COLUMN: Cult not 'different' or 'unusual' but intolerable

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on April 17, 2008 at 9:35 AM, updated April 17, 2008 at 9:37 AM

While channel surfing Wednesday, I paused on a news station airing an interview with three female members of a renegade clan of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Texas authorities raided the church's YFZ (Yearning for Zion) Ranch in Eldorado this month, taking 416 children into protective custody citing allegations of sexual abuse. More than 100 women accompanied the children. Tuesday, authorities ruled that only those women with children younger than 5 could stay at the temporary housing sites in San Angelo.

Now the media is clamoring to talk to the "mothers."

I didn't catch the name of the interviewer I saw because she said something that distracted me and sent me into a fit of talking back to the television. I only do that when I hear something so thoroughly absurd that it staggers all common sense.

I paraphrase:

"Women who live outside your community feel sorry for you because you are separated from your children. But that's the only way they identify with you because your lifestyle is so (here's where it gets absurd) 'different' and 'unusual'."

When I think of all the adjectives one could use to describe that abomination, that half-baked, crackpot, cockamamie corruption of spirituality, "different" and "unusual" aren't at the fore.

The outside world has trouble identifying with those women because their lifestyle is immoral, illegal and vile.

Different and unusual we can tolerate.

There is no Constitutional, religious, humanitarian or other authority that compels anyone to tolerate something so execrable as a bunch of nasty old men who sexually assault children and try to pass it off as acceptable under the veil of their warped interpretation of religion.

That cult is not a religion.

It's a breeding ground from which godless pedophiles harvest children for purposes of satisfying their amoral and abnormal sexual urges.

As we wouldn't tolerate "religions" advocating torture or homicide, we shouldn't pull punches when we carry out our duty to squash cults that abuse children.
Furthermore, I don't feel sorry for any of the mothers.

They should be separated. They should be tried. They're culpable in the whole shameful mess.

Any woman who would expose her children to that kind of abuse is a poor imitation of a mother.

They forfeited their rights to sympathy and compassion when they showed none for the children they were supposed to protect.

What an abhorrent, repugnant, disgraceful panorama.