by Marie Davis

Created on: April 27, 2008   Last Updated: April 28, 2008

Earlier this month, a scandal of such salacious proportions unfolded that it caught even our jaded national attention for a short time. Acting on a phone call made by a 16-year-old girl to a local family violence hotline, Texas authorities staged a week-long raid on the Yearning For Zion ranch, a polygamist compound surrounded mostly by desert and tumbleweeds. After finding incriminating evidence, like marriage beds (used to immediately consummate "spiritual marriages" between young teenage girls and much older men) conveniently located in the sect's temple, undergarments, and computer records, plus a lot of pregnant teenagers, over 400 minors were taken into custody. The kids are not sure if they'll ever see their parents again, the angry mothers claimed they were tricked into leaving their children, lawsuits are brewing, allegations of sexual and physical abuse are flying, and no one is sure just what will happen after all the DNA testing is completed.

The case is frightening no matter which side of the fence you inhabit. Here in Utah, many folks who aren't too far removed from the "good old days" of mainstream Mormon polygamy, are muttering darkly about violations of religious freedom, government persecution of fringe groups, and the trauma felt as families were suddenly ripped apart by the very officials supposedly sworn to protect and defend them. On the other side of that log fence, we have Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who appeared on NBC's TODAY show last week and loudly decried the polygamist group as being "North America's Taliban," treating women as absolute property and denying them basic rights like the right to not get married at age 14.

The truly scary part, however, is not the thorny clash between the government's duty to protect our religious freedom and our basic human rights at the same time, nor the thin line between protection of the minors and persecution of the adults. It's the fact that, in a country we consider socially and spiritually enlightened- modern, even- that this could be happening at all. Surprisingly, in a land that prides itself on the complete independence of its denizens, religion is one area where people seem unbelievably willing to hand over control of their spiritual welfare, their lifestyle, and even their fundamental right to self-determination, to their chosen authority figure. Warren Jeffs, the "prophet" of the FLDS Church, languishes in a jail cell, but that doesn't alter the degree of control he exercises

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