Word: sects
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Williams had driven 1,200 miles (1,900 km) to Eldorado, Texas, in the hope that a brief encounter with modernity would allow him--and others like him--to push it once more far from his life. He is a believer in an antique and renegade Mormon sect that has endeavored for more than a century to keep polygamy alive in North America. His three sons were among the 437 children removed in early April from the sect's ranch in Texas, and Williams was doing his part to get them back...
...other men of the sect tried to explain themselves to the 21st century, it was as if no common language existed. One man, who gave his name only as Rulon, declared, "We have broken no laws"--though the laws against having multiple wives are more than a century old. "I am a loving and honorable father," said Williams--though he has not seen his children in years, by order of the sect's leader, Warren Jeffs. Asked how he can revere Jeffs as a prophet even after the man drove him from his home, his family and the community...
...based commercial genetics lab, which is not involved with the Texas case. It could take several weeks longer, however, to construct a family tree from the results. Once they are traced, however, the children's origins may offer a fascinating look at the family structure of the secretive polygamist sect, as well as insight into the emergence of a tragic birth defect that has plagued the community...
...heart of the identity problem are the group's commitment to "celestial marriage" - polygamy - and its custom of allowing first cousins to marry. "Your family tree shouldn't be a wreath," says Randy Mankin, editor of the El Dorado Success newspaper, which unearthed the sect's Utah roots four years ago, when its first members, posing as businessmen, arrived in Eldorado under the pretense of building a hunting and game preserve. But the legal notices published in Mankin's paper listing the custody suits brought by the state against the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints of Jesus Christ...
...There was no evidence of illegal activity nor an offense in plain view.' SHERIFF DAVID DORAN, of Schleicher County, Texas, on why authorities waited until April 3 to investigate a polygamist sect's compound in the desert outside Eldorado...