Dangers Signs of Polygamy

[wilma]

From the website Tapestry Against Polygamy
http://www.polygamy.org/


Danger signs of abuse within a polygamous relationship:

* Control over private lives: telling people where they should work; expecting attendance at multiple church services and activities, dictating decisions that should be made by the entire family.

* Manipulation of marriages: arranging for people to get married; telling women to stay in abusive home situations and accept the abuse as "correction from the Lord".

* Sexual demands: pressures to perform sexual acts through coercion.

* Threats or intimidation: threats to "take away" the husband’s attention for "wrong behavior."

* The group seems perfect: everyone agrees and follows orders cheerfully.

* The group claims to have "all the answers" to your problems.

* You begin to feel guilty and ashamed, unworthy as a person.

* The group speaks in a derogatory way about those outside the religious affiliation.

* Outsiders are defined as unable to understand and help you with religious matters.

* Males are believed to have more rights and abilities than females.

* Leadership is never shared.

* Someone frequently prefaces his or her remarks with things like "The Lord has told me."

* An authoritarian leadership that claims exclusive access to God’s will.

* Total control over members' daily lives.

* Exclusivity and isolation.

* Development of unhealthy emotional dependence.

* Prohibition of critical analysis and independent thinking.

* Practices methods of ego destruction and mind control.

* Discouragement of free and independent pursuit of education.

That list pretty much defines life at the Tony Alamo Foundation.
SG

[wilma]

FLDS: Religious rape?
A tip to Bountiful: Save your girls from a life of polygamy

WinnepegSun.com By MINDELLE JACOBS
Fri, August 3, 2007

With a straight face, B.C. Attorney-General Wally Oppal said this week there’s no evidence that girls in Bountiful, the province’s infamous polygamous colony, are being exploited.

“In fact,” he added, “it was surprising to me the number of young women who told police that they were the aggressors, that they wanted to have sex with the older men.”

What’s Oppal been smoking in Lotusland? What did he expect from girls who’ve been raised in a cloistered community where men have all the power, independence and education is discouraged and females are brainwashed for years to believe their role is to breed and serve men.

Did he imagine that after a lifetime of emotionally crippling psychological moulding that girls from Bountiful would reveal their true feelings to outsiders — especially the cops?

It’s too late to save many of the women, says Audrey Vance, of the B.C. group Altering Destiny Through Education, which does its best to convince Bountiful kids to stay in school.

“But I think we’re getting through to the young teens,” she says. A few of the teens are graduating from high school and more young women are actually leaving the polygamous community, Vance adds.

Education may be crucial to helping young people — especially girls — escape Bountiful, but it’s pathetic that volunteer groups are doing more to help stamp out polygamy than the government.

It’s no surprise that the girls interviewed by the cops insisted they engaged in consensual sex with men in the polygamous colony.

BRAINWASHED

“They’re brainwashed into having sex with older men,” says Alberta-based anti-polygamy activist Nancy Mereska.

“They’re also brainnwashed to believe that if they do not comply with what the leaders of their sect want them to do, they will be cut off from God and they will burn in hell,” she says.

“My grief for these people is profound and my tears have been many.”

On Wednesday, a special prosecutor recommended that no sex-related charges be laid against Bountiful residents. Instead, Richard Peck proposed that the government take the polygamy issue straight to court for a constitutional ruling.

A weary and frustrated Mereska wonders why British Columbia didn’t take that route years ago. “How long is this particular process going to take?

“How many more young women in polygamous sects are going to be forced into religious rape and how many more babies are going to be born that were conceived out of religious rape?”

Her anger is understandable. The B.C. government has pretty much ignored Bountiful for decades and, in recent years, has been reluctant to proceed with a polygamy prosecution for fear the law would be struck down as a violation of freedom of religion.

As Peck noted in his report, however, religious freedom is not absolute.

“There is a substantial body of scholarship supporting the position that polygamy is socially harmful,” he said.

So it’s highly unlikely the Supreme Court of Canada would place the interests of exploitive megalomaniacs over the health of women and children.

CONSTITUTION

“If they’re worried about a constitutional challenge, let’s get on with it.

Let’s get this settled,” says University of Alberta sociologist Stephen Kent, an expert in alternative religions.

Utah has set up social services agencies in one of its polygamous communities and B.C. should do the same in Bountiful so people know there are alternatives, he adds.

And how about regular job fairs in Bountiful?

Let these young women know there is more to life than sexual bondage.

[smitty]

That's the kind of stuff that insures that I'll NEVER go back to live in Canada.

Tom Smith, transplanted Canadian, American by choice

[jackrussell]

Tony Alamo is beset with that polygamous spirit. Even some time ago in a tract or two somewhere he has referred to women as mere incubators, breeders. How archaic, and draconian! No respect. Tony sees people as the devil sees people and not as the Lord sees.

Polygamous religions are anything but Christian, a parrot can memorize the bible, and they have a lot in common with muslim polygamy in the total disregard for the well being of women. They are all about a carnal 'works' will worship of sorts, with no election, faith or hearing from God. They are on their own and will imagine and fantasize their own deceit, in their own kind of darkness, in a gulf fixed so that neither truth can get thru to them nor they to it. When they say 'thus saith the Lord,' you know it is make believe.....my 2cents

[modesto]

Jack,

Once again you hit a cord."Tony sees people as the devil sees people....".That rang so true to me and I'm not exactly sure why.It touched a reckoning down inside , maybe ole Sigmund was right about the unconscious.Anyway, thanks Jack, I got to chew on that one for awhile.

[modesto]

Regarding polygamy,I think that the Apostles tolerated it at first in the early Church, begrudgingly, because it was so firmly entrenched in the culture.But Jesus made it clear that ceretain old customs were tolerated by God in the past because of the defectiveness of people.

He saith unto them,Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives:but from the begining it was not so.(Mathew 19:8.) Jesus

Paul in his epistles to Timothy and Titus told them both that the husband of more than one wife was not to be entrusted with any significant responsibility in the Church.Everyone with half a brain should have figured out by now that polygamy is not sanctioned by the Bible and now,we are in sin if we have more than one wife.

My two cents