Russia: Property Sell-Offs, Alternative Service Denials Follow Jehovah's Witness Ban

Victoria Arnold

Eurasia Review
F18News
December 29, 2017

Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia continue to feel the impact of their liquidation and the nationwide ban on their exercise of freedom of religion or belief. Regional Justice Ministry branches are preparing to sell off confiscated Jehovah’s Witness property. Military call-up offices have denied several army conscripts the option of alternative civilian service. Jehovah’s Witnesses also experience increased law enforcement harassment and incidents of vandalism and violence across the country.

Individual Jehovah’s Witnesses remain at risk of criminal prosecution if they engage in any expression of their faith which law enforcement officers may interpret as “continuing the activities of a banned extremist organisation”.

Jehovah’s Witness appeals to both Russia’s Human Rights Ombudsperson’s Office and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg are pending (see below).

A 14 November Supreme Court resolution advises courts to deprive people of their parental rights in cases of their “involvement [of the children] in the activity of a public or religious association or other organisation which has been liquidated by a court order which has come into force, or whose activity has been banned”. Courts could use this against Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as against Muslims who meet to study the writings of the late Turkish theologian Said Nursi (see below).

Meanwhile, Jehovah’s Witnesses are also trying to stop the prohibition as “extremist” of their Russian-language New World Bible. Vyborg City Court upheld prosecutors’ request to rule the text “extremist” on 17 August 2017. The next hearing in the appeal process is due at Leningrad Regional Court on 20 December. The suit is not connected to the Supreme Court’s liquidation ruling, as Leningrad-Finland Transport Prosecutor’s Office lodged its suit more than a year earlier.
Banned since 17 July

The Supreme Court’s ruling that the Jehovah’s Witness Administrative Centre be declared an “extremist” organisation and its activities prohibited throughout Russia came into force on 17 July, when an appeal panel upheld the original 20 April decision. Some Jehovah’s Witness activities had already been halted by a 15 March suspension order issued by the Justice Ministry when it lodged its liquidation suit.

Individual believers and communities had already begun to suffer the effects of the liquidation ruling, even before it came into force, with a steep rise in vandalism, the prosecution of community elders for leading worship, and incidents of discrimination against children at school and adults in the workplace.

The Jehovah’s Witness Administrative Centre and all 395 local communities have now been added to the Justice Ministry’s list of banned “extremist” organisations, alongside violent far-right and Islamist groups, Forum 18 notes. They are also included on the Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) list of “terrorists and extremists” whose assets banks are obliged to freeze (though in the case of Jehovah’s Witness organisations, the state has already seized their assets).

Jehovah’s Witnesses are in a unique position in Russia as the only centralised religious organisation with a nationwide presence which has been ruled “extremist” and liquidated, thus losing its legal personality and forfeiting its property.

Other religious associations which have been banned as “extremist” have either lacked registration (and therefore property of their own), such as “Nurdzhular” (followers of Said Nursi), or have been local communities, such as the Muslim congregation of Borovsky in Tyumen Region.
Appeal to European Court of Human Rights

On 1 December 2017, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ appeal against their liquidation admissible and decided that it should be considered as a priority case.

The appeal challenges the liquidation ruling under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion), in conjunction with Article 11 (the right to freedom of assembly and association) and Article 14 (the prohibition of discrimination). It also protests specifically against the confiscation of Jehovah’s Witness property, under Article 1 of the additional 1952 Protocol to the Convention (protection of property).

On 1 December, the Court asked the Russian government to respond by 23 March 2018 to the question of whether the liquidation violates Jehovah’s Witnesses’ rights under these Articles.

“Administrative Centre of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Kalin vs. Russia” (Application No. 10188/17) was originally lodged on 3 February 2017 in response to the General Prosecutor’s Office warning of “the inadmissibility of extremist activity”, issued on 2 March 2016. Jehovah’s Witnesses had already challenged this warning unsuccessfully in the Russian courts, lastly at Moscow City Court on 16 January 2017.

The appeal to the ECtHR now also encompasses the Supreme Court’s 20 April decision to declare the Administrative Centre an “extremist” organisation and ban all Jehovah’s Witness activities.
Council of Europe Committee of Ministers questions to Russia

On 7 December, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, which is responsible for overseeing the implementation of ECtHR judgments, decided to change the monitoring of two earlier rulings against Russia to an “enhanced procedure”.

The June 2010 ruling in Jehovah’s Witnesses of Moscow and Others vs. Russia (Application No. 302/02) obliged Russia to re-register the Moscow Jehovah’s Witness community, which was eventually completed in 2015. The June 2014 ruling in Krupko and Others (Application No. 26587/07) v. Russia obliged the Russian authorities to pay damages to Jehovah’s Witnesses who were detained when police raided a worship service taking place in a hired hall.

The Committee of Ministers “expressed their serious concern” about the impact of the nationwide Supreme Court ban on Jehovah’s Witness activities, the 7 December decisions note. It has asked the Russian government for information on how the Jehovah’s Witnesses who lodged these two cases may “continue to enjoy the individual right to freedom of religion”.
Appeal to Human Rights Ombudsperson

Jehovah’s Witnesses also sent an appeal to Human Rights Ombudsperson Tatyana Moskalkova on 9 October. They asked her to use her right to appeal against court decisions which have come into force. They also drew attention to the “massive, growing violation of human rights that followed the court’s ruling”, the jw-russia.org news website reported.

“Believers hope that, after reading the case materials, Tatyana Moskalkova will consider it necessary to apply to the presidium of the Supreme Court of Russia with a demand to overturn the unreasonable and unlawful court decision,” the website noted.

Jehovah’s Witnesses appear to have received no reply. Forum 18 wrote to the Ombudsperson’s office before the start of the Moscow working day of 18 December, asking what answer it had to the Jehovah’s Witness appeal, and how it was responding to the violation of their human rights. Forum 18 received no reply by the end of the working day in Moscow on 19 December.
Confiscation of property
– Administrative Centre case

On 7 December, after a four-hour hearing, Judge Natalya Bogdanova of St Petersburg’s Sestroretsk District Court ruled that a 17-year-old property contract was invalid, thus allowing the seizure by the state of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ principal site in Russia. The court’s decision may be appealed within 30 days.

“This decision casts a shadow over the inviolability of property rights in the Russian Federation, where no organisation, even an international one, can have peace of mind over its transactions, even if they are officially registered by authorised bodies,” the jw-russia.org news website commented on 7 December.

The complex in question consists of 14 buildings (constructed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses) on ten hectares of land in the village of Solnechnoye, and has a value of more than 881 million Roubles (126 million Norwegian Kroner, 13 million Euros or 15 million US Dollars), according to a court press release of 7 December. The Administrative Centre of Jehovah’s Witnesses acquired the land in 2000 and transferred its ownership to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, which in turn allowed the Administrative Centre free use of the site.

Because the site was owned by a foreign organisation, it did not automatically become the property of the state upon the liquidation of the Administrative Centre, a Russian legal entity. The Kurortny District Prosecutor’s Office argued, however, that the contract governing the transfer of the property to the Watch Tower Society’s ownership was invalid, as it was the Administrative Centre which continued to use and maintain the land and buildings.

Watch Tower Society lawyer Viktor Shipilov argued in court that federal tax records show that the Society has been paying taxes on the property since 2000 (had the Administrative Centre owned the site, it would not have had to do so, as registered Russian religious organisations are not liable for tax on land or property used for religious purposes). He also noted that Kurortny District Prosecutor’s Office checked the legitimacy of the acquisition of the property and its ownership by the Watch Tower Society in 2007 and found no violations.

The Administrative Centre complex also accommodated almost 400 people, both Russian and foreign nationals, some of whom had made their homes there for more than twenty years. “The move from their homes and the disruption in their voluntary religious service .. have been traumatic,” according to a 5 December Jehovah’s Witness statement on their international website, jw.org.

Forum 18 telephoned the Justice Ministry’s Department for the Affairs of Religious Organisations on 19 December to ask what would happen to the Administrative Centre’s property in St Petersburg and whether the people who lived there would receive any compensation. A spokeswoman insisted that all questions must be put to the Ministry’s press service.

The Department for the Affairs of Religious Organisations was responsible for submitting the liquidation suit to the Supreme Court in March 2017, and its staff member Svetlana Borisova represented the Justice Ministry during the hearings.
– Locally-owned property

Meanwhile, buildings and land owned by local Jehovah’s Witness organisations are now in the process of being sold off. Once creditors have been satisfied, any remaining assets will pass to the state and may then be sold. If a local community had insufficient monetary funds to pay off its debts, its property will be auctioned to raise more (if worth more than 100,000 Roubles).

According to legal documents seen by Forum 18, this process is initiated by regional branches of the Justice Ministry, overseen by regional arbitration courts, and carried out by an executor from the Interregional Self-Regulatory Organisation of Professional Arbitration Managers.

Justice Ministry branches appear to be seeking to appoint the same executor, Sergei Aleksandrovich Kryazhev, to manage the disposal of Jehovah’s Witness property across the country. He is to be paid 30,000 Roubles per month from the liquidated community’s assets (disposal periods vary between cases).

Regional Justice Ministry branches appear to have begun lodging suits initiating the disposal of Jehovah’s Witness property in late September (only two months after the Supreme Court’s ruling came into force), but, according to the Civil Code, they have five years to do so after a legal entity is recorded as liquidated in federal tax records. The process of disposal of Jehovah’s Witness assets may therefore continue for some time.

