Anti-Polygamy Witchhunt

Feds Hands Off Mormon Fundamentalists!

On May 6 the FBI announced a new name on its notorious “Ten Most Wanted” (which include an alleged Colombian drug lord, Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger and Osama bin Laden): Warren Jeffs, 50-year-old leader of a polygamist Mormon sect called the “Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” The Utah attorney general is now investigating the church as “an organized crime-type setup” based on allegations of financial fraud. Jeffs has been a fugitive since 2005, when he was indicted in Arizona for conspiracy and for the “sex crime” of allegedly marrying a 16-year-old woman to an older man. In April, Utah prosecutors charged him with “rape as an accomplice” for performing another marriage.

The official Mormon church renounced the practice of polygamy to meet conditions set by Congress for Utah to achieve statehood, which it did in 1896. But there are an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 Mormons still practicing “that old-time religion” in communities throughout Utah and Arizona. Our view is that the government should leave the Mormons, all varieties of them, alone, as Abraham Lincoln once proposed.

The government’s pursuit of the fugitive Mormon is being aided by a media circus. It almost seems like the Feds’ revenge for the popular HBO series Big Love, the sympathetic soap opera of a Utah polygamist and his wives. Here in the real world, we have a gang of patriarchal fundamentalist Christians in the White House chasing a bunch of patriarchal fundamentalist Mormons out in the sticks, in the name of saving young women from polygamous marriages in order to stifle them in monogamous ones instead.

The witchhunt against Jeffs recalls the case of Tom Green, a Utah Mormon convicted of felony bigamy charges in 2001 over the objections of his wives. As we wrote in “Mormon Polygamists: Leave Them Alone!” (WV No. 764, 14 September 2001): “The family structure—whether monogamous or polygamous—necessarily oppresses women. However, not everybody understands the source of their oppression, and people do all sorts of things that are undoubtedly bad for them that the state still has no business throwing them in prison for.” The Mormons are one of many peculiar American religious sects (check out Christian Science and L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology) essentially chosen by their practitioners. However, in many societies that never experienced bourgeois revolutions, women are held to be little more than property, requiring struggle by communists to end such institutions as polygamy, the bride price and other such legacies of social backwardness.

It’s both a sign of anti-sex hysteria and the height of hypocrisy for authorities today to pretend horror at 16-year-olds in the U.S. getting married, as this was utterly commonplace only decades ago. Indeed, New Hampshire still allows 13-year-old girls to marry if they have parental consent. We uphold “effective consent” as the only guiding principle in sexual relations. We have always opposed reactionary “age of consent” and “statutory rape” laws, which are designed to repress youth and strengthen the repressive reach of the state, and also serve as a diversion from the real brutality of this sick capitalist society.

Our liberating Marxist position is anathema to the capitalist ruling class and its government. The oppression of women is rooted in the institution of the family, which arose with the advent of private property as the mechanism for passing property from one generation to the next, with the monogamous wife supposedly ensuring the heirs’ paternity. The family serves as the social mechanism to rear the next generation, and under capitalism serves, along with religion, to instill obedience to authority among youth. The private property system, upheld by the bourgeois state, and the family cannot be “reformed” away. The liberation of women requires proletarian revolution internationally to lay the basis for a socialist society of material abundance, in which child-rearing and other functions now performed by the family will be the responsibility of society as a whole.

Today, of course, there is real violent abuse, including sexual abuse, of both women and children within polygamous families, just as within monogamous ones. But prosecuting Mormons for polygamy won’t help, as such families retreat further underground in fear of the authorities.

The Irish playwright Brendan Behan commented, “I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.” Certainly the government’s “sex offender” Internet registries have made a dismal situation far worse for those falling into the clutches of the law, often for acts that in a rational society would be no crime at all. These registries, providing photos and home addresses of “offenders,” are an “all you can kill” buffet for wackos driven mad by the thought of children and sex. This April in Maine, two men on such a registry were shot dead in separate towns. Last summer in Washington state, two other men were murdered; the killer said he’d targeted them after finding their names on an online list.

Government vendettas against anyone it decides to target are deadly business. In 1985 under Ronald Reagan, the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms conspired with the Philadelphia police department and black mayor Wilson Goode to incinerate the mainly black back-to-nature MOVE commune, killing eleven people, including five children, and burning down a whole black neighborhood. In 1993 under Bill Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno ordered a fiery assault on the racially integrated Branch Davidian commune near Waco, Texas, killing more than 80 men, women and children on such pretexts as suspected “child abuse.” In vigorously protesting these government atrocities, we declared that these people had the right to live and be left alone. Now today, we Marxist atheists are again defending a religious sect, in this case a Mormon one, against a government witchhunt. Sure, the Mormons may be weird, but the main enemy of human progress and women’s liberation in the world today is the U.S. imperialist ruling class and its state.