Has Bush no comforting words for the Lost Boys?

[Benbow]

At least, unlike Terri Schiavo, they are alive - show us your "family values", President Bush.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1505997,00.html

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has "purged" from the sect between 400 and 1,000 teenage boys and young men. The FLDS describes them as delinquents. Utah authorities say they were thrown out to make more girls available as wives for older men in the sect.

Jim Hill, an investigator in Utah's attorney general's office ... said although the boys may have been rebellious, their expulsion had more to do with the ruthless sexual arithmetic of a polygamous sect.

One of the boys, Gideon Barlow, said he was expelled from a FLDS community in Colorado City, Arizona, for wearing short-sleeved shirts, listening to CDs and having a girlfriend. He said his mother rejected him on orders from the sect's leaders.

"I couldn't see how my mum would let them do what they did to me," he told the Los Angeles Times. After his expulsion, he attempted to give her a Mother's Day present but she told him to stay away. "I am dead to her now," he said.

Joanne Suder, a lawyer representing some of the Lost Boys in a case against the sect, said there had been "a conspiracy to excommunicate young boys to change the arithmetic so there are more young girls available for polygamy." She said some of the boys were simply driven out of town and dumped on the side of the road, leaving them traumatised. "I think anyone who finds themselves ousted from the only environment they ever knew and left in the middle of nowhere, and then is not allowed to be with their family and loved ones, and is led to believe that they can no longer go to heaven, is going to be troubled," Ms Suder told The Guardian.

Of course, they will find themselves in the US army in no time at all - offered a fast-track back to the promise of heaven.

[BattyDem]

1. I'm glad they're going after the sect, but ...

shouldn't they also be going after the parents of the boys? Doesn't this qualify as child abandonment? :shrug:

[Warpy]

2. It certainly does

but here in the southwest, people have been pussyfooting around these groups forever, simply because although they aren't a part of the larger LDS, they do have their tacit support, and that means a lot of political support.

Abandoning boy children, welfare fraud and abuse, and the systematic rape of girl children under 16 taken as "wives" have all been neglected out here for ages. These people have simply been untouchable.

Perhaps that will change now that the scale of child abandonment is known, but only if the major media report it on the evening news and Middle America gets riled up about it.

The feeling now is "Well, I wouldn't want to live like that, but they aren't hurting anybody." Well, yes. They are. They are hurting a lot of people, especially their own children.

[minnesotaDFLer]

3. absofuckinglutely ridiculous