The Republic of Karachai-Cherkessiya’s Justice Ministry branch lodged its suit to initiate the disposal of the Cherkessk Jehovah’s Witness community’s property on 21 September at the Arbitration Court of Karachai-Cherkessiya. It was upheld on 6 December. The congregation’s property consists of a non-residential building of 298.5 sq.m. and a plot of land of 857 sq.m. Judge Ali Botashev ruled that disposal should take place within six months and agreed to the appointment of Sergei Kryazhev as executor with remuneration of 30,000 Roubles per month from the assets of the liquidated community.

The Judge stipulated that the executor should publish notice of the disposal process in the journal “State Registration Herald” (Vestnik gosudarstvennoy registratsiy) no more than ten working days after the court ruling is issued, and should immediately inform any creditors of the disposal process. Notice of the disposal should also be published in the media within two months of the ruling, and creditors should be given two months (from publication in the press) in which to put forward their claims. The judge has scheduled another hearing on 18 May 2018 to examine the executor’s report on the results of the disposal process.

Similar proceedings are underway or have recently been completed in other regions, e.g. Krasnoyarsk (lodged 24 October; first hearing 20 November, next hearing due 9 January 2018), Saratov (re. Volzhsk community, lodged 13 November, first hearing due 16 January), Vladimir (lodged 24 October, first hearing due 23 January 2018), St. Petersburg/Leningrad Region (re. Administrative Centre, lodged 27 October, first hearing due 26 December; re. Kirishi community, lodged 30 October, first hearing due 26 December), Amur (re. Tynda community, lodged 8 December, first hearing due 15 January 2018), Irkutsk (re. Northern, Usolye-Sibirskoye community, lodged 22 September, halted 19 October at Justice Ministry’s request because of lack of resources; re. Vikhorevka community, lodged 22 September, upheld in full 1 November), Republic of Karachai-Cherkessiya (re. Kurdzhinovo community, lodged 21 September, preliminary hearing due 27 December), Sakha Republic/Yakutiya (re. Chulman community, lodged 9 November, upheld in part 11 December), Rostov (re. Salsk community, lodged 17 November, preliminary hearing due 25 December).

It is theoretically possible under the Civil Code for the founders or former directors of a liquidated organisation to be named as third parties to such arbitration suits, and in cases of organisations liquidated through choice or because of non-viability, remaining assets would be divided between them. In the case of Jehovah’s Witness congregations, however, the “extremism” ruling and ban means that they no longer have any right to proceeds from their property, and even appear to be unable to attend court hearings on its disposal.

Forum 18 found one instance, in Krasnoyarsk, of the twenty founding members of a community being named by the court as third parties to the suit. The judge removed them as third parties at the first hearing, however, at the request of the regional Justice Ministry, based on the fact that Jehovah’s Witness property was now forfeit to the state (two had also died).
Denial of alternative civilian service

At least six young Jehovah’s Witness men are potentially being denied their right to perform alternative civilian service. Of the six individuals in five different regions across Russia known to Forum 18, three have so far received official refusals and have been called up to the army, while military authorities have yet to make a final decision regarding the other three.

Individuals whose beliefs do not allow them to engage in military activity may apply to local military call-up offices for permission to perform “alternative civilian service”.

The military call-up office for the Central and Komintern Districts of Voronezh now obliges conscripts to fill out a form about their “attitude to religion” and “attitude to religious trends of an extremist nature”, the portal-credo.ru news website reported on 30 November. Conscripts must state whether they “belong to”, “are acquainted with”, or “defend the activities of” such movements.

Although the form gives “Wahhabism” as an example of such extremist religious beliefs, it is likely that Jehovah’s Witnesses would also be considered as such in the wake of the Supreme Court ban – as a result, young Jehovah’s Witness men would be obliged to disclose their religious affiliation.

The insistence that conscripts give their views on religion violates both their Constitutional rights and international human rights norms. Article 29, Part 3, of Russia’s Constitution declares: “No one can be forced to declare their opinions and beliefs or to deny them.”

General Comment 22 of the United Nations Human Rights Committee on Article 18.3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights notes that “no one can be compelled to reveal his [sic] thoughts or adherence to a religion or belief”.

The duty officer at Voronezh Region military call-up office put the phone down on 19 December as soon as Forum 18 asked about conscripts being given a form about their attitude to religion. The telephones at the military call-up office for the Central and Komintern Districts went unanswered each time Forum 18 called the same day.
Deprivation of parental rights

On 14 November, the Plenum of the Supreme Court issued a resolution on the application of legislation to disputes affecting the rights of children. This included advice to courts to deprive people of their parental rights if they “involved [the children] in the activity of a public or religious association or other organisation which has been liquidated by a court order which has come into force, or whose activity has been banned”.

The resolution mentions no specific organisation, but the measure could apply to Jehovah’s Witnesses and to Muslims who read the works of Said Nursi (frequently prosecuted for involvement with the banned “extremist” organisation Nurdzhular, the existence of which Muslims in Russia deny).

The resolution also does not explain what is meant by “involvement” (vovlecheniye), which could be subject to a wide range of interpretation by officials.

Forum 18 is not aware of any instances of this measure being used against Jehovah’s Witnesses or Muslims who read Nursi’s works, as of 19 December.
Arrests, detentions, raids

On 14 December, around 40 law enforcement officers, including from the fire brigade, entered the Hall of Congresses, a large worship building in northern St Petersburg, the jw-russia.org news website reported the same day. Officers then sealed the building. The congregation, abiding by the Supreme Court’s ruling, has not used the building since April.

Throughout November alone, police detained Jehovah’s Witnesses, required them to disclose their religion, often took them to police stations, obliged them to submit to photographing and fingerprinting, and confiscated their personal belongings, the Moscow-based SOVA Centre reported on 12 December. Such incidents have occurred in Dmitrov (Moscow Region), Severnaya Ferma (Vologda Region), Chapayevsk (Samara Region), and Diveyevo (Novgorod Region), and in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District.

Police, sometimes accompanied by FSB security service officers, have also raided homes, Jehovah’s Witnesses reported. In the village of Uyskoye in Chelyabinsk Region, police took down the details of anyone who entered a flat in which Jehovah’s Witnesses lived. In Kuchva in Sverdlovsk Region, police searched a house without permission, insulted the owner and a visiting friend, and “expressed their scorn for their faith”. A Jehovah’s Witness couple from Belgorod claims that police illegally entered their flat and installed audio and video surveillance equipment. In Naberezhnyye Chelny (Republic of Tatarstan), police and FSB security service officers went to a holiday complex which had been rented by 100 Jehovah’s Witnesses, inspected their documents, and took their details. Police in Novosibirsk also visited a Jehovah’s Witness at work and allegedly planted religious literature in his office.

So far, no prosecutions are known to have arisen from these incidents.
Vandalism and violence

On 23 November in Moscow, a man allegedly pushed a 54-year-old Jehovah’s Witness down the stairs of his block of flats. Her tablet computer broke in the fall.

On 16 September, in Chunsky village in Irkutsk Region, “unknown persons” broke into the building formerly used for Jehovah’s Witness worship, the jw-russia.org news website reported on 20 September. The intruders smashed the building’s internal doors, set off fire extinguishers, destroyed sound equipment, and broke the burglar alarm. Jehovah’s Witnesses reported the incident to the police, and “have no doubt” that it was provoked by the Supreme Court decision.
Prosecutions

After the Justice Ministry issued its 15 March suspension order, several Jehovah’s Witness leaders were prosecuted under Administrative Code Article 20.28, Part 1 (“Organisation of or participation in the activities of a public or religious association, in relation to which a decision on the suspension of its activities is in force”). Most of these prosecutions led to fines. The prosecutions were launched despite the fact that the order did not apply to worship.

After the Supreme Court’s liquidation ruling came into force on 17 July, these prosecutions ceased, as Jehovah’s Witness activities are now banned, not merely suspended. Individuals are therefore now at risk of criminal prosecution under Criminal Code Article 282.2 (“Organisation of” or “participation in” “the activity of a social or religious association or other organisation in relation to which a court has adopted a decision legally in force on liquidation or ban on the activity in connection with the carrying out of extremist activity”).

Danish Jehovah’s Witness Dennis Ole Christensen remains in pre-trial custody on charges of “organising the activities of a banned extremist organisation” (Criminal Code Article 282.2, Part 1). He will appeal against his detention for the third time at Oryol Regional Court on 22 December. Christensen is accused of “continuing the activities” of the Oryol Jehovah’s Witness community, which was ordered liquidated in June 2016.

The next hearing in the trial of Jehovah’s Witness elder Arkady Akopovich Akopyan is due on 10 January 2018 at Prokhladny District Court in Kabardino-Balkariya. Akopyan’s case is also not directly connected to the Supreme Court’s liquidation ruling; he was charged under Article 282, Part 1 (“Actions directed at the incitement of hatred [nenavist] or enmity [vrazhda], as well as the humiliation of an individual or group of persons on the basis of sex, race, nationality, language, origin, attitude to religion, or social group”) for allegedly giving sermons in which he “degraded the dignity of adherents of other religions”

https://www.eurasiareview.com/29122017-russi-property-sell-offs-alternative-service-denials-follow-jehovahs-witness-ban/

A woman who married God, a chess-playing priest and 10 more fascinating religious figures who died in 2017

Daniel Silliman

December 28, 2017


More than 70 percent of Americans say religion is important in their lives, but this year’s obituaries reveal the vast diversity of religious life in American culture.

Spirituality takes a lot of different shapes in America. Some people preach, some pray and some evangelize. Some break the law. Some serve an institution and a hierarchy while others build individualized cathedrals.

