Christian or Biblical Polygamy

“When Carolyn Jessop sums up the first 35 years of her life, she calls it a “horror story”.
But then beatings, polygamy and even child cruelty were part and parcel of her existence in the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints cult.”

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HILDALE, Utah (AP)
Roger Wyler has something almost no one else here does — a deed to his home.For more than 60 years, all the land and all the homes in the dusty, side-by-side towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., belonged not to the residents, but to a trust set up by their church, a renegade Mormon splinter group that practices polygamy.Now the trust arrangement is being dismantled under court order, and past and present members of the church are being offered the opportunity to secure title to a house and become real homeowners.
“It’s good to be home,” said Roger Wyler, 32, a disaffected former church member who recently came back to town to buy a house. “My whole life growing up, you weren’t really allowed to own property. If you owned it, it was a disobedient act.”

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Technorati Tags: Arizona, Colorado City, FLDS, Hildale, Mormons, Roger Wyler, Utah, Warren Jeffs, plural marriage, polygamous sects, polygamy

Carving a hedge against doomsday

“The way things were going, Bob Foster figured the end was near and there was no safer place to be than inside a rock in southern Utah. That was 1979.
Nearly 30 years later, Foster still lives in a mammoth sandstone slab south of Moab, an astonishing creation he calls Rockland Ranch. Through the years, Foster has carved eight homes and a “charity house” into the rock, creating comfortable and even luxurious dwellings.
When he started it all, Foster was a younger, stronger man - one driven by apocalyptic fears and his fundamentalist Mormon faith to find a safe haven to rear his polygamous family.
He found it on 82 acres in the sagebrush desert, an edge-of-the-world spot off a twisting, red dirt road and dominated by a massive sandstone formation.
“It was crystal clear this is the place,” Foster said. “I knew I was to cut holes in rocks for a refuge center.”
Foster signed a 50-year lease for the property, located on state school trust land, and began blasting home-sized holes in the sandstone.
There are 22 years left on the lease, which runs about $6,400 per year, but Foster doesn’t expect the government to last that long.
So his work continues.”

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Technorati Tags: FLDS, mountains, Bob Foster, Polygamy, Doomsday, apocalypse, Moab, Rockland Ranch, Utah, Mormon

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ST. GEORGE - The attorneys in the state’s case against Warren Steed Jeffs will be in court again Tuesday afternoon presenting arguments before Judge James L. Shumate.
This time, the arguments will focus on whether Jeffs, 51, the prophet of the Fundamental-ist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, should serve any jail time on his two counts of rape as an accomplice stemming from a marriage Jeffs arranged and performed in 2001.

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And figure this one out:

The marriage Jeffs arranged was between Elissa Wall, then 14, and Allen Steed, who was 19 and Wall’s cousin who at the time, were both members of the FLDS Church, whose principles include arranged and plural marriage.
Steed was charged with rape following Jeffs’ jury trial.

Technorati Tags: Warren Jeffs, FLDS, trial against Jeffs, Elisa Wall, Allen Steed

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a three-part series, published on succeeding Mondays, about fundamentalism in southern Utah.

Polygamy is often seen as synonymous with Mormonism, even though The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discontinued the practice more than 150 years ago. However, a variety of fundamentalist groups still practice the principle of plural marriage as taught by early church leaders.While the Warren Jeffs trial has drawn national attention to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and those practicing plural marriage, confusion and misunderstandings still persist concerning fundamentalists and their relationship with the church, observers have said.

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