One year after raid, Texas polygamous sect survives

At the Yearning For Zion Ranch, life has regained a familiar rhythm.
Families awake at 5 a.m., gather for prayers, breakfast and chores before the children head to the sect's private school. Days end much the same way: chores, a meal, prayer.
There is just one sign of the disruption that unfolded here last April: The gleaming limestone temple, once illuminated and visible for miles against the night sky, is shuttered and dark.
A year ago this week, a women's shelter received calls for help --- now believed a hoax -- that drew law enforcement to the polygamous sect's ranch in the remote Texas town of Eldorado and triggered the largest abuse investigation in U.S. history.
Within days, 439 children had been taken from their parents; a diaspora of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) families was under way. Some of them have yet to recover.
The fallout is still being calculated financially, legally and psychologically, but the results are these:
Just one child remains in state custody. Twelve men face criminal charges related to underage marriages; the first trial is set for October. A new legislative committee is set to explore "lessons learned" from the raid, which has cost upward of $15 million.
Texas authorities resolutely defend their actions as necessary for the children's safety. And members of the FLDS remain as firmly committed to their faith as ever.
In sermons and school lessons, the FLDS has kept alive eight decades of efforts to wipe out its polygamous lifestyle -- most notably, the 1953 raid on Short Creek, their traditional home base at the Utah-Arizona border. Authorities kept 263 women and children in state custody for two years. The raid led the sect to close ranks -- a decision that contributed to what happened in Texas 55 years later, said Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.
"One good thing is it sent a message to (sect leader) Warren Jeffs, or anyone of his ilk, that they can't go somewhere else to perform underage marriages, even though they went to extraordinary lengths to have it be private on the ranch," he said.
That secrecy was breached on April 3, when about 100 law officers and caseworkers descended on the ranch and sealed it to search for a teen-age girl who, in fact, did not exist. Once there, however, they found other young girls who had been "spiritually united" with adult men and encountered what they deemed a "pattern of deception" that validated the state's concern.
Texas state Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, sponsor of a 2005 bill that raised the age of legal marriage from 14 to 16, said at the time that religions practicing plural marriage are not "part of Texas values."
Just last week, the Republican introduced a new bill that will, among other things, allow authorities to consider the actions of all adults in a household before deciding whether a child or the child's suspected abuser should be removed.
As last year's investigation unfolded, FLDS members looked to their history as their lives were opened to public scrutiny and authorities removed their children.
"That example of maintaining their cool and keeping faith ... is what literally saved the people," said Willie Jessop, an FLDS member who emerged as a spokesman last spring. "There was a deliverance by a power greater than what we could have done, and we certainly acknowledge that."
There was another past lesson the FLDS, which had long maintained a stoic silence in the face of criticism and government pressure, drew on: the value of public appeals.
"When the decision was made to let the news media come out on the ranch and start interacting with people, all of a sudden there was a voice on the other side; there were human faces, and it was not just about what the state was doing," said Salt Lake City attorney Rod Parker, who helped the sect deal with media in Texas.
In recent weeks, the sect has again allowed media access to the ranch, where a handful of families have given interviews.
Many men are working jobs elsewhere during the week to help pay the steep legal bills and expenses the sect has racked up over the past year, Jessop said.
But not all mothers and children have returned to the ranch.
The reasons vary. Some entered yearlong rental contracts on apartments they moved into so they would be close to the shelters housing their children. For others, the ranch and the traumatic events there can never be untwined.
"That is the scene of a lot of emotional difficulties for them, and they are trying to pick up the pieces and go on," said Rene Haas, a Corpus Christi attorney who represents Joseph and Lori Jessop.
The couple -- parents to three young children -- have emotional and physical problems that Haas said resulted from the raid. Joseph, a framer, "works when work is available and when he is physically able," Haas said.
The children "all still have problems of worrying about strange men coming around -- are the police coming? -- that sort of thing," she added.
But Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, said given the same circumstances today, his department would respond exactly the same way.
"We were required by Texas law to investigate the report," he said. "Once the investigators got to the ranch, the investigation proceeded, not because of the initial report, but because of what they found: an obvious pattern of underage marriages and births, deception and misinformation (and) girls who told our workers that no age was too young to marry."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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