Word: flds
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...witness, not a defendant. And while the headlines referred to it as the POLYGAMY TRIAL, that was not the charge either, though attitudes about polygamy are clearly being put to the test. The defendant, Warren Jeffs, the 51-year-old prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), was being tried as an accomplice to rape for commanding Doe to agree to an arranged marriage despite her resistance and instructing her to submit to her husband "mind, body and soul" if she was to have any hope of salvation...
...beliefs, however repugnant others may find them. Jeffs' defense lawyers challenge the very notion that he should somehow be held responsible for what goes on in the privacy of a marriage simply because he arranged it. But state prosecutors have long looked for some way to penetrate the remote FLDS enclave, whose apostate refugees tell stories of exploitation of children as workers, of incest and of sexual abuse. Sitting in court amid the throngs of reporters and silent church members was Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff, a Republican and a practicing Mormon, come to offer moral support to his team...
...with the success of the Fischer prosecution, Arizona and Utah authorities hope that other polygamy-abuse cases in the pipeline can be tried without victim testimony, including seven other men from the FLDS community scheduled to stand trial. This is the largest group to be prosecuted for crimes related to their polygamist lifestyle since the 1950s...
...Some polygamists, however, worry that the legal action will turn into a kind of witch hunt. Polygamist Marlyne Hammon, who lives in Centennial Park - a community that split from the FLDS church about 20 years ago - fears that polygamists will be targeted while non-polygamist women can still marry young without worry. The authorities, she says, "don't apply the law across the board." There are many girls in Arizona who do not practice polygamy, she adds, but have children with men who are older. "What about those girls?" She also points out that some young polygamist women...
...wives in the middle of the night. "You are culturally adapted to the abuse and if you come forward you will never fit into this society again - which is all you know." Jessop says she hopes that Fischer's conviction and others will empower women in the FLDS communities. "It sends a message that the outside world has a limit on what they will tolerate...