The comparison captured a major crisis facing the city. The effects are still felt in every aspect of the city’s daily life. The tank was a huge white whale of a thing, roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. On … “This might sound like every sob story ever,” Debbie later told a local paper, “but my oven was half heated up, and I had stuff in the pan, and the burner went off.”, Propane tanks are at a premium in Hildale, an isolated city, hemmed in by mountains on one side and desert plains on the other. A goal of the show creators was to be fair in their portrayal of the polygamist lifestyle – including it’s place in Utah culture. So the apostates held a series of community meetings and drafted a petition outlining their requests, garnering hundreds of signatures and enough public notice that the judge got wind of it. In total, 263 minors were separated from their families. For the first time in its history, the town will be helmed by a female non-member. He started a religion and almost immediately spawned a subculture, one whose faith, for better or for worse, the people of Hildale are still hashing out. They were, effectively, constructing a democracy from scratch. For two years, the family crisis took up all his attention. And while the directives from Jeffs’ jail cell have dwindled, in 2016 the Department of Justice found the Hildale government guilty of discriminating against “apostates,” exiled members of the church, in matters of policing, housing, and utilities. In 1890, the Mormon Church banned polygamy. There were also problems with voting. All told, the 29,000-square-foot compound has 44 bedrooms, a basketball court with no hoops (Jeffs removed them when he banned games), three isolated “punishment” areas, an electric closet for all his phone taps, and a secret back room attached to an escape tunnel. But the essential conflict underlying Debbie’s tank dispute traces all the way back to the mid 19th century, a few decades after a charismatic zealot named Joseph Smith placed a magical, egg-shaped rock in the basin of a hat, buried his face inside it, and translated the scripture that became The Book of Mormon. (Anywhere else, the whole ordeal might have looked like another installation of the holiday-industrial-complex. But the Church would not let them testify. When Rulon finally died, Warren held a bizarre, unprecedented, quasi-coronation: placing a portrait of his father on a chair, then sitting in it himself, and declaring, mystically, to the crowd, “Father is still with us!” As his father incarnate, Jeffs then wedded his dad’s 20-some surviving wives, effectively marrying his stepmothers. Polygamy was outlawed in federal territories by the Edmunds Act, and there are laws against the practice in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The revelation, written in Joseph Smith’s second sacred text, Doctrines & Covenants, is a flowery 66-paragraph treatise, with more than one verily, that gets to the gist around graf 61: “If any man espouse a virgin and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified.” It’s the section, in other words, where Smith gives polygamy the go-ahead. The crime is punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or both, according to the law of the individual state and the circumstances of the offense. The last morning I was in Hildale, for instance, something happened at the Meetinghouse, the Church’s main headquarters. “One that’s totally vulnerable, that’s completely dependent, that we have to nurse and tender along. Some divisions were cartoonishly literal: the faithful enclosed their homes in massive privacy fences, cutting off any communication with apostates, even their own family members, and leaving the town with a very Anchorite vibe. and last updated 12:41 PM, Mar 29, 2020. Under Jeffs’ system, Church members donated their time and effort to town projects, working grueling hours—some recalled getting as little as two hours’ sleep—entirely without pay. Hildale, Utah, pictured, and Colorado City, Ariz., are border towns long overseen by a polygamist sect. ), The last band to come on was a squadron of long-haired teenage boys, members of Christmas-themed metal group called Severed Society. But it also meant something simple: if the town’s problems were going to be solved, changes would need to come from someone with context, someone who knew Hildale history. “When you tell someone they’re wrong, they’re going to dig their heels in so deep. He was voted out of office the next year. That’s what makes Hildale’s move toward democracy so unlikely: they are literally the little guy, the tiny section of settlement overflowing into Utah, less than a third the size of Colorado City, pushing back against neighbors, friends, family and a hundred years of government-hating history. “The crazy thing is you’ve got this,” Barlow said, gesturing to the compound, “and then across the street you’ve got that.” Near Jeffs’ home, there’s a weathered-looking, unfinished house, barely fit for any family, but especially in Hildale where offspring historically number in the double digits. The nation was gearing up for a presidential election, and for the first time, the state of Utah was holding a caucus instead of a primary. As Jessop prepared to break up her family, her 9-year-old daughter intervened. Children born into the remote Utah community of … “It was like a board whacked me upside the head.” Almost immediately, they left Hildale. Polygamy is not the same as polyamory. Decades before he ran for office, Barlow began working for