Bound by Fear: Polygamy in Arizona
For decades the state has let a feudal colony of fundamentalist Mormons force underage girls into illegal polygamous marriages
By John Dougherty
Published: Thursday, March 13, 2003
Lenore Holm was served eviction papers after she objected to the planned marriage of her 16-year-old daughter as the second wife to a 39-year-old man.
Who / What:
Polygamy in Arizona
Details:
Letters From the Issue of Thursday, January 5, 2006
Sixteen-year-old Ruth Stubbs wanted to marry the boy down the street.
So she revealed her desire to a religious leader, a man held in the highest esteem in her rural, isolated community straddling the Arizona-Utah border.
On a December morning four years ago, Ruth sought the advice of the Prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 88-year-old Rulon Jeffs.
Ruth asked the stroke-ridden Jeffs for permission to marry Carl Cooke, a young man she had been seeing secretly for several months.
Jeffs pondered the question for a moment and then delivered a startling pronouncement.
"Well," Jeffs said, gesturing toward Rodney Holm, a police officer who had escorted Ruth to the meeting, "I feel she belongs to you."
Ruth was stunned, but not surprised. She barely knew Holm, but what she did know was disturbing.
At 32, Holm was twice her age.
And Rodney was already married to two women, one of whom (his first wife) is Ruth's sister, Suzie.
"Shocked, I was," Ruth told investigators from the Arizona Attorney General's Office, after relating the story of her meeting with Jeffs.
But Ruth knew such marriages were common among fundamentalist Mormons, particularly in the towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah.
In the dusty, unkempt hamlets north of the Grand Canyon and south of Zion National Park along the boundless Arizona Strip, life is controlled by a theocracy seemingly as impenetrable as the jagged El Capitan Peak that provides a dramatic backdrop for roughly 6,000 inhabitants.
The fundamentalists in control believe that their patriarchal society embracing polygamy ensures the people in their realm of reaching heaven's highest echelon. As incredible as it may seem to outsiders, they believe that men faithful to the religious doctrine will become gods and rule over a multitude of planets for eternity. Their wives if the husbands deem them worthy will join them in heaven as goddesses.
This fundamentalist theology is similar to that of the Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The difference is that the Mormon Church publicly moved away from polygamy in 1890, although some of its leaders continued the practice into the 20th century. The mainstream church does, however, still believe in polygamy in the afterlife.
With only a sixth-grade education and little experience beyond her rural upbringing, Ruth already was deeply entrenched in polygamy. Her father had three wives, and she is one of 42 children.
Ruth also knew that most of the people in town believed the old man sitting in front of her was the most powerful man on Earth. The fundamentalist Mormons hold that their Prophet is God's only true representative.
No one dared question the decisions of the Prophet in Colorado City. To do so would bring swift ruin and eternal damnation.
Ruth quickly agreed to the sudden change in grooms.
"I just said, 'kay, you know, I'll, I'll do it," she told state investigators in January 2002 according to a 56-page transcript of the interview obtained by New Times. Ruth Stubbs declined to be interviewed for this article.
There was little time for Ruth to ponder the decision. Her wedding to a man she had never kissed, let alone dated, was scheduled for the next day, December 11, 1998.
"They didn't want me to think it over," she told state investigators.
This is not to say she didn't have second thoughts. She tried to postpone the wedding for several weeks, but her sister who wanted Ruth to join the family to help her in a power struggle with the other wife pressured Ruth to move forward.
"Suzie told me that the town, the whole town, already knew I was supposed to marry Rod."
To back out now would bring unbearable social repercussions in a community where the women are raised to obey men without question.
"I was afraid of the town," Ruth admitted.
The next day, with Carl sequestered by his family, Ruth went to the Prophet's massive home, which sheltered at least a dozen some say upward of 70 of his own wives. She was joined by Holm and his two wives.
Rodney Holm had already secured permission to marry Ruth from her polygamous father although her mother hated the idea. Neither parent was allowed at the wedding.
If they had been there, they would have seen their daughter in a delusional state.
"I felt when I got up there that it was going to be Carl instead of Rod," Ruth recounted to investigators. "'Cause I've watched movies like that. I was really dreamy."
But Carl never appeared, and 16-year-old Ruth Stubbs was "sealed" to her 32-year-old brother-in-law by the Prophet in a "spiritual" ceremony. No marriage certificate was issued. Ruth had no right to community property. Even death was not to part them. Ruth was to be Rodney's possession for eternity.
Her marriage wasn't the only one conducted that day by the Prophet.
"At the time, [he was] marrying four or five couples a day," Ruth told the Attorney General's Office.
That evening, Rodney Holm took Ruth to the area's only motel the Mark Twain Inn in Hildale where his marriage to the virgin bride was consummated.
It was the beginning of a journey of physical, spiritual and mental abuse that took Ruth Stubbs to the brink of suicide.
At the time, the outlook was far brighter for Holm. He was on his way toward becoming a god in fundamentalist Mormon heaven, having acquired the crucial third wife.
He had had sexual intercourse with a girl half his age who was not his legal wife a felony in Arizona and Utah but that fact made no difference to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS).
State Inaction
Ruth Stubbs is among scores of teenage girls, many of whom are underage, who have been married by fundamentalist Mormon prophets into polygamy in recent years. The tally reaches hundreds of girls over the last seven decades.
The Arizona Attorney General's Office has compiled a list of more than 40 teenage girls it suspects have been coerced into polygamy by the FLDS in the last decade, state records obtained by New Times through the Arizona Public Records Law show.
A few decades ago, the FLDS routinely married girls as young as 13 into polygamy. The practice still occurs from time to time, but the girls tend to be at least 15 these days.
The state has been conducting a broad grand jury investigation into polygamy in Colorado City since at least December 2000, but no arrests have been made. One reason is that state investigators have been unable to persuade polygamous wives to testify against their husbands.
Such wives, even if they wanted to cooperate with authorities, know that assisting the government would bring retaliation from their community.
In Colorado City, women, and men, risk losing their children, their homes, their livelihoods and most terrifying to fundamentalist Mormons their salvation for uttering a single negative statement about their religion.
Underage, polygamous marriages are merely a symptom of a greater problem.
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Colorado City is a virtual medieval fiefdom overseen by an omnipotent Prophet who is accountable to no one but presumably God.
The FLDS is subverting a wide range of civil liberties with taxpayer assistance.
Cloaked in the legitimacy of town government and public schools, FLDS polygamists receive more than $6 million a year in public funds to support these institutions.
Through his proxies, the FLDS Prophet controls all levels of local government and the Colorado City public school board. He controls ownership of virtually all the land in town and most of the businesses. He controls local law enforcement.
But, most important, the Prophet controls the minds of the faithful, convincing them that, if necessary, they must forgo happiness in this life for eternal bliss after death.
"We don't have minds of our own," former FLDS member and Colorado City High School science teacher DeLoy Bateman told New Times. "We are taught to follow."
Nowhere else in the United States is there a state-sanctioned town that is overwhelmingly controlled by a religion whose current leader performs polygamous marriages and who himself has anywhere from a dozen to 70 wives.
, thank goodness they are doing something now. I know it is too little too late for many of those children but maybe it will deter some of the pedophiles from preying on other children. 
