Sect expels 1000 boys so men get more wives
June 15, 2005


Washington: Up to 1000 teenage boys have been separated from their
parents and thrown out of their communities by a polygamous sect to make
more young women available for older men, Utah state officials allege.

Many of the so-called "Lost Boys", some as young as 13, were dumped on
the side of the road in Arizona and Utah by leaders of the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and told
they will never see their families again or go to heaven.

The 10,000-strong sect, which broke away from the Mormon church in 1890
when the mainstream faith disavowed polygamy, believes a man must marry
at least three women to go to heaven. The sect appeared to be in turmoil
on Monday after its assets were frozen and a warrant was issued in
Arizona for the arrest of its authoritarian leader, Warren Jeffs, for
arranging a wedding between an under-age girl and a 28-year-old man who
was already married.

Jeffs is being sued by lawyers for six of the Lost Boys for purging
surplus males from the community, and by his nephew Brent Jeffs, who has
accused him of sexual abuse. Utah state officials believe Jeffs may be
in hiding in a sect compound near Eldorado, Texas, and they have warned
that cornering him could provoke a tragedy like the 1993 siege of the
Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas.

Jim Hill, an investigator in Utah's attorney-general's office, said on
Monday: "From everything I've been able to discern about Warren Jeffs,
he is someone who is capable of some very different things. Whether that
includes a mass suicide, I don't know. But I worry about it all the time."

Sect leaders have argued that the Lost Boys were exiled because they
were teenage delinquents who refused to keep the sect's rules. A state
investigator, Jim Hill, said their expulsion had more to do with the
ruthless sexual arithmetic of a polygamous sect.

"Obviously if you're going to have three to one or four to one female to
male marriages, you're going to run out of females," he said. "The way
of taking care of it is selectively casting out those you don't want to
be in the religion."

The Guardian