Jury Finds Sect Leader Guilty of Sexual Assault

President of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS Church) and self professed prophet, Warren Steed Jeffs, was found guilty by the Texas jury of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old and a 15-year old, whom Jeffs called his “spiritual wives.”

The FLDS Church practices polygamy, with leader Jeffs indoctrinating all girls to worship him, and training them to service men – especially himself – sexually, in order to atone for the sins of the community. Disobedience would result in rejection from God. He has arranged 550 bigamous marriages, has 78 wives, 29 of which are the wives of his father and predecessor, 56 of which are sisters and 24 of which are under the age of 17, thus creating a “pervasive” pattern of sexual abuse. He has a history of drugging women who attempt to flee his territory of control, and freely reassigns wives and children to other men. He has been previously convicted in Utah on two counts of being accomplice to rape, after forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old cousin. After viewing several “horrific” sex tapes and the testimony of Jeffs’s nephew, who accused Jeffs of sexually abusing him as a 5-year-old, it took the jurors less than half an hour to sentence Jeffs to life plus 20 years in prison. Jeffs chose to represent himself, insisting that he was the “humble servant of God,” and that he deserved constitutional protection for representing a religious organization. He frequently invoked religious freedom as defense.

There are several issues involved here: language, ethics, and the limitations of perception. Does the government have the right to interfere with an individual’s religious beliefs, and to infringe upon their rights? What is religion? Are we entitled to judge the practices of a different culture? Should Warren Steed Jeffs have been convicted?

Freedom of religion is the right of any individual or community to believe, practice and worship as they so choose, and is widely considered to be a fundamental human right. It has been established to counter religious intolerance dating back to the Crusades of the 11^th Century, including the persecution of Jews and Muslims by the Spanish Inquisition, the Wars of Religion between Roman Catholics and Protestants, the Arab-Israeli Wars, as well as the strong militant connotations almost synonymous with terrorism, that jihad – the sixth pillar of Islam – has accrued over the past few years. But perhaps the most notorious instance is that of the Holocaust, during which Adolf Hitler ordered the mass murder of six million European Jews. These are all examples of groups that have denounced all other religions, attempted to impose their own beliefs on others, with brutal consequences. Thus, to deny Jeffs religious freedom would be to embark towards a world where the discrimination, violence, and inhumanity exhibited by Nazi Germany would be condoned and displayed.

Furthermore, the government’s involvement in depriving its citizen of one of his freedoms is suggestive of despotic behavior. Citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are prohibited from exercising their freedoms of speech and press, and are exposed only to a limited scope of information that favors the regime. Due to severe curtailing of economic and political freedoms, North Korea also boasts of one of the lowest human rights records on the planet, with numerous concentration camps and the liberal application of capital punishment upon defectors. Admittedly, this is an extreme example and it is highly unlikely that the United States of America will dissolve into anything remotely resembling the North Korean state. Yet it makes the important point that convicting Warren Steed Jeffs for his religious beliefs may be a small step, but one towards a slippery slope of tyranny and oppression – by allowing one individual freedom to be restricted is to surrender the integrity of the American Constitution, which makes the absolute declaration to defend the freedom of speech, of press, of peaceful assembly and the freedom to exercise any religion under its First Amendment. The structure of democratic society would collapse.

However, while arguing that the government has a responsibility to protect Jeffs’s right to religious freedom, the rights of his 78 wives, as well as those of other women – more girls, really – whom he has manipulated into lifestyles of sexual servitude, must also be considered. By simply glossing over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is apparent that Jeffs has violated at least half of the 30 Articles of the Declaration, such as the right not to be “subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” the right “to freedom of movement,” and the right to enter marriage “only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses,” not to mention International Human Rights Treatises such as the one dedicated to “Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,” and the “Rights of the Child,” which protects children from abuse or exploitation. Just in terms of numbers, it’s not extremely difficult to deduce whether it is the Texas jurors or Jeffs who committed the greater violation of human rights. Also, the severity of the violation must be considered, and involvement in hundreds of instances of sexual abuse affects a greater number of people and leaves more devastating mental and emotional damage, than introducing Jeffs to celibacy and a cell, even if it does infringe upon his freedom of religion. Thus, I would say that a government may interfere with the freedoms of an individual, if that individual is violating the freedoms of others especially in a way that is physically or emotionally harmful (though I’m not sure you can interfere with someone’s freedoms in a way that wouldn’t be).

Something else that should be considered is whether it is accurate for Jeffs to claim that his religious freedom is being contested. Religion is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “a personal set or institutionalized of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices,” in “the service and worship of God or the supernatural.” It is possible that Jeffs actually had faith in his carnal antidote for sin (ironic), because he was brought up to believe that he was a prophet and ordained for preferential treatment. At the same time, though the specific details of FLDS Church doctrine were not included in the article, there is nothing to suggest that God considers it necessary for women to be married against their will, forced to have sex against their will, or that they must be underage. Therefore, Jeffs’s actions do not appear to be directed towards achieving any spiritual end, but instead towards pure, sexual gratification. Again, this cannot be confirmed without entering Jeffs’s mind, but it is a fact that in a “chilling” journal entry seized by authorities, Jeffs writes that, “if the world knew what I was doing, they would hang me from the highest tree,” meaning that he is not unaware that his behavior is condemnable. If this is the case, then his actions were not inspired by religion and deserve no constitutional protection.

Lastly, there exists the dilemma framed in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s quote: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” In other words, human beings have a tendency to reject or demean anything that is different from what we are accustomed to. In her YouTube video, “In My Language,” Autism Rights Activists Amanda Baggs addresses the general consensus that autistic people are inferior because their unique forms of expression (caressing objects, making clicking noises, bodily contortions, etc.) suggest that they are not capable of legitimate communication. Baggs demolishes this misconception by ending her strange video with a commentary in sophisticated English, arguing that though she is obviously a complex and mentally competent individual, this is not recognized until she learns a conventional language, meaning that it is only to conformity and familiarity that we award merit and status. Such evidence implies that our understanding of the world is severely limited and we are therefore not qualified to deprecate everything that we do not understand. Having not grown up under FLDS doctrine, how can the Texas jurors be sure that it is a harmful lifestyle? We must then recognize the possibility that the FLDS Church functions successfully and wholesomely as a community.

The problem with this argument is that sex against someone’s will, underage marriage and polygamy is not as alien to human culture as communicating by rubbing books against faces (“In My Language”). In fact, human history is inundated by such examples: rape has accompanied war before the sack of Rome in 410 to the Nanking Massacre in 1937, in the Middle East, some girls are married when they are as young as 8 years old, the Forbidden City is rumored to have housed thousands of imperial concubines, and the sultan’s harem was typically composed of up to 500 women. Yet these practices are no longer widespread, nor tolerated by most of the world because they are sexist, unjust, and in many instances, cruel. As a species, human beings have experienced these characteristics of Jeffs’s community, and discarded them in order to become a better society. This means that the argument above is not valid and it is highly unlikely that the FLDS Church is anything remotely successful and wholesome. Reports of wives attempting to escape and members of the community defecting for the safety of themselves and their loved ones attest to this fact.

Based on these conclusions - that the government may override the freedoms of its citizens in order to protect the freedoms of others, that Jeffs's actions deserve no constitutional protection, and that the lifestyle he advocates has been tested and found wanting by our ancestors - I would say that Jeffs should definitely be convicted for his crimes.

Relevant examples include the controversy of outlawing abortion or euthanasia: in order to protect every person’s right to live, abortion and euthanasia is prohibited in numerous states. At the same time, this is a violation of a woman’s rights to her body, and every person’s right to die a dignified death.