A number of fascinating figures died this year. Their lives show the real range of religious life in this country:

Sweet Angel Divine

Like a lot of immigrants, Edna Rose Ritchings came to the United States looking for a better life. That better life included a wedding to the man she believed to be God.

Ritchings first heard Father Major Jealous Divine speak in Vancouver, B.C., when she was 15. Divine was a black man who said he was God and called his followers to abstain from sex and partake of feasts. Ritchings joined a group of Divine’s followers in Montreal, taking the name Sweet Angel. In 1946, she traveled to the United States and married Divine.

Mother Divine led Divine’s New Religious Movement, headquartered in Philadelphia, after his death in 1965. She played recordings of his talks and spoke of him in the present tense until her deathin Gladwyne, Pa., at 91.

[Theologian R.C. Sproul, who influenced evangelical beliefs about the Bible, dies at 78]

Patrick Fernández Flores

Patrick Fernández Flores wasthe first Mexican American in the hierarchy of the U.S. Catholic Church. Born to migrant workers, Flores wanted to be a priest from childhood, even though he had a limited education and Anglo clerics discouraged him. He was ordained in 1957 and made a bishop in 1970, rising to the level of archbishop of San Antonio in 1979.

No stranger to political controversy, Flores was an advocate for Hispanics and the poor. “If you reject the poor,” he once told the city of San Antonio, “you reject Jesus.”

Flores co-founded the influential Catholic Television of San Antonio in 1981 and brought Pope John Paul II to Texas in 1987. In 2000, he was held hostage by a Salvadoran man who feared deportation. The man surrendered to police after nine hours. Flores supported the man’s family for years after. He died in San Antonio at 87.

Gelek Rimpoche

Gelek Rimpoche served as a leading teacher of Tibetan Buddhism in America. He was one of the last Buddhist teachers to be fully educated in Tibet. He entered monastery at the age of 5, leaving at age 19 when the Chinese Communists killed monks and shelled monasteries in 1959. As a refugee in India, Rimpoche played a crucial role in preserving the tradition, editing and publishing 170 volumes of rare manuscripts. He also wrote a popular book on reincarnation.

In 1987, at the instruction of his superiors, Rimpoche moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., to teach Buddhism to Americans. He became a U.S. citizen and worked hard to understand American culture, watching “Days of Our Lives” and televangelist Jim Bakker on TV. Rimpoche established Buddhist communities in Ann Arbor, Chicago and New York City, teaching a number of notable Americans, including composer Philip Glass. He diedin Ann Arbor at 77.

Frank Worthen

Frank Worthen was first told he was gay by his pastor at age 13. At the time, Worthen recalled, he didn’t know what the word “homosexual” meant. He accepted his gay identity until his evangelical conversion in 1973.

Worthen recorded a cassette tape recounting his experience and advertised it in a gay newspaper popular in San Francisco. “Do you want out of homosexuality?” the ad read. “Send for a Brother Frank tape on a Christ-centered way out of homosexuality.” About 60 men asked for copies the first year and Worthen launched a group called Love in Action. A network of similar ministries was formed in 1976 with the name Exodus International. “Conversion therapy,” as it came to be known, became increasingly controversial. Exodus International closed in 2013, apologizing to those who had been a part of its ministry.

Worthen continued to believe Jesus could free people from same-sex attraction until his death in San Rafael, Calif., at 87.

[Survivors of sexual abuse in Catholic Church decry the Vatican’s honorable funeral for Cardinal Law]

Maxine Grimm

Maxine Grimm, a pioneering but unofficial Mormon missionary to the Philippines — born Maxine Tate — was widowed in 1940 at the age of 25 and then joined the Red Cross. The Red Cross sent her to the Philippines at the start of World War II. In 1945, she led a seamstress to join the Mormon Church, the first Filipino to become Mormon.

She married a non-Mormon army colonel, E.M. Grimm and remained in Manila after the war. Though the church never formally recognized her as a missionary, Grimm continued to convert Filipinos. About 2,000 were baptized in her swimming pool by the end of the 1950s. “I know the Church is true and I have always wanted to show that,” Grimm said. Today, there are more than 745,000 Latter-day Saints in the country. Grimm died in Tooele, Utah, at 102.

Michael Sharp

Michael “M.J.” Sharp believed in the power of peace. That’s why the Mennonite from Indiana would walk deep into the Congo forest, sit beneath a banana tree and talk to armed rebels.

Sharp started his career as a peacemaker after graduating from Eastern Mennonite University in 2005. He counseled U.S. soldiers stationed in Germany, telling them how to declare themselves conscientious objectors. Then, in 2012, Sharp went to the Democratic Republic of Congo. With a budget of $12,000 per month, he coordinated a group of Christian volunteers who would talk to rebel fighters. In three years, they convinced 1,600 rebels to lay down their arms. When funding was canceled, Sharp contracted as a United Nations observer, investigating rapes, massacres and child soldiers in Congo.

He and a U.N. colleague, Zaida Catalán of Sweden, were kidnapped in Congo in March. Their bodies were found two weeks later in a shallow grave. Sharp was 34.

Donald Weiser

Donald Weiser was pivotal in the spread of occult beliefs in middle America. He published books on Western traditions of “secret knowledge,” including astrology, tarot, paganism, witchcraft and magick.

Weiser started as an antiquarian, taking over his father’s rare book business in New York in 1950. He specialized in acquiring occult libraries to sell to collectors. By 1957, however, Weiser realized there was a broader interest for these books. He started publishing 15 to 20 cheap editions per year and selling them to hippies, housewives, soldiers returning from Korea and Wall Street brokers looking for a supernatural advantage.

When mainstream publishers repackaged the occult as “New Age” in the 1970s, they recruited Weiser’s proteges to run them. They established New Age as an official category, so when Borders and Barnes & Noble launched their superstores in American suburbs in the 1980s, the occult was made widely available to middle America. Weiser died in Greenacres, Fla., at 89.

[Why this Muslim-turned-Christian speaker resonated with so many before his death at 34]

Katherine Dockens

Katherine Dockens was the direct descendant of the slave who bought his own freedom and founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. As the sixth-generation granddaughter of Richard Allen, the church’s founding bishop, she worked tirelessly to preserve and promote her church’s history, leading regular tours of Mother Bethel A.M.E. in Philadelphia. Historians, documentarians and tourists sought her expertise.

Dockens helped organize a bicentennial celebration in 1987. The church reiterated its commitment to racial justice and reenacted the founder’s trek from Delaware, where he was a slave, to Philadelphia, where the A.M.E. began, to Baltimore, where the first conference of A.M.E. churches was held. Today the church has about 2.5 million members, according to the World Council of Churches. Dockens also served as president of the church’s missionary society, and was given the honorific “Mother Missionary” in Botswana in 1997. She died in Athens, Ga., at 95.

Leroy Jenkins

Leroy Jenkins’s life was full of sensational scandals, but he never stopped preaching miracles.

He started his ministry in 1960, saying God had healed his severed arm and called him to heal others. He built a cathedral in Ohio in 1968, but the building failed safety inspections, and it burned down in a suspected insurance scam. Jenkins made it big in the 1970s with a faith-healing TV show. Then he was convicted of plotting two arsons in South Carolina.

Jenkins served time in prison from 1979 to 1985, but he rebuilt his ministry and his cathedral with another TV show and sales of miracle water. In 2003, the Ohio Department of Agriculture reported Jenkins’s miracle water was contaminated with fecal bacteria. Unfazed, he continued preaching until 2015. Jenkins died in Apopka, Fla., at 83.

William Lombardy

William Lombardy was the greatest chess-playing Catholic priest of the 20th century. He learned chess at 9 from a Jewish neighbor in the Bronx. At 19, he became the world junior champion, winning 11 games in a row, an unheard of feat. But he was quickly overshadowed by a young friend named Bobby Fischer.

A priest serving in the Bronx, he continued to play chess at the highest levels, even assisting Fischer in his famous Cold War victory over the Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky. The church, however, did not always approve of the priest’s games. A cardinal chided Lombardy for “pushing meaningless wooden pieces across a wooden board.”

Lombardy left the priesthood in 1977, criticizing the church’s wealth. He spent his later years in poverty. In 2016, he was evicted from his apartment, more than $27,000 behind in rent. Lombardy died in Martinez, Calif., at 79.

Betty Bone Schiess

Betty Bone Schiess was one of the first women ordained as an Episcopalian priest. Her 1974 ordination was, in the legal language of the church at the time, “irregular.” The House of Bishops, in an emergency meeting at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, declared the ordination invalid.

The church changed its position on women’s ordination two years later. Schiess was reordained and her sex-discrimination lawsuit was dropped. During her service, she was a chaplain at Syracuse University and Cornell University and as rector of a church in northeast New York.

By 1985, more than 600 women were Episcopalian priests. Today, more than 40 percent of the denomination’s priests are women. Schiess was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994. She died in Syracuse, N.Y., at 94.

John Raines

John Raines was an ordained Methodist minister who was an accomplice in a burglary that revealed FBI abuses. Raines, his wife, Bonnie, and six other peace activists stole 1,000 files from a Philadelphia office and mailed them to three newspapers reporters in 1971. The files revealed the FBI’s secret campaign to harass civil rights advocates, antiwar protesters and other “subversives.”

Born to a Methodist bishop, Raines followed his father into ministry. As a pastor, he became active in civil rights activism and joined the Freedom Rides to force the desegregation of public buses in 1961.

