April 30: Women, Children Deserve Safe Refuge
With so much outcry about the massive strain on Texas' resources in providing safe places for the polygamist wives and children, I suggest that only the men be removed from the Yearning For Zion YFZ Ranch and the ranch complex be used as the safe haven itself.
Authorities should allow female social workers, female nurses and female doctors to enter and attend to needs. If the community wants to help, the county should waive property taxes and allow them to stay at the ranch indefinitely. If outsiders (including churches) want to help, they cold provide food and pay for electricity, propane, etc., to meet the residents' day-to-day needs.
Keeping the women and children together should take precedence. Then the relatively small number of men rounded up could be investigated. Those men convicted of wrongdoing would be jailed while any innocent man who committed no abuse could return to the ranch.
Anyone who has read the Holy Bible knows the Old Testament mentions numerous cases of marital practice of polygamy (a husband with more than one wife).
Abraham, Jacob, Moses, King Solomon and many others practiced this form of matrimony. While I would never approve of underage child-bride or abuse or fraud, I would never blur the issue by finding fault with adults who practiced this form of marriage if they were open and honest with each other, and if it was in a harmonious setting.
A distinction must be made between consenting adults versus child predators. I believe people should refrain from name calling, such as tossing out the label "cult." If abuses occurred, they were committed by individual men. The word "cult" is simply a reference to a slice of a "culture."
Centuries ago our American forbearers wanted a country with religious liberty and that should include the freedom to practice an Old Testament form of marriage. Granted, women and children need to be protected. Use the ranch for their safe harbor.
And if there were any adult men who made solemn spiritual vows to support any adult woman, let them be reunited with their families if no abuse occurred.
James A. Marples
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