BishopAccountability.org
	Justice Served Arizona Republic September 26, 2007 http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0926EDITORIAL20.html?&wired After decades of looking away from the injustice, cruelty and sexual abuse masquerading as religion in the tiny polygamist towns straddling the Arizona-Utah border, determined law enforcers got their man. Finally, Warren Jeffs, 51, was convicted as an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl. The verdict came after jurors deliberated about 16 hours over three days, and amid a trial that placed national attention on the plural-marriage sect centered in Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah. Jeffs could get life in prison. That would be fitting. Jeffs' attorneys and backers attempted to make this trial about religious persecution and prosecutorial bias: That Jeffs was hounded by law enforcement officials in two states as the head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sanctions polygamy and arranged marriages. That is simply not true. What this renegade sect conducts can be more accurately described as coercion, not polygamy. This is a cult that enforces the systematic abuse of young girls forced into loveless sexual unions with older men chosen by Jeffs and his cronies. Call it rape. Call it child abuse. It isn't polygamy, which is illegal in Arizona, Utah and every other state. But since the 1920s, this breakaway Mormon sect has stood apart, impervious to laws. For decades, it took advantage of its religious pose to create a centrally controlled community for the benefit of a small cadre of men. They traded power and sexual favors while routinely running younger men out of town - reducing sexual competition for themselves. For decades, the FLDS defied state and natural law, intimidating law enforcement. They used memories of the public relations disaster of a government raid in 1953 to maintain their power. For a half-century since then, the FLDS cult has been virtually a law unto itself. Until recently, when two attorneys general, Mark Shurtleff of Utah and Terry Goddard of Arizona, decided FLDS was not a religion but a cover for abuse. Washington County, Utah, officials prosecuted Jeffs. And Mohave County Attorney Matt Smith has indicted other cult members. Today, that long struggle has seen a landmark victory, a historic triumph over evil. Warren Jeffs is guilty.
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