the Hildale fire department at age 14. When One Wife Isnt Enough: The Problems Of Polygamy, Judge To Decide Future Of Polygamous Towns In Arizona, Utah, Polygamy Increases Risk Of Heart Disease, Study Says. Hildale City, Utah. (“When you’re running a department that has done things in the past that are strange,” board manager Johnson said, “applying the standard to people now feels strange.”) But Johnson was also new to town, on the job barely a month, without much context. Of these children, some wouldn’t see their parents for as long as two years. It had been closed off since the Fundamentalists built walls back in 2016, blocking out the 4th of July party. The schism concerned a chunk of church doctrine called “Section 132,” which was a little more salacious than its sounds. Outside, utility officials were hauling away the couple’s primary source of fuel, holding hundreds of gallons of propane. Back at the council meeting, everyone read the mission, vision and value statements closely. The crowd that night was mostly the mayor’s family, either by blood or by marriage (“but not both!”), and everyone dressed for the occasion. Houses were blocked off. All of that to say: There was a lot at stake in Strategic Item A. Then, in November, Jessop took the election with 129 votes. The most recent, started just after Thanksgiving, took 24 hours to extinguish. One council member said that his property had six or seven other names registered to it, all of whom, he claimed, were Fundamentalists who had since left town, but continued to vote from afar. A group of pro-polygamy protesters rally at the Utah state Capitol on February 10, 2017. But there was 70-something or 80-whatever.”. Image: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer/Associated Press (“That’s a code word for ‘slave labor,’” one councilman said.) The city manager pulled the language up on a projector, and began re-writing in real time. The morning after Hildale officials drafted their new mission statement, councilman Lawrence Barlow gave me a windshield tour of town, pointing out major landmarks. “They tried to bring in a health center, and the mayor said no. (“We've got some citizens saying that was government overreach,” she sighed, “because now, we’re not the wild, wild west.”) Then, there were flood mitigation ditches, sewer ponds, and culinary water conflicts. They boarded all the children on to buses, declared them wards of the state, and drove them to Phoenix, Arizona. In the pre-Donia Jessop era, in other words, the government wasn’t controlled just by the Church, but by family members exercising a kind of dynastic mob rule. A mother of eight with high cheekbones and a soft blonde bob, Jessop had felt church discrimination first-hand. But, we don’t want to get into all that in this blog post. Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune The view of the Vermillion Cliffs towering over the twin towns of Short Creek (Hildale, UT, and Colorado City, AZ) is usually seen on news articles and the covers of books detailing the secretive world of the polygamous FLDS church. Soon after taking power, Warren began ruling with manic authority. “We’re all alone out here. He moved to Short Creek in the mid-1990s to help his father, Rulon Jeffs, then leader of the Fundamentalist Church, convert the town from a small fringe community into an American banana republic. Polygamy is the act or condition of a person marrying another person while still being lawfully married to another spouse. They were religiously persecuted because their religion was different, and because they practiced it so diligently that it irritated all those who didn’t understand the reason.”. “My dad had two ladies,” she said. Polygamy and bigamy are illegal in Utah, but the practice is more or less allowed, with the state rarely prosecuting polygamists unless crimes are being conducted. The council fired the police chief, hired a new one, and cracked down on a spree of animal killings (the Church had banned pets, leading to many cat and dog deaths, a trend that didn’t end after the election).“It felt like we were just putting out fires,” she said. One mom worked out of town, the other cared for the family’s 26 children. More examples pop up everyday. Polygamists on Utah-Arizona Border Under Scrutiny For years, isolation kept the law away from the polygamous towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah. Brigham Young founded the first settlement in Utah in 1847. But for the most part, her faith ran so deep that when Jessop’s husband found out about Jeffs’ crimes, he didn’t confide in her. When she drove over the hill into town, she started to hyperventilate. “We didn’t sleep for 30 days,” said one resident. The Utah US state is very popular for polygamy thanks to the fact that they have a lot of history dating back few hundreds of years ago when polygamy was widely spread across the territory where Utah is now situated. There were ugly Christmas sweaters, matching elf costumes, and more than one silver sequin fedora. The following month, when the DOJ decision came down, Barlow and other apostates wanted to have some say in the court’s recommendations for the city. The city held an election and an apostate won. For years, handling emergencies was his job: first as a paramedic, then in search and rescue. But Hildale also faced brutal income inequality, falling, like much of the nation, into a familiar economic trap: a few families amassed nearly all of the wealth, while others lived off scraps. But that morning, all the gates were open for business. In