. “By the time she was sixteen, Joanna knew that she had to get out. She fled in the cover of night with her daughter. She came here to Salt Lake City and tried to raise the girl on her own, but she had so few skills. Her education was poor—she could hardly read—and she had no support system because she’d left her family and church behind her. She was terrified of any government assistance because she’d been taught to believe that the government was ruled by Satan, and there was the very real risk she’d be sent home because she was underage.”
Rebecca had already mentioned the problem of Joanna’s legal emancipation, no doubt something Stephen had helped her with and which had made her even more dependent on and grateful to him. I was angry at the idea of any girl being married so young, and maybe Stephen wanted me to see him as a savior of his wives. He’d helped Carolyn and Joanna have more normal lives than the ones they’d been born into. But I couldn’t help but think about the possibility that he had married needy, much-younger women for his own selfish reasons.
“The FLDS believe many of the same things I believe about Wilford Woodruff and the 1890 Manifesto ending polygamy,” Stephen said. “But they have some strange ideas about special genetic lineage that mean that there is a lot of intermarriage. As a medical doctor, I can’t help but see the mistaken thinking there for what it is. They have many, many children born with defects. There is a baby graveyard in every city they live in, and sometimes the elders of the church are even asked to come in and end the suffering of the child and the parents before it happens naturally.” He shuddered at this.
Some part of me found it beyond strange that he could look at other people’s polygamy and think them so much worse than he was. But at least he had no baby graveyard.
“Even worse is the isolation and control. Boys and girls are not allowed to watch television or use the Internet, so they have no contact with the outside world. They live in isolated communities, miles and miles away from the nearest town. All the children work many hours a day to earn money for the large corporations that the elders of the church own, and they are not compensated for their time.”
Yes, I knew about the FLDS church and its practices already. But so far much of what he was describing seemed not very different from the Carter family system as Rebecca had described it to me earlier. Did he really see himself as so different?
“The boys are culled regularly when they are of age, to make sure that they don’t fall in love with girls marked for the men in authority. When they are sent away, they are given nothing but the clothes on their backs, and they have nothing they can do to earn their way in the world but the crudest labor. I’m sure God does not look on this practice with the least degree of allowance.”
Kurt made a grunt of unwilling assent to that.
Stephen picked up a toy that was in the yard and carried it with us as we moved toward the unfinished porch of the farthest house. “As for the girls, they are married so young they cannot object. They have no idea of any life but housework, yard labor, and bearing children. Joanna is unusual in her rebellion. Many girls are tied to so many children by the time they are old enough to think for themselves that they can never escape, not really. It is a travesty. The government should be doing more to stop it, but the group claims religious freedom exemptions all the time for child labor infractions and education failures.”
“It is terrible,” I agreed, as our walking pace slowed.
“Of course, my own children are very well educated,” Stephen said, as if anticipating the comparison. “We homeschool them, but not to handicap them and make them unable to choose any other life, only to make sure that they are able to choose their own topics so their interest in education always remains high.”