During the 1971 burglary, Raines drove the family’s station wagon as the getaway car. Sometimes, he said when the secret was revealed to a Washington Post reporter in 2014, breaking the law is the only way to stop a crime. Raines died in Philadelphia at 84.

Daniel Silliman is a Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso University. A U.S. historian, he writes about American religion and culture. You can follow him on Twitter@danielsilliman.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/12/28/a-woman-who-married-god-a-chess-playing-priest-and-10-more-fascinating-religious-figures-who-died-in-2017/

Podcast: The cult of Gloriavale

Lilia at her baptism at Gloriavale.

Megan McChesney
Noted
December 27, 2017

PODCAST

When Lilia Tarawa fled from the religious cult of Gloriavale, she turned her back on the only life she’d ever known.

The deeply moving story of a girl who grew up in this isolated community on the South Island’s West Coast … and what happened when her thirst for truth and knowledge became too great to ignore.


“Mum freaks out, like, ‘God has cursed us’. Dad’s like, ‘Don’t be silly, woman!’ and I’m sitting here thinking, ‘Are there people from Gloriavale coming to get us? Will they come and force us to go back? And I’m scared out of my wits.”

“We don’t want women who are independent. We don’t want to be raising women who are leaders. A woman’s job is to submit to the men.”

https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/social-issues/podcast-the-cult-of-gloriavale/

Federal Officials Reportedly Investigating Group Where Women Were Branded

New York Times

By BARRY MEIER and PAULINA VILLEGAS

DEC. 21, 2017

 

The Justice Department has started an investigation into a self-described self-help group in which women were branded with a symbol containing its leader’s initials, several people contacted as part of the inquiry said.

Those people said that agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation had recently contacted or questioned them about the group, which is called Nxivm. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because officials asked them not to discuss the inquiry, which appears to be at an early stage.

In a related move, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York is expected to soon recommend possible changes in how state regulators review complaints against doctors, a spokesman said. The decision follows the disclosure that health department officials declined to act on complaints about two doctors affiliated with Nxivm, including one who reportedly used a surgical device to brand women. Inquiries into those two doctors are now underway, a spokesman for the governor said.

John Marzulli, a spokesman for the office of the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which is reportedly leading the inquiry, said he could neither confirm nor deny whether an investigation into Nxivm, which is based in Albany, was underway.

The developments follow an October article in The New York Times that disclosed how some women who joined a secret sorority within Nxivm were branded with a symbol that incorporated the initials of the group’s leader, Keith Raniere.

omen were also told that compromising information they had provided to join the sorority, such as naked photographs, would be publicly released if they disclosed its existence. The sorority revolved around “master-slave” relationships, former Nxivm members said, in which women faced punishments, including physical ones, for not following a master’s order.

Since the late 1990s, over 16,000 people have enrolled in courses offered by Nxivm (pronounced Nex-e-um), which the group says are designed to bring about greater self-fulfillment by eliminating psychological and emotional barriers.

Most participants take some workshops, like the group’s Executive Success Programs, and resume their lives. But other people have become drawn more deeply into Nxivm, giving up careers, friends and families to become devoted followers of Mr. Raniere. Critics and former members have described the group’s practices as cultlike.

Mr. Raniere, whose followers refer to him as “Vanguard,” urges women to follow near-starvation diets of 500 to 800 calories a day to achieve the body shape he finds appealing. Some women who have followed that diet have stopped menstruating and lost hair, according to former Nxivm members.

Mr. Raniere, 57, recently left the Albany area and traveled to Mexico, where Nxivm has hundreds of followers, to stay with an adherent in Monterrey. Former associates said Mr. Raniere had never previously gone to Mexico. A former Nxivm member in Mexico said that Mr. Raniere was seen recently in Monterrey, though his current whereabouts is not known.

Mr. Raniere and other Nxivm officials did not respond to requests for interviews or repeated emails. A lawyer who represents the group, Robert D. Crockett, also did not respond to written questions, including whether federal or state officials had contacted Nxivm.

In recent weeks, Nxivm’s leaders have posted statements on the website of Executive Success Programs, contending that the secret sorority was not connected to Nxivm and that Mr. Raniere was unaware of its practices.

Nxivm also stated that it has conducted an independent investigation of the sorority and determined that the women in it are healthy and happy.

”Our experts, a forensic psychiatrist of international repute, psychologists and ex-law enforcement say members of the sorority are thriving, healthy, happy, better off and haven’t been coerced,” Mr. Raniere said in a statement. The group did not name the experts.

Several former Nxivm members said that senior women in the group, including the daughter of its co-founder, were involved in the sorority and branding ceremonies. In addition, a text message sent by Mr. Raniere indicated that he was aware that women were being branded with a symbol that contained his initials.

“Not initially intended as my initials but they rearranged it slightly for tribute,” he wrote in that message. “(if it were abraham lincolns or bill gates initials no one would care.)”

Nxivm did not respond to requests for the report of its independent investigation or the names of the experts involved. But an actress, Catherine Oxenberg, said a well-known forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Park Dietz, recently contacted her and said that Nxivm had hired him to evaluate her 26-year-old daughter, India Oxenberg. .

In May, another doctor who examined Ms. Oxenberg’s daughter told her that the severe diet she was following had jeopardized her ability to have children. Ms. Oxenberg has tried without success to convince her daughter, who has followed Mr. Raniere for years, to leave Nxivm.

In response to written questions, Dr. Dietz said he has examined only one female participant in Nxivm, though he declined, citing issues of patient confidentiality, to confirm that it was Ms. Oxenberg.

He added that his initial examination of the woman had not found evidence of “brainwashing” and that she appeared “happy,” though troubled by what she described as false media reports about the group.

Dr. Dietz said that Nxivm had not hired him to examine matters related to the secret sorority, stating it was his understanding that the group “is not a Nxivm entity but rather a private sorority of women.”

In recent months, Nxivm has also attempted to hire lobbyists in Albany to represent it before politicians and regulators there. It has also sued or sought to bring criminal charges against former members.

For example, the Mexican branch of Nxivm recently sued a former member there who quit the organization after 13 years upon hearing about the secret sorority and the branding.

The man, Toni Zarattini, said that when he asked other Nxivm members in Mexico about those practices he was told to stop doing so. “There is no problem here, all is good, don’t ask more questions and don’t say a word to anyone else,” Mr. Zarattini said he was told.

Nxivm’s Mexican affiliate is headed by Emiliano Salinas, a son of that country’s former president. Its ranks include members of Mexico’s ruling elite, including a daughter of the publisher of one of the country’s biggest newspapers, Reforma. Several women who belong to the group in Mexico have traveled to Albany, where they were branded, two former Nxivm members said.

Asked about the practice, Mr. Salinas reiterated that the sorority was not affiliated with Nxivm and added that it was important to “respect the decisions” members make in their private lives.

He added the company had sued Mr. Zarattini because he and others had tried to extort Nxivm by asking for money in exchange for not revealing information, an assertion Mr. Zarattini has denied.

Earlier this month, a Mexican judge dismissed the lawsuit against Mr. Zarattini, saying it was based on inadequate evidence. A lawyer for Nxivm said the group has another action pending against him, but lawyers for Mr. Zarattini said they were unaware of it.

His friends “are in some ways kidnapped; their minds, their emotions have been taken for ransom,” said Mr. Zarattini, who was kidnapped and brutalized a decade ago by a drug cartel. “I can’t allow these secrets to keep going because that contributes in some way to that.”

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on December 22, 2017, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Federal Officials Are Said to Investigate Group Where Women Were Branded

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/nyregion/nxivm-women-branded-federal-investigation.html

 

Coverdale Avoids Debt With Bankruptcy in JZ Lawsuit

Racist Rant Video Lawsuit: Judge Rules Knight Failed to Prove Coverdale Caused Willful and Malicious Injury

Andrew Kollar 
Nisqually Valley News
December 21, 2017

Following five years of legal battles, JZ Knight is awarded nothing after Virginia Coverdale violated a non-disclosure agreement for leaking footage of a video that some characterize as a racist rant.

Knight is the head of the Yelm-area based Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment. She has what she calls “students” world wide. She claims to channel the 35,000-year-old Lemurian warlord Ramtha. Coverdale is a past student at RSE.

According to court documents, drama began to develop in 2007 or 2008 when Coverdale had an affair with Knight’s then-boyfriend James Flick. Upon hearing the news, Coverdale was expelled from the school but attended events some time later. In February, 2012 Knight allegedly channeled Ramtha in front of a gathering filled with RSE students and made statements referring to Coverdale as a “whore.”

Coverdale released video footage obtained from a third-party where Knight made what some claim were racist remarks towards Mexicans, Jews and Catholics.

“F--- God’s chosen people. I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now,” she said to RSE students in the videotape.

In the video, Knight also said Mexicans breed like rabbits and are poisonous, all gay men were once Catholic priests and organic farmers smell bad.

Coverdale posted the video to YouTube Oct. 18, 2012 and a lawsuit was filed by Knight 11 days later. The lawsuit was against Coverdale and anonymous ex-RSE students for a breach of contract and injunction under the terms of a confidentiality clause.

Ex-students created an online messaging board where they would discuss concerns about Knight and her school. Knight tried to discover who was a part of the group by having Michael Wright, legal liaison for RSE, contact members of the group through email for litigation against Coverdale, according to court documents. The judge found Wright to be disingenuous in his reasoning behind the efforts and found the emails to be intimidating and suppressive to those who oppose Knight and RSE.

Knight was successful in suing Coverdale for violating the non-disclosure agreement and was awarded over $600,000. Coverdale countered and filed for voluntary bankruptcy, causing her debt to be discharged.