his car, the officer turned up a smattering of burner phones, computers and gadgets, thousands of dollars in cash, multiple credit cards, and three wigs. It concerned the fact that, for over a century, Hildale has been home to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), an offshoot of Mormonism which continues to practice polygamy. In September, the desert town of Hildale, a community of 2,000 or so, squished along Utah’s southern border, erupted into an amazingly ferocious battle, centered around a propane tank. “Every day something new would crop up.” (Sometime those fires were literal: since the DOJ decision, there have been more than two dozen human-started tire fires. Hildale had never held a caucus; they barely had a voter registry. When she decided to run for mayor, it wasn’t certain Jessop had a shot. By Harmeet Kaur, CNN. Polygamy is found in cultures all over the world, but in the Western world it's often linked to fringe religious groups. The town appealed the decision, pouring tax dollars into lawyers and litigation, quibbling, according to city staffers, over interpretations of a few minor words. We have to build the systems around it that it’s never had.”. A federal judge issued a final ruling Wednesday in the so-called Sister Wives case, handing the stars of the TLC show a resounding victory. Among them: mayor. Bigamy is no longer a felony in Utah. A tent city sprung up on the town’s outer limits, populated by “visiting” Fundamentalists. Even if one of the largest part of the Mormon population have easily accepted the prohibition of being married to more than one partner, there were still many groups left out of the LDS Church that had absolutely no problem in practicing the plural marriages. Polygamy (or more accurately, Polygyny) was instituted among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, Mormons) in the early 1840s. Are Men Naturally More Polygamous Than Women. “She said to me—yelled actually—‘I want to live with my family,’” Jessop recalled. And the government stated that this practice is not legal and a very large territory from all over the world have renounced on doing it. Not long after their term began, the city made even more room for secularists, when two Fundamentalists still on the council, Doran and Brian Jessop, left the government in a huff. Because state laws exist, polygamy is not ac… Polygamy Is Legal In Utah, For Now. “I couldn’t quite catch my breath.” (It was like that until the fifth time she came back). The show is a bit controversial in Utah, as you can imagine. Barlow was originally chosen as mayor by … In the 1970s, after 9-1-1 became the national emergency number, he introduced the idea to Hildale. The U.S. Department of Justice says the towns denied water, police services, and housing to non-believers. But inequality in Hildale is not like inequality anywhere else in the United States, where disparity usually stems from an unbalanced capitalist system. Along the length of the chimney, brick letters spell out Warren’s catchphrase: Pray and Obey. But in February 2016, just before the Department of Justice would deliver its ruling, another emergency cropped up. The longest debate concerned variants on the phrase “decisions based on critical thinking” (in the end, they kept it as is). The meetings took place in the bishop’s house. “This was Warren’s house,” he said. When the date arrived in March, Barlow saw a mammoth improvement in voter participation from the last election. Centennial Park is a remote town just over the Utah border and it is home to 1,500 fundamentalist Mormons. “The energy here was just very, very dark,” she said. “It just speaks to the disparity,” Barlow said. In 1890, a Fundamentalist sect split off from the mainstream Mormon congregation. For decades, Short Creek operated as a quasi-communist state. This past December, a few months after the tank debacle, the Hildale city council met at the town hall, a brick, ’60s-era prefab on the west side, for the final meeting of Jessop’s first year in office. Prophet Joseph Smith founded Mormonism in 1840 and led the religion until his death in 1844. Both are banned by the Church. Forced out of most Mormon pockets in the Southwest, some of these fringe families found their way to a small homestead on the Utah-Arizona border, where they could run their large households without intervention. When all the changes were made, the council unanimously voted the text into effect. “We went from 5 percent to 55 percent,” he said, laughing. That's considered a third-degree felony. Fortunately, Jessop isn’t running her revolution alone. In one infamous Church meeting, Jeffs called out the names of 20 prominent polygamist men, ordered them to stand before the entire congregation, accused them of fire-and-brimstone-sounding Biblical crimes, from “sinning against the Holy Ghost” to “denying the divinity of Christ,” banished them to “repent from afar,” and redistributed their wives like chattel. Posted on August 27, 2014, at 9:28 p.m. Jessop wore the long, starchy dresses; she coiffed her hair in the signature bouffant. Now, no concert, no ballgame, no zoning law, no propane tank removal takes place outside the shadow of Jeffs’ legacy. An opera house was built, a gold smelter, Utah’s first Masonic lodge, Utah’s first Methodist church, alongside banks, warehouses, whorehouses, 15 saloons and 16 liquor stores. By 1962, when the community incorporated to tap into state electric and sewage systems, they went with different branding. 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