Jobless, he moved his family into a moldy trailer on the edge of town and cared for his wife and children, all of whom still belonged to Church. But she did have a very particular skill set that was well-suited for Hildale. Worse: the new leader was a woman. Donia Jessop beat incumbent mayor Phillip Barlow in Tuesday’s election. “Every day something new would crop up.” (Sometime those fires were literal: since the DOJ decision, there have been more than two dozen human-started tire fires. But, we don’t want to get into all that in this blog post. Most of the town sat in the dry, unpopulated expanse known as the Arizona Strip, cut off in the north by a range of steep cliffs, and in the south by the Grand Canyon. Even after he went to prison, Jeffs’ control over the town didn’t slack. (“When you’re running a department that has done things in the past that are strange,” board manager Johnson said, “applying the standard to people now feels strange.”) But Johnson was also new to town, on the job barely a month, without much context. He moved to Short Creek in the mid-1990s to help his father, Rulon Jeffs, then leader of the Fundamentalist Church, convert the town from a small fringe community into an American banana republic. “The words matter to us,” one official assured the crowd, “because we intend to channel every decision through them.” The statements allowed the council to write something that will, as they put it, “underpin everything that [they] do.” If applied properly, they could give the city something else to echo, something other than Warren Jeffs. With a margin of 48 votes, Donia Jessop became the first female mayor, not only in Hildale, but in the entire county. Then, in November, Jessop took the election with 129 votes. “My religion teaches me that I should not follow a woman for a leader in a public or family capacity.” (“That was why everyone quit,” Mayor Jessop said. Jim Dalrymple II BuzzFeed News Reporter. Along the length of the chimney, brick letters spell out Warren’s catchphrase: Pray and Obey. The officials wrote their resignation notices just after Mayor Jessop dropped the appeal of the DOJ case. But inequality in Hildale is not like inequality anywhere else in the United States, where disparity usually stems from an unbalanced capitalist system. The nation was gearing up for a presidential election, and for the first time, the state of Utah was holding a caucus instead of a primary. “This was Warren’s house,” he said. The mayors, council members, and city staffs were beholden to the Church, with ears cocked to Jeffs’ jail cell. Polygamists on Utah-Arizona Border Under Scrutiny For years, isolation kept the law away from the polygamous towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah. When Rulon finally died, Warren held a bizarre, unprecedented, quasi-coronation: placing a portrait of his father on a chair, then sitting in it himself, and declaring, mystically, to the crowd, “Father is still with us!” As his father incarnate, Jeffs then wedded his dad’s 20-some surviving wives, effectively marrying his stepmothers. But as Hildale begins to reclaim autonomy, one of the longest-lasting impacts of Jeffs’ reign isn’t just in the architecture or the emotional injuries, it’s in the founding values of the town, that Jeffs, just some outsider from Sacramento, effectively turned upside down. The caucus indicated people were itching to make change. She can approach Church members with understanding, because she used to number among their most loyal. The former mayor got 81. Polygamy is not the same as polyamory. Most cited family problems or other obligations. One guy went full Santa. Doran and Brian Jessop were vestiges of the old system, and after months of obstruction and playing hooky from council meetings, both moved on—one by choice, the other only after he refused to show up—paving the way for a fully democratic council. Utah at the same time has a law against cohabitation, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah is opposing to that. Even after the Department of Justice appointed monitors to oversee government activity in Hildale and Colorado City, change was still slow. After his father was incapacitated by a stroke in the late ’90s, Jeffs simply stepped in and took over his duties. Any kind of growth or repair, the mayor said no.”