When Coverdale filed for bankruptcy, Knight filed another lawsuit of “abuse of process” and tried to form an argument of “willful and malicious” injury. The court did not find Coverdale to have improper motive in her defense and Knight failed to prove Coverdale caused willful and malicious injury.

Coverdale declared victory following the court ruling.

“Finally a judge who saw it all for what it was,” Coverdale said on her Facebook page. “He has restored my faith in the system. I cannot thank enough all who supported me over the years. I know it was really hard for you to watch me getting beat up by a criminal.”

Wright disagreed.

“Ms. Coverdale filing for bankruptcy is hardly a victory,” Wright stated in an email to the Nisqually Valley News. “It is an admission that she got in way over her head and accumulated debts that she felt she was unable to repay at present or in the years ahead without intervention by the court. It is the financial equivalent of calling 911.”

http://www.yelmonline.com/news/article_9e740aca-e69d-11e7-9470-efe09f254e5a.html

The link between polygamy and war

The perils of polygamy
Plural marriage, bred of inequality, begets violence

The Economist
Christmas Specials
Dec 19th 2017| CAIRO, LAHORE AND WAU

IT IS a truth universally acknowledged, or at least widely accepted in South Sudan, that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of many wives. Paul Malong, South Sudan’s former army chief of staff, has more than 100—no one knows the exact number. A news website put it at 112 in February, after one of the youngest of them ran off to marry a teacher. The couple were said to be in hiding. To adapt Jane Austen again, we are all fools in love, but especially so if we cuckold a warlord in one of the world’s most violent countries.

Men in South Sudan typically marry as often as their wealth—often measured in cattle—will allow. Perhaps 40% of marriages are polygamous. “In [our] culture, the more family you have, the more people respect you,” says William, a young IT specialist in search of his second wife (his name, like some others in this article, has been changed). Having studied in America and come back to his home village, he finds that he is wealthy by local standards. So why be content with just one bride?

Few South Sudanese see the connection between these matrimonial customs and the country’s horrific civil war. If you ask them the reason for the violence, locals will blame tribalism, greedy politicians, weak institutions and perhaps the oil wealth which gives warlords something to fight over. All true, but not the whole story.

Wherever it is widely practised, polygamy (specifically polygyny, the taking of multiple wives) destabilises society, largely because it is a form of inequality which creates an urgent distress in the hearts, and loins, of young men. If a rich man has a Lamborghini, that does not mean that a poor man has to walk, for the supply of cars is not fixed. By contrast, every time a rich man takes an extra wife, another poor man must remain single. If the richest and most powerful 10% of men have, say, four wives each, the bottom 30% of men cannot marry. Young men will take desperate measures to avoid this state.

This is one of the reasons why the Arab Spring erupted, why the jihadists of Boko Haram and Islamic State were able to conquer swathes of Nigeria, Iraq and Syria, and why the polygamous parts of Indonesia and Haiti are so turbulent. Polygamous societies are bloodier, more likely to invade their neighbours and more prone to collapse than others are. The taking of multiple wives is a feature of life in all of the 20 most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index compiled by the Fund for Peace, an NGO (see chart).



Because polygamy is illegal in most rich countries, many Westerners underestimate how common it is. More than a third of women in West Africa are married to a man who has more than one wife. Plural marriages are plentiful in the Arab world, and fairly common in South-East Asia and a few parts of the Caribbean. The cultures involved are usually patrilineal: ie, the family is defined by the male bloodline. And they are patrilocal: wives join the husband’s family and leave their own behind. Marriages are often sealed by the payment of a brideprice from the groom’s family to the bride’s. This is supposed to compensate the bride’s family for the cost of raising her.

A few men attract multiple wives by being exceptionally charismatic, or by persuading others that they are holy. “There may be examples of [male] cult leaders who did not make use of their position to further their personal polygyny, but I cannot think of any,” notes David Barash of the University of Washington in “Out of Eden: The Surprising Consequences of Polygamy”. However, the most important enabler of the practice is not the unequal distribution of charm but the unequal distribution of wealth. Brideprice societies where wealth is unevenly distributed lend themselves to polygamy—which in turn inflates the price of brides, often to ruinous heights. In wretchedly poor Afghanistan, the cost of a wedding for a young man averages $12,000-$20,000.

By increasing the bride price, polygamy tends to raise the age at which young men get married; it takes a long time to save enough money. At the same time, it lowers the age at which women get married. All but the wealthiest families need to “sell” their daughters before they can afford to “buy” wives for their sons; they also want the wives they shell out for to be young and fertile. In South Sudan “a girl is called an old lady at age 20 because she cannot bear many children after that,” a local man told Marc Sommers of Boston University and Stephanie Schwartz of Columbia University. A tribal elder spelled out the maths of the situation. “When you have 10 daughters, each one will give you 30 cows, and they are all for [the father]. So then you have 300 cows.” If a patriarch sells his daughters at 15 and does not let his sons marry until they are 30, he has 15 years to enjoy the returns on the assets he gained from brideprice. That’s a lot of milk.

Valerie Hudson of Texas A&M University and Hilary Matfess of Yale have found that an inflated brideprice is a “critical” factor “predisposing young men to become involved in organised group violence for political purposes”. Terrorist groups know this, too. Muhammad Kasab, a Pakistani terrorist hanged for his role in the Mumbai attacks of 2008, said he joined Lashkar-e-Taiba, the jihadist aggressor, because it promised to pay for his siblings to get married. In Nigeria, Boko Haram arranges marriages for its recruits. The so-called Islamic State used to offer foreign recruits $1,500 towards a starter home and a free honeymoon in Raqqa. Radical Islamist groups in Egypt have also organised cheap marriages for members. It is not just in the next life that jihadists are promised virgins.

The deepest deprivation

In South Sudan, brideprices may be anything from 30 to 300 cows. “For young men, the acquisition of so many cattle through legitimate means is nearly impossible,” write Ms Hudson and Ms Matfess. The alternative is to steal a herd from the tribe next door. In a country awash with arms, such cattle raids are as bloody as they are frequent. “7 killed, 10 others wounded in cattle raid in Eastern Lakes,” reads a typical headline in This Day, a South Sudanese paper. The article describes how “armed youths from neighbouring communities” stole 58 cows, leaving seven people—and 38 cows—shot dead “in tragic crossfire”.

Thousands of South Sudanese are killed in cattle raids every year. “When you have cows, the first thing you must do is get a gun. If you don’t have a gun, people will take your cows,” says Jok, a 30-year-old cattle herder in Wau, a South Sudanese city. He is only carrying a machete, but he says his brothers have guns.

Jok loves cows. “They give you milk, and you can marry with them,” he smiles. He says he will get married this year, though he does not yet have enough cows and, judging by his ragged clothes, he does not have the money to buy them, either. He is vague as to how he will acquire the necessary ruminants. But one can’t help noticing that he is grazing his herd on land that has recently been ethnically cleansed. Dinkas like Jok walk around freely in Wau. Members of other tribes who used to live in the area huddle in camps for displaced people, guarded by UN peacekeepers.

The people in the camps all tell similar stories. The Dinkas came, dressed in blue, and attacked their homes, killing the men and stealing whatever they could carry away, including livestock and young women. “Many of my family were killed or raped,” says Saida, a village trader. “The attackers cut people’s heads off. All the young men have gone from our village now. Some have joined the rebels. Some fled to Sudan.” Saida’s husband escaped and is now with his other wife in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital. Saida is left tending five children. Asked why all this is happening, she bursts into tears.

“If you have a gun, you can get anything you want,” says Abdullah, a farmer who was driven off his land so that Dinka marauders could graze their cattle on it. “If a man with a gun says ‘I want to marry you’, you can’t say no,” says Akech, an aid worker. This is why adolescent boys hover on the edge of battles in South Sudan. When a fighter is killed, they rush over and steal his weapon so that they can become fighters, too.

Overall, polygamy is in retreat. However, its supporters are fighting to preserve or even extend it. Two-fifths of Kazakhstanis want to re-legalise the practice (it was banned by the Bolsheviks). In 2008 they were thwarted, at least temporarily, when a female MP amended a pro-polygamy bill to say that polyandry—the taking of multiple hubands—would be allowed as well; Muslim greybeards balked at that.

In the West polygamy is too rare to be socially destabilising. To some extent this is because it is serialised. Rich and powerful men regularly swap older wives for younger ones, thus monopolising the prime reproductive years of several women. But that allows a few wives, not a few dozen. The polygamous enclaves in America run by breakaway Mormon sects are highly unstable—the old men in charge expel large numbers of young men for trivial offences so they can marry lots of young women themselves. Nevertheless, some American campaigners argue that parallelised polygamy should be made legal. If the constitution demands that gay marriage be allowed (as the Supreme Court ruled in 2015), then surely it is unconstitutional to disallow plural marriage, they argue. “Group marriage is the next horizon of social liberalism,” writes Fredrik deBoer, an academic, in Politico, on the basis that long-term polyamorous relationships deserve as much legal protection as any others freely entered into.

Proponents of polygamy offer two main arguments beyond personal preference. One is that it is blessed in the Koran, which is true. The other is that it gives women a better chance of avoiding spinsterhood. Rania Hashem, a pro-polygamy campaigner in Egypt, claims that there is a shortage of men in her country. (There is not, but this is a common misconception among polygamists.) If more rich, educated Egyptian men take multiple wives, she says, this will make it easier for women to exercise their “right to have a husband”. Mona Abu Shanab, another Egyptian polygamy advocate, argues that polygamy is a sensible way to assuage male sexual frustration, a common cause of divorce. “Women after marriage just disregard their men [and] focus on their kids. They…always have an excuse for not engaging in intimate relations; they are always ‘tired’ or ‘sick’. This makes the men uncomfortable and drives them to…have a girlfriend.”

