"You get a call on the phone," says Brad Zitting, 21, and it's the prophet. " 'Be in my office in one hour.' He marries you right there, work clothes and everything." Then, you're sent off to consummate the marriage, whether you like her or not.
"You know what the worst thing is?" says Zitting, who was exiled for kissing. "The worst thing is when you have the hots for this girl, you're just like uhhhhn. And then she marries your dad."
But in recent years, as a young teen, it is far more common that you'd have a message from Jeffs that goes like this:
" 'Warren wants you out,"' recalls Jessop, banished one week into eighth grade as punishment for visiting a friend's house outside of Colorado City. "I went up to my mom's room, and she was crying. All she said was 'Why?' "
This Christmas, Lost Boy Sam Icke is buying just one gift. He's having a plaque engraved for a man who has everything, and has given Icke and the other Lost Boys everything in return.
Dan Fischer is white-haired, with kind eyes and a dignified air.
He grew up in polygamy, and once had two wives himself.
He is the eldest of 36 children, and his own father was expelled from the faith, his mother reassigned in marriage to another man. For years, he has been watching this exodus of broken-hearted boys.
Fischer, 56, started the Diversity Foundation to help the boys, and has donated more than $2 million to help them.
He finds them work at Ultradent, the dental-supply manufacturing company he owns in the Salt Lake suburbs.
He sends the boys and young men to college to illuminate their minds, gets them into therapy to correct what was there before. In return, he asks that they go to school, keep a job, return phone calls, and learn, above all, to see their lives in a new light.
Interesting story.
Funny, the word "cult" didn't seem to find its way into the story.
He is hiding out in the compound he is building in Eldorado, Texas.
I've been to Colorado City, it's a very weird place. It's a collection of big houses in the middle of nowhere. When I told someone I was going there, they said to not spend much time there because "they don't like strangers hanging around".
If people only knew the roots of this very strange society...........
A Southern Utah ping to you Bing
As the mother of a 12 year old boy, I shudder at the damage being done to these poor children.
I shall keep them in my prayers.
This is disgusting on so many levels.
Older men just after baby brides so they can literally suck the youth out of them. That's all it is.
Creepy.
Jeffs is untouchable because the FBI does not want to risk a standoff.
And the logic of the FLDS is inescapable: in a polygamous culture, certain men will wind up as losers who do not get to marry. In a small community of a few thousand where polygamy commonly means a dozen or more wives, hundreds of men will be the losers and a few hundred angry, marginalized men in a community that small are a clear threat to Jeffs' regime.
He is doing the smartest thing he can: selecting the losers at an age so young that they do not yet grasp the situation fully, and isolating and exiling them one by one instead of giving themselves any consciousness as a group.
These young men should return en masse to Colorado City as an organized group, use the fact that they have hundreds of mothers, stepmothers, sisters and half-sisters sympathetic to their situation and stick it out.
If I were governor of UT and CO I would use eminent domain against Jeffs to annex land contiguous to Colorado City and give it to the exiles for them to build houses on.
If I were prominent in the LDS, I would send female anti-FLDS missionaries into Colorado City to talk to the women.
If I were the exiles, I would arm myself, go around in groups and openly mock Jeffs in front of the young men and completely ignore Jeffs, his inner circle and his dummy police force.
There are ways to break Jeffs without a standoff composed entirely of insiders versus outsiders.
The goal should be to blur the lines and undermine Jeffs.
The sooner mainstream society accepts polygamy as a lifestyle choice made by consenting adults, the sooner stories like this will cease to be newsworthy. What happens in the bedroom is nobody's business but the half-dozen or so consenting adults who are in there.
Hmm
There are a lot of cutsey jokes about polygamy, and it is being winked at by the elites, but polygamy is a barbaric practice that must have no place in the 21st century.
Males as well as females suffer from this exploitation.
Mr. Fisher sounds like a gift from God for these boys.