. Behind the bureaucratic jargon, the council was asking a quietly monumental question: what, exactly, should our city be? PHOENIX (AP) — A jury verdict against two polygamous towns in Arizona and Utah for discriminating against nonbelievers now puts the future of the communities in the hands of a judge who will have to remedy the sweeping civil rights violations. But the Church would not let them testify. She also had “a natural ability to bring people together,” and a thick skin (“I tell people I don't have one ounce of fat on my body,” she said. She started overhauling city operations, breaking with tradition and the church. Polygamy (or more accurately, Polygyny) was instituted among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, Mormons) in the early 1840s. When they took the stage, Jessop leaned over and said, “Those are my nephews—well, two of them aren’t.” The other two were the sons of Jacob Jessop, the former Utility Board Chairman, the man who quit when the mayor took office, saying he couldn’t serve a woman. There is also a reality TV show available on TLC since 2010 called Sister Wives that is going to deal with the polygamy fundamentalist Mormon family where everything is going to happen in the modern day Utah. A group of pro-polygamy protesters rally at the Utah state Capitol on February 10, 2017. In 2014, after he was exiled for a long list of alleged crimes (“everything from murder to adultery to sinning against the Holy Ghost... I’ve forgotten them all because they were bullshit...”), Barlow’s wife suffered a traumatic stroke, rendering her incapable of critical decision making, according to the state. A governor once described the town as the “most isolated of all Arizona communities.”. “This song,” he told the crowd, wryly, “is for everyone who didn’t come tonight.” Then they launched into their cover of “The Grinch.”. In 1890, a Fundamentalist sect split off from the mainstream Mormon congregation. One Tuesday, the tank owners, a married couple named Debbie and Lee Steed, were cooking chicken fajitas, until, suddenly, they weren’t. Furious, the Steeds responded with the diplomacy of an unhinged Yelp reviewer. By Harmeet Kaur, CNN. The term came out of a statewide push, brought on by the Utah lieutenant governor, to factor intergenerational trauma—things like poverty, abuse, food insecurity, and for some, a century of polygamist rule—into all government activity. The U.S. Department of Justice says the towns denied water, police services, and housing to non-believers. For example there is “Big Love” a series featured on HBO, where the main characters are part of a polygamous family from Utah, living in the first decade of the 21st century. They hung a block-long banner on the area’s main street, where it stayed for some two weeks, announcing, in towering scarlet letters: “Harrison Johnson is a THIEF.”. He aggressively married teen girls, impregnating them in what he called “heavenly sessions,” and held many prisoner in various homes around Hildale or on his custom-built Texas ranch (a structure so big, its floors were measured in acres, according to one townsperson who helped build it). Not long after the tank dust settled, the City Council started buzzing about a new, jargony idea: the “trauma-informed state.” It seemed like something out of a brochure, and in a sense it was. The authorities carted off most men and several women. It was a cold night and already pitch black, but some 20 citizens turned out. There were also problems with voting. The narrow sliver that spilled over into Utah took a different title: Hildale. When she decided to run for mayor, it wasn’t certain Jessop had a shot. This past December, a few months after the tank debacle, the Hildale city council met at the town hall, a brick, ’60s-era prefab on the west side, for the final meeting of Jessop’s first year in office. Centennial Park is a remote town just over the Utah border and it is home to 1,500 fundamentalist Mormons. At one point, the lead singer grabbed the mic. But not everyone was excited. The meetings took place in the bishop’s house. Most polygamist groups that receive publicity in North America and the United Kingdom are heterosexual, religious based organizations that promote marriage between an older male and multiple younger … A tent city sprung up on the town’s outer limits, populated by “visiting” Fundamentalists. In most places, this kind of dispute wouldn’t amount to much more than a minor bureaucratic annoyance. Each edit occasioned its own back-and-forth. They’re thinking: Community center. When all the changes were made, the council unanimously voted the text into effect. Pedestrians trickled in, looking confused. ), Rancor, hostility, and partisanship were such common themes in the town’s daily life, it became a kind of joke. Some never saw them again. Polygamy in Utah is covered by these articles: Polygamy in North America; Current state of polygamy in the Latter Day Saint movement This page was last edited on 13 July 2020, at 19:03 (UTC). As an adult, Jeffs, a soft-spoken, stick-bug-looking guy, worked as a school principal for decades (where he allegedly molested many students, according to Sam Brower’s extensive investigation into Jeffs, Prophet’s Prey). Smith himself had married uncounted dozens of “spiritual wives,” although the practice was not widespread among Mormons until 1852, eight years after Smith was killed by a mob over his appetite for 14-year-olds. Back in the year 1852, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-days Saints, which was led by Brigham Young, felt secure enough to announce to the world the fact that they were practicing polygamy in Utah. But last year, Hildale underwent a sea change. Image: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer/Associated Press She had one moment of