Some men see polygamy as a pragmatic response to female infertility. “My first wife was issueless,” says Gurmeet, a 65-year-old landlord in Lahore, Pakistan. At one point “she said our inability to have a child was because of my medical condition, not hers. I was enraged. I turned to religion and was guided [by God] to take a second wife.” He had been planning to try in-vitro fertilisation but God’s advice looked like a sounder investment. Initially, his first wife was “unwilling to share my affections with another woman”. But as time passed, she accepted the situation, says Gurmeet. He divided the house into two parts, so his wives could live separately. He divided his time equally between them. “It worked,” he says. The second wife had six children. But Gurmeet grumbles that she dressed less elegantly than his childless wife and did not keep her rooms as tidy.

Polygyny is hard work for men but good for women, says Gurmeet, because it is “undesirable” for a woman to be unmarried. Asked about polyandry, Gurmeet says, “I strongly disapprove. It is against nature for a woman to have multiple partners.” He elaborates: “As a young man I kept chickens. The cock has many hens, but he does not allow the females to mate with more than one partner. So it’s against natural law.”

Bad for brides

Polygamy “can work fine, provided you do justice to [all wives] equally,” says Amar, a Pakistani judge with two wives. “If you do not prefer any one over the others, no problem arises.” He admits that if two wives live together in the same home, “a natural rivalry” arises. Dividing property can also be complicated and leads to a lot of litigation.

But Amar thinks he gets it right. “My routine is: I spend one night with one wife and one night with the other. That way, nobody feels treated badly. And I give them exactly the same amount of money to spend: they get one credit card each. As a judge, it is [my] foremost duty to deliver justice.” One of his wives enters the room and offers to give her side of the story. Her husband banishes her, with visible irritation, before your correspondent can ask her anything.

Although women in a polygamous society find it relatively easy to get married, the quality of their marriages may not be high. Because such brides are often much younger, not to mention ill-educated, they find it hard to stand up to their husbands. And brideprice is not conducive to a relationship of equals.

In South Sudan, nearly 80% of people think it acceptable for a husband to beat his wife for such things as refusing sex, burning the dinner and so on. Divorce requires that the bride’s family repay the brideprice; they may thus insist that the abused woman stays with her husband no matter how badly he treats her.

Polygamy is also bad for children. A study of 240,000 children in 29 African countries found that, after controlling for other factors, those in polygamous families were more likely to die young. A study among the Dogon of Mali found that a child in a polygynous family was seven to 11 times more likely to die early than a child in a monogamous one. The father spends his time siring more children rather than looking after the ones he already has, Mr Barash explains. Also, according to the Dogon themselves, jealous co-wives sometimes poison each other’s offspring so that their own will inherit more.

For Akech, the South Sudanese aid worker, growing up in a polygamous family “wasn’t easy”. Her father, a former rebel commander, had eight wives and numerous concubines. She has 41 siblings that she knows of. When she was six, she used to fetch 20 litres of water each day for her mother to use to make siko, a form of moonshine. Sometimes her father would come round drunk, bang on the door and take her mother’s money to spend on another woman. Akech remembers her parents quarrelling a lot. That said, the extended family could pull together in an emergency. When her father was shot in the leg, his wives teamed up to bathe him, get him to hospital and pay his medical bills.

One day, when Akech was at university, her father asked her to come and see him. “We had never had a father-daughter bond, so I was excited,” she remembers. When she arrived, he introduced her to a fellow officer and ordered her to marry him. She was horrified. Her father’s friend was 65. Akech was 19.

She pretended to accept the proposal and said she just wanted to pop back to her college, which was in a neighbouring country, to collect her things. Her father agreed. She went back to college and stayed there.

That was more than a decade ago. Akech went on to complete university and find a good job. She recently bought her now-elderly father a house, partly to show him the value of her education, but also out of a residual sense of guilt at having once defied him. “In my culture, your parents are your earthly gods. I tried not to disappoint him,” she says. He has never said sorry for attempting to sell her.

This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline "The perils of polygamy"



https://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21732695-plural-marriage-bred-inequality-begets-violence-link-between-polygamy-and-war

The Nazi breeding and infanticide program you probably never knew about

German women carrying children of alleged aryan purity in a Lebensborn selection center in 1939.

Forced procreation, kidnapping, and execution of babies were all carried out in the name of a master race

Erin Blakemore

Timeline

December 18, 2017

It sounds like the stuff of dystopian fantasy: women encouraged to bear children to hand over to a totalitarian regime. But for thousands of Europeans, including ABBA singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad, such a program isn’t imaginary — it’s the story of their lives. Lyngstad and approximately 20,000 others are the Lebensborn, survivors of a Nazi breeding program designed to create racially “pure” children for the Third Reich.

Between 1935 and 1945, the secret program encouraged racially “fit” women to bear children for the Reich and protected babies thought to exemplify Nazi Germany’s Aryan ideals. Translated as “fount of life,” the Lebensborn program involved secret birthing facilities, hidden identities, and the theft of hundreds of thousands of children.

The program has its roots in World War I, which decimated Germany’s male population and contributed to a sharp decline in the country’s birth rates, which fell 43 percent between 1920 and 1932. This was a problem for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, which came into power in 1933 with plans to usher in a new world order, one in which Nordic and Germanic “Aryans” — whom they considered the most superior of the races — would rightfully reign supreme. In order to carry out Hitler’s vision of a completely Aryan Europe, the Nazis would need address the country’s genetic shortage.

SS head Heinrich Himmler was convinced that abortion was the primary reason for the falling birthrate, and in 1935 he decided to strike back. He decided to make abortions of racially “pure” children less appealing by offering an alternative to their mothers. Women who could prove that their unborn child would fit Nazi racial purity standards could give birth to the child in secret, comfortable facilities.

But there was a catch: Once the babies were born, they had to be relinquished to the SS. The SS would then educate them, indoctrinate them in Nazi ideology, and give them to elite families to raise.

At first, Himmler urged the SS and German military to have children with Aryan women both in and out of wedlock, but as the war progressed, that became an mandate. When casualties further decimated the German male population, Himmler ordered his officers to marry and reproduce. Women in occupied countries were also encouraged to have children with German soldiers.

As it moved eastward, the Third Reich expanded the Lebensborn program to include wholesale kidnapping. Children thought to be racially pure were taken from their parents and temporarily placed in Lebensborn homes before being adopted by German families. In Poland alone, between 100,000 and 200,000 children were kidnapped; those who failed racial purity tests in Germany were sent to orphanages or summarily executed.

At its height, the Lebensborn program included dozens of birth centers in Germany and the countries it occupied. Comfortably furnished with the possessions of deported Jews, these homes were quietly advertised as places where unwed mothers could escape social ostracism, ensuring a bright future for their children. In occupied territory, they were also a place to escape the fury of locals who faced starvation and oppression at the hands of the Germans and resented the special privileges granted to women pregnant with “desirable” children.

It’s still unclear exactly how many children were born in Lebensborn homes; current estimates range up to 20,000. However, that number may never be fully known due to secrecy on the part of mothers, incomplete and destroyed records, and new names given to children who were placed in Nazi families.

What is clear is the trauma suffered by children who were part of the program. After the war, Lebensborn became social outcasts both inside and outside of Germany. At the time, single, unmarried mothers were seen as social misfits, and in occupied countries, those who had engaged in sexual relationships with German soldiers were seen as traitors.

Take, for example, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, who was born in 1945 after her Norwegian mother had a relationship with a Nazi sergeant. Though Lyngstad was given her mother’s surname, she was branded a Tyskerbarnas, or German child, and her mother became an outcast. The family later emigrated to Sweden, where Lyngstad grew up lonely and isolated.

When she was 22, she entered and won a Swedish talent contest; by the time ABBA formed, she had multiple number one hits. After her time with ABBA, one of history’s most recognizable and best-selling pop groups, Lyngstad became a princess by marriage.

 

Parents pose with a child adopted from a Lebensborn eugenics center during WWII. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Other Lebensborn haven’t been so lucky. As The Guardian’s Kate Connolly notes, Lyngstad’s success would have been almost unthinkable if she had remained in Norway. Educational and employment opportunities were rare for Lebensborn; the government sent many children to different countries in an attempt to get rid of them, and many ended up in children’s homes after their mothers were shipped off to concentration camps. Norwegian Lebensborn also allege they were used in secret military trials of drugs like mescaline and LSD; however, those claims have never been officially recognized.

In 2002, Norway offered about $31,000 to Lebensborn to make amends for the government’s treatment of children, but the country has never officially apologized. No other country has offered to compensate victims, who endured shaming and trauma.

Those who know they were Lebensborn face a harsh reckoning with the knowledge that their fathers — and possibly their mothers — were devoted Nazis. But perhaps the most horrifying part of the program is the fact that so many people who were kidnapped or adopted under Lebensborn ideology will never know their true identities. The Nazis never managed to create an Aryan super race, but their quest for racial perfection, ironically, damaged a generation of the children they claimed to cherish.

https://timeline.com/the-nazi-breeding-and-infanticide-program-you-probably-never-knew-about-cc5cc7b82fdc

Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Fast Facts

CNN Library 
December 14, 2017

(CNN) -- Here is a look at the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a religious sect that broke away from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church, over the practice of polygamy.

