How Should States Deal with Polygamous Sects?

PHOENIX -- It was a showdown, of sorts, over how far states should go to keep tabs on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, the group known to endorse multiple wives for men and motherhood for underage girls. In a public spat, officials from Arizona and Utah squared off last week against a U.S. senator who suggested that the two states, home to FLDS communities, should follow the more interventionist approach of Texas in cracking down on the breakaway Mormon sect.

At the end of it all, the wrangling may well result in federal involvement in investigating the FLDS, which numbers more than 10,000 and has compounds in several Western states, Canada, and Mexico. But it also underscores why Arizona and Utah have moved with caution in dealing with the FLDS, compared with Texas' decision last month to take temporary custody of all the children living at the group's Yearning for Zion ranch in the wake of abuse complaints.

The dispute began April 28th with a radio interview with Sen. Harry Reid (D) of Nevada, which drew an angry letter from the Arizona and Utah attorneys general.

"I am a cheerleader for what Texas is doing," Senator Reid told the University of Utah's KUER RadioWest. "Texas is doing what Utah and Arizona should have done decades ago … " Reid, the majority leader and a Mormon, added that he has asked the U.S. Justice Department to create a task force to investigate the FLDS.

Texas raided the 1,700-acre FLDS ranch in early April and took temporary custody of all 463 children, pending the state's voluminous investigation of child-abuse allegations. Arizona and Utah have not acted on that scale, at least not since 1953. But the two states did join forces about five years ago to "apply the rule of law" in the border towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, headquarters of the FLDS. They have prosecuted the FLDS leader as well as several other male members, removed much of the sect's financial underpinnings, and set up in those two towns social services and sheriff's offices that are operated by people from outside the FLDS group.

When Mark Shurtleff became Utah's attorney general in 2001, one investigator specifically worked cases in "closed communities" -- code, he says, for polygamous communities. That investigator chased down Tom Green, later convicted of child rape, bigamy, and fraud. Several of Mr. Green's underage wives were from the FLDS towns on the Utah-Arizona border.

"My determination to do something started then," Mr. Shurtleff says in a phone interview. "We hadn't done anything in 50 years, and I said it's time we start investigating these cases."

Both Utah and Arizona had mostly ignored the FLDS since the infamous 1953 raid of Short Creek, the Arizona town that now goes by the name Colorado City. "In the inky darkness of an eclipsed moon," The Arizona Republic reported on July 27, 1953, "more than 100 Arizona peace officers yesterday seized virtually every man, woman, and child in this historically polygamous village," after a two-year investigation by the state of Arizona.

Some 36 men, 86 women, and 263 children were taken into custody. The state charged most of the men and several of the women with crimes ranging from rape and bigamy to violating corporation laws and misappropriating school funds. Many of the women and all of the children were placed in foster care.

But after two years of acrimonious hearings and public recriminations, the charges were dropped and the families all went back to Short Creek.

"Then what happened was a mutual withdrawal," says Terry Goddard, Arizona's attorney general. "Any contacts with the outside world that had begun … were cut off by the devout, and the state decided, once burned, we'll just stay away."

It wasn't until 2003 that Attorney General Goddard joined forces with Shurtleff, his counterpart in Utah, to hold a "summit" with the FLDS communities in the Arizona-Utah border region. During 50 years of government absence, the two say, the sect had become more autocratic, much larger, and wealthier.