Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Mormon Cult got 14-year-olds pregnant

News out of Texas confirms that 31 of the 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17, who were taken into protective custody by Texas law enforcement officials, from the Yearning For Zion Mormon Cult compound, had either given birth before, or were pregnant at the time of the raid. One 15-year-old girl gave birth while in custody, just the other day.

Religious pundits, including Ben Stein wrote scathing articles about how these poor religious people's rights were being violated, or how they were being treated unfairly.

With this new evidence, combined with the information from the girls that most of them were married to men who were old enough to be their grandfathers (the average age of their husbands was 53 or older) is quite damning evidence, as it proves that the practice of marrying teenage girls to older men was pervaisive. They have been marrying young girls off in this manner for decades -- and that violates both the statutory rape laws of Texas, as well as the marriage laws, which prohibit people under 18 from consenting to marriage.

These are really sick-ass people!

So here's a good question, though...

Should "First Amendment Protected Religious Freedom" include the right to marry off your kids off and get them pregnant at 12, 13, and 14 years of age?

Should it include the right to create a closed-off religious compound-type environment, where all information about the outside world is controlled by the leaders?

Should it include the right to home-school kids with a curriculum that essentially leaves them unable to function outside of the cult environment, and which does not meet any education standards of the state or federal government?

Should it include the right to have agencies within the religious organization whose job is to spy on members and critics, and take action against them?

Should it include the right of these organizaitons to accumulate stockpiles of weapons and to tell their members that soon they will need to take up arms against outsiders?

Consider this something to think about. The Texas cult raises many issues pertaining to age of consent and religious freedom. Unfortunately, I don't think that anyone could seriously argue that we should have just left them alone to keep practicing their sick society. In my opinion, no religion should have the right to do what they did. It's not religious freedom. It's old men using religion to have sex with kids, period.

5 comments:

GamingAsshole said...

Why would anyone be so misguided to think these people are simply practicing their religion? They are raping people for fucks sake! If an Atheist compound was doing this, Ben Stein would say, "SEE! My movie was right!"

Pocket Nerd said...

Religious freedom does not include the right to do otherwise illegal things. It shows how far toward theocracy we've fallen that so many people seem to think these people should receive leniency or even immunity because of their religion.

David W. Irish said...

This story gets even more sordid!

(1) In order to ensure that there are plenty of young girls to satisfy the old men, young boys are routinely kicked out of the cult as teenagers, to prevent them from dating, and from marrying girls.

(2) The kids do not read. They apparently were home-schooled without any books. They do not know about books, and were unable to read.

(3) The social service people had to remove anything colored red form roomsbefore the girls were comfortable. Apparently red is a color reserved for Jesus to wear, and the use of the color red in anything other than Jesus's clothing, worn by Jesus himself, is forbidden.

(4) Many of the kids have broken bones, and the cult argues that they got them because they work with machinery on a farm, and that is normal for anyone. Though a reasonable excuse, the sheer number of broken bones that these kids had in their lifetimes is higher than should be expected.

I think that settles it. We should no longer allow religious groups to have closed-off compounds where they raise kids to be retards that can't function on their own without the group telling them what to do. These kids are practically retards, all because their elders wanted to nail little girls to their hearts' content.

GamingAsshole said...

>>>>
(3) The social service people had to remove anything colored red form roomsbefore the girls were comfortable. Apparently red is a color reserved for Jesus to wear, and the use of the color red in anything other than Jesus's clothing, worn by Jesus himself, is forbidden.<<<<<

Woah, where did they get that from? The fundamentalist bibles I used to read always said Jesus wore purple.

Unknown said...

I bet they weren't vegetarians...