2002-present - Warren Jeffs is the spiritual leader of the FLDS. His brother, Lyle Jeffs, overseas daily affairs.

2011 - Warren Jeffs is sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault of a child under age 14, and 20 years for the sexual assault of a child under age 17.

About FLDS:The FLDS has an estimated 10,000 members, most of whom live in Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah. The group also has followers near Eldorado, Texas, and in South Dakota, Colorado, Nevada, British Columbia, and Mexico.

The spiritual leader of the FLDS church is considered a prophet of God. He is the only person able to perform marriage and can punish followers by "reassigning" their wives and children to other men.

They believe in practicing polygamy.

Critics of the FLDS maintain that underage females are often forced into marriages with older men.

Eleven of 12 suspects from the 2008 raid on the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch have been tried and convicted on charges of child sexual assault, bigamy, or performing an unlawful marriage. The charges against Lloyd H. Barlow, the doctor indicted on three charges of failure to report child abuse, were dismissed.

Timeline:1890 - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church, suspends the practice of polygamy in order to gain statehood for Utah. Members who continue to practice polygamy are excommunicated.

1930s - Fundamentalists who practiced polygamy are excommunicated by the Mormon church and settle in Arizona.

July 26, 1953 - Thirty-six men, 86 women, and 263 children are either arrested or taken into custody during a pre-dawn raid in Arizona.- The men are placed on probation after promising to discontinue practicing polygamy.- Most of the women and children return to the ranch after two years of being wards of the state of Arizona.

November 1986 - FLDS prophet and leader LeRoy Johnson dies at age 98, after leading the FLDS since 1954.

1986-2002 - Rulon T. Jeffs rules as prophet of FLDS until his death at age 92.

September 8, 2002 - Rulon T. Jeffs' son, Warren Jeffs, becomes prophet.

May 2005 - A Utah court freezes the assets of the United Effort Plan trust, which encompasses all of the FLDS sect's land, houses and other assets. The trust, established in the 1940s, is worth more than $100 million. While the trust was established for the benefit of all FLDS members, critics charge that Warren Jeffs has used it to punish dissenters by kicking them out of their homes.

June 9-10, 2005 - Warren Jeffs is indicted in Mohave County, Arizona, on felony charges of arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a 28-year-old man, who was already married. A state warrant is issued for Jeffs' arrest, although he hasn't been seen in public for months.

2006 - In the ongoing dispute over the United Effort Plan trust, a judge strips the trust of its religious tenets and allows former church members to join as beneficiaries.

April 6, 2006 - Jeffs is charged in Utah as an accomplice to rape for performing a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and an adult man.

May 6, 2006 - The FBI places Jeffs on its top 10 most-wanted list of fugitives.

August 28, 2006 - Jeffs is arrested after being pulled over for a routine traffic stop near Las Vegas.

January 28, 2007 - Attempts to hang himself in his cell while awaiting trial.

September 25, 2007 - Jeffs is found guilty of two counts of rape by accomplice in Utah. He is sentenced to ten years to life in prison.

April 4-7, 2008 - In response to phone calls to a family violence hotline alleging abuse and rape, police raid the FLDS Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch in Eldorado, Texas.- 416 children are initially removed from the YFZ Ranch (The number of children removed rises to 468 after some of the mothers are determined to be younger than 18). About 130 women voluntarily leave the compound.

May 22, 2008 - The Texas 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin rules that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) illegally removed the children from their families.

May 29, 2008 - The Texas Supreme Court upholds the appellate court's ruling, 6-3.

July 22, 2008 - A Texas grand jury indicts Warren Jeffs and other FLDS members, on bigamy and sexual assault charges.

June 9, 2010 - An Arizona judge dismisses the four charges against Jeffs of being an accomplice to sexual conduct with a minor, due to his more serious pending charges in Texas.

July 27, 2010 - The Utah Supreme Court overturns Jeffs' two 2007 convictions by reason of erroneous jury instructions and orders a new trial.

November 30, 2010 - Jeffs is extradited from Utah to Texas to stand trial on two charges of sexual assault of a child and bigamy.

December 29, 2010 - Pleas of not guilty are entered on Jeffs' behalf. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of up to 99 years in prison.

July 25, 2011 - Trial begins in Texas on charges of sexual assault of a child. Jeffs is granted the request to represent himself.

August 4, 2011 - Jeffs is convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child under age 14 and sexual assault of a child under age 17.

August 9, 2011 - Jeffs is sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault of a child under age 14 and 20 years for sexual assault of a child under age 17.

January 2012 - Texas prison officials find Jeffs guilty of "a major disciplinary infraction" for violating policy by making conference calls to preach to his congregation.

October 9, 2012 - The bigamy charges against already-imprisoned Jeffs and three other sect members are dismissed. The motion states "in the interest of judicial economy, the State moves to dismiss the indictment."

November 28, 2012 - The Texas Attorney General's Office announces it has begun legal proceedings to seize the 1,600-acre YFZ Ranch near Eldorado, Texas.

April 17, 2014 - Officials confirm that Texas authorities have initiated the seizure of the YFZ Ranch.

February 23, 2016 - Eleven FLDS members, including Lyle Jeffs, are indicted. They are accused of fraud and money laundering.

March 7, 2016 - A federal jury finds that the city governments in Short Creek -- Hildale on the Utah side and Colorado City on the Arizona side -- were so corrupted by the FLDS that they discriminated against non-members by denying them police service, water hookups and other utilities. A federal judge has set aside four days in late October for testimony to help him decide what steps to take.

June 2016 - While under house arrest awaiting a fraud trial, it is discovered that Lyle Jeffs has removed his FBI tracking bracelet and fled.

June 14, 2017 - A tip leads to Jeffs' arrest in Yankton, South Dakota. He had been on the run for over a year.

August 4, 2017 - The court announces Jeffs' trial is postponed until October.

September 5, 2017 - Warren Jeffs is ordered to pay $16 million to a former child bride.

December 13, 2017 - Lyle Jeffs is sentenced to 57 months in federal prison for his role in food stamp fraud and escaping house arrest.

http://www.kitv.com/story/37072899/fundamentalist-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-fast-facts

'Nobody saved us': Man describes childhood in abusive 'cult'

Mitch Weiss And Holbrook Mohr
National Post
The Associated Press
December 13, 2017

SPINDALE, N.C. — Jamey Anderson vividly recalls being a skinny kid trembling on the floor of a dank, windowless storage room, waiting in terror for the next adult to open the door.

He was bruised and exhausted after being held down while a group of Word of Faith Fellowship congregants — including his mother and future stepfather — beat him with a wooden paddle, he said. As with most punishments at the secretive Christian church, Anderson said, it was prompted by some vague accusation: He had sin in his heart, or he had given in to the “unclean.” The attacks could last for hours until he confessed to something, anything, and cried out to Jesus, he said.

Sometimes even that wasn’t enough for redemption. Then, Anderson said, he would be locked in a dark place he called the “green room,” where he would bang his head against the brick wall, wanting to die.

“I just wanted it to end,” he recalled in a series of interviews with The Associated Press. “Of course, they told us that killing yourself is the unforgivable sin.”

Today, Anderson is a 29-year-old handsome, articulate attorney with a quick wit and a sarcastic side. At first glance, he seems well-adjusted. But he finds it hard to trust anyone.

He fled the secretive evangelical church when he was 18, but he is not free. More than a decade later, he still struggles to find his footing in a world that he doesn’t understand, having been raised, as he puts it, in a “cult.”

Night terrors jolt him awake. He fears people will think he’s delusional if he discusses his experiences in Word of Faith because the stories seem unbelievable. He missed a lifetime of pop culture, which makes it difficult for him to build connections with his peers.

Worst of all is the suffocating anguish that rushes in when he looks back on the beatings and isolation.

“There were times that mentally you just feel broken,” he said. “I mean, I was a kid — I couldn’t even process why this was happening to me.”

As part of an ongoing investigation into Word of Faith Fellowship, dozens of former congregants have told the AP that church members were regularly beaten in an effort to “purify” sinners — even children. But despite allegations of abuse spanning two decades, authorities have done little to intervene.

As a child, Anderson said, he was questioned by social services investigators in church co-founder Jane Whaley’s office, but was too afraid to tell the truth. In 2003, he said, the church forced him to sign an affidavit saying he had not been abused and that “church discipline” was “God’s mercy on my life.”

Anderson was about 4 years old when his mother joined Word of Faith. He describes his childhood as nothing short of hell.

Throughout his adolescence, he was singled out as a rebel and suffered some of the most brutal treatment in the church, nearly two dozen former congregants told the AP. Among his transgressions: making a funny face at a classmate.

His most traumatizing memories stem from the “green room,” a storage area named for the colour of its outdoor carpeting in a house his family shared with more than a dozen church members. The long stretches of isolation, the incessant hum of a dehumidifier and the pervasive smell of mildew almost drove him mad, he said.

“I remember thinking about it in that room, thinking, ‘I wish that someone cared. I wish that someone got me out of here,”‘ he recalled.

Former Word of Faith member Risa Pires said that when she visited her aunt, who lived with Anderson’s family, it seemed like “Jamey was always in that room.”

Pires, who left the church three years ago, said children were encouraged to tell on Anderson — and others — for the slightest perceived infractions in the church’s K-12 school, where she was in his class until the ninth grade.

Anderson would be pulled from the classroom and brought to another room where he would be “brutally paddled,” she said.

“You could hear the loud whacks through the wall,” she said. “You just sat there, hoping you weren’t next.”

