If you have any misgivings about the horror that is the cult at the center of the El Dorado, Texas, brouhaha, check out some sober reflections on the situation of the women involved. They will sound extremely reasonable and claim they are not brainwashed. And what brainwashed persons wouldn't deny what has been done to them?Check out the posts by Sara Robinson at Orcinus, especially the one titled "Are FLDS women brainwashed?"
Part of what Sara writes:
The problem, as it so often is with the mainstream media, is that absolutely everybody involved with reporting or commenting on this story has been airlifted into it in the past few days. (You'd think somebody would have at least taken the time on the plane flight to skim Krakauer's book and get up to speed. You'd be wrong.) And this is just one example of the ways that ignorance of the backstory cheats the rest of us out of a real understanding of what's going on here.
Because, by the definition offered by these experts, the FLDS is very coercive indeed.
Almost every feature of these women's lives is determined by someone else. They do not choose what they wear, whom they live with, when and whom they marry, or when and with whom they have sex. From the day they're born, they can be reassigned at a moment's notice to another father or husband, another household, or another community. Most will have no educational choices (FLDS kids are taught in church-run schools, usually only through about tenth grade -- by which point they girls are usually married and pregnant). Everything they produce goes into a trust controlled by the patriarch: they do not even own their own labor. If they object to any of this, they're subject to losing access to the resources they need to raise their kids: they can be moved to a trailer with no heat, and given less food than more compliant wives, until they learn to "keep sweet."
There is more and I believe people need to be aware of what lies beneath the surface. Here I am preaching to the choir, I know. But if you hear some fatuous comments, Sara and Orcinus will provide you with information you can use.
In a second post she touches on religious freedom issues. Here is one paragraph:
There's no shortage of people in the media trying to make this a debate about religious freedom, which is fair enough. But the question they're not asking -- and the one that is central to that debate, in my mind -- is how we can reasonably and justly incorporate America's historical ideas about religious freedom with what we know now about how to identify and chart the prognosis of dangerous cults. As I've written before, governments in both Canada and the US are well aware of the signs that indicate a community headed toward violence. The FLDS exhibits almost all of those signs. As a society, it's time to figure out where the line gets crossed, and when government intervention becomes justified.Sara will be writing more, so check it out: Orcinus, where Dave Neiwert and Sara Robinson post.
Update: h/t to digby (apologies for forgetting this at first posting)
--the BB