After breaking with Word of Faith, Anderson lost all contact with his mother and brother, who remain in the church. He said Whaley even refused to let him attend the funeral of his grandfather, the most important male figure in his childhood, and that he was omitted from the list of family members in the obituary.

He is free and yet, he said, he cannot escape the church’s reach. It has branded him — permanently, he fears.

He is speaking out now, he said, because “I want to make sure that kids there, they know that there’s a better way to live. That people can love you for who you are. That they’re not going to mistreat you.”

Noell Tin, an attorney for Whaley, denied Anderson had been mistreated. “Mr. Anderson’s claims are disputed not only by Ms. Whaley, but also by members of the church,” he said.

To understand what Anderson lived through, it is necessary to understand Word of Faith. Founded in 1979 by Whaley, a former math teacher, and her husband, Sam, the church has grown to a congregation of nearly 750 people in rural Spindale with hundreds more followers extending to Brazil, Ghana and other countries.

Jane Whaley is the unquestioned leader, presenting herself as a prophet. Over the years, she has decreed ever more stringent rules, dictating how followers dress, where they live, who they marry and even when they have sex. Birthday celebrations, television and music are strictly off-limits.

A series of AP stories over the past year have documented widespread abuses within Word of Faith, prompting investigations in the U.S. and South America. In July, the AP revealed how the church mined its two branches in Brazil for a steady supply of young labourers who say they were forced to work for little or no pay in the U.S. at businesses owned by church leaders. In November, the AP documented how the sect used it power and influence to wrest children from poor single mothers.

Anderson said some of his earliest memories are of a church practice called “blasting,” in which congregants are shrieked at, sometimes for hours, to drive out devils. The sessions often graduate to slapping, punching and choking, according to more than 40 former members interviewed by the AP.

The members said Whaley quotes Acts 2:2 and other scriptures to justify the practice: “When suddenly there came a sound from heaven like the rushing of a violent tempest blast …”

From early childhood, Anderson always seemed to be in trouble, resulting in regular severe beatings, several former members said.

Anderson recounted a particularly brutal attack when he was about 9, when he said a female church member pinned his arms down while his mother sat on his legs and beat him with a paddle.

“It hit me in many other places than where it was supposed to. But they didn’t stop, because I needed a ‘breakthrough.’ The demons were ‘taking me over,’ as a kid. I was going to go to hell. And so they kept swinging the paddle, swinging the paddle,” he said.

Anderson’s mother, Patricia Dolan, did not respond to phone and text messages from the AP.

Former congregant Danielle Cordes said it was common for adults to hold children down by their arms and legs during attacks. It happened to her, too. “That was normal,” she said.

Forced child labour was another staple of life, several former members told the AP.

Anderson said his work details began around sixth grade — sometimes during school hours — on construction and real estate projects performed for church members. He recalled being diagnosed with asthma in middle school, a condition aggravated by the outdoor work, and being rebuked for “laziness and foolishness.”

Over the years, he said, the work increased. Anderson said he cleaned the Whaleys’ house, sometimes working until after midnight, then would return in the morning to mow their lawn. At times, he said, he was forced to work several nights a week, often doing remodeling work like painting and drywall repair. He said church leaders called it “volunteer work,” but that the punishment for refusing could be severe.

And though he thought his life couldn’t get any worse, it did.

When he was 14, Anderson said, Jane Whaley called a mandatory church meeting, on a weekday. Waiting in the sanctuary that day in early 2002, “we knew it couldn’t be good,” he said.

When Whaley arrived, she pointed to Anderson and a group of “troublemakers” she called the “five boys.” For two hours, he said, Whaley screamed and shamed them.

They were expected to fall to the floor and cry out to Jesus for forgiveness. Some did, but Anderson said he was too scared to move.

“That meant to Jane that my heart was hard. I was unreachable and that’s when she got very close to my face and called me everything she could think of, yelling at me at the top of her lungs,” he said.

Whaley placed Anderson and his four friends in isolation for a year, he said. Instead of attending class, he said they sat in a room watching videos of Whaley preaching and were confined to their homes after school and on weekends. Family members weren’t allowed to talk to them. When it was time to eat, someone would open the door and slide food in, “like in a prison,” Anderson said.

They were treated as if they did not exist — except when it came time for punishment and they were told they were full of “witchcraft and warfare,” he said.

Ministers constantly grilled them with questions that would devolve into the “sexual realm,” said Peter Cooper, another of the five, who called the ministers relentless. If the boys didn’t answer the “right way,” he said, they were blasted and beaten.

“After you’ve been told repeatedly that you’re unclean, you know it’s better to go ahead and admit it. You start confessing to things you didn’t think about. They destroy your will,” said Cooper, 28, who left the church in 2014.

To this day, Anderson said he can’t understand why the boys were singled out and considered so unworthy of love and acceptance.

“If there was ever a time I was broken, that was it,” he said, pushing back tears.

When Anderson walked away from Word of Faith, he left behind the only life he had ever known. He wanted “freedom,” even though he wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

Despite having an outgoing personality, his isolated upbringing makes it hard for him to fit in. If he’s hanging out with a group of peers and someone cites a scene from a movie or line from a song, he has no idea what they’re talking about. He doesn’t get their jokes. The loneliness can be crushing, he said.

It also remains difficult for him to maintain romantic relationships, crippled by the fear of questions about his past and embarrassment about his night terrors.

“I don’t trust anybody. With this thing, it can change the way people look at you,” Anderson said.

Still, he forges on, determined to build a happy life.

He graduated from law school and was hired by a respected firm in Charlotte, and his future — for a change — seemed bright. Then one night in October 2016, the police knocked on his apartment door and arrested him for trespassing on his brother’s property.

Nick Anderson had sworn to a magistrate judge that another church member spotted Jamey on his property. When presented with overwhelming evidence that Jamey was nowhere near his brother’s home that night, District Attorney Ted Bell dismissed the case. But Jamey said he was humiliated by having to explain to his neighbours and law firm that members of a “crazy church” had made false accusations against him.

Reached by phone, Nick Anderson declined to comment.

The district attorney said he considered charging Nick Anderson and the church member with intimidating a witness, but instead would “send them a strongly worded letter to not do it again.”

That provides little solace to Jamey. Like the skinny little kid locked away in the storage room anticipating the next beating, he still can’t escape the fear of what the church might do next.

Because he does not want any other child in Word of Faith to suffer like he says he suffered, he tells his story to “be the light that I used to see as a small child, that got extinguished when nobody saved us. . I don’t want to watch and see as other kids grow up and they start to leave and say, ‘Why didn’t someone come and help us? Why was our childhood destroyed, when you knew better?”‘

http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/nobody-saved-us-man-describes-childhood-in-abusive-cult

Ex-Polygamous Sect Leader Gets Nearly 5 Years in Fraud Case

Lyle Jeffs

A former polygamous sect leader has been sentenced to nearly five years for his role in a carrying out an elaborate food stamp fraud scheme and for escaping home confinement while awaiting trial.

By BRADY McCOMBS
U.S. News & World Report
December 13, 2017

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A former polygamous sect leader was sentenced Wednesday to nearly five years in prison for his role in a carrying out an elaborate food stamp fraud scheme and for escaping home confinement while awaiting trial.

U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart said during a hearing in Salt Lake City that Lyle Jeffs deserved the 57-month prison sentence because his behavior showed he doesn't respect U.S. laws and puts his allegiance to his brother and the sect's imprisoned prophet, Warren Jeffs, above everything else.

Stewart said Lyle Jeffs' religious beliefs provide context for his decision to follow his brother's orders, but don't justify the fact that he "cheated" taxpayers out of government funds.

Lyle Jeffs is lifelong member of the Mormon offshoot group based on the Utah-Arizona border known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

"Mr. Jeffs is an adult. He knows right from wrong," Stewart said.

Prosecutors accused Lyle Jeffs of running a scheme to divert some $11 million in food-stamp benefits to a communal storehouse and front companies.

Prosecutor Robert Lund asked for the maximum five-year sentence to send a message to Lyle Jeffs and other sect leaders that a "culture of corruption" in recent years won't be tolerated.

Lyle Jeffs was also ordered to pay $1 million in restitution. He had previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit benefits fraud and failure to appear.

Lyle Jeffs 57, spoke briefly and said he accepted responsibility for his mistakes and that he erred in not properly researching food stamp fraud laws.

"I do your honor humbly and respectfully say that I acknowledge my mistakes and decision-making," said Lyle Jeffs, his hands and ankles shackled. "I do humbly accept my responsibly for my actions. I don't blame anyone."

His attorney Kathryn Nester said the scheme wasn't malicious but meant to ensure everyone in the group had food to eat as part of the group's religious beliefs in communal living.

She said Lyle Jeffs has already suffered tremendously because he's been banned from the sect by his brother Warren Jeffs. That means he's lost his family, his job and his faith.

"If you're looking to humble him, I think we're there," Nester said.

Lyle Jeffs was first charged in February 2016 along with 10 other members of the sect in the fraud scheme. Cases against the others ended in plea deals without prison time or dismissed charges.

Lyle Jeffs compounded his legal problems when he became a fugitive after he slipped off an ankle monitoring device in in June of that year while out on supervised release. He was caught in South Dakota a year later after pawn shop workers spotted him and called police.

His brother Warren Jeffs is serving a life sentence in Texas for sexually assaulting girls he considered wives.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/utah/articles/2017-12-13/ex-polygamous-sect-leader-gets-nearly-5-years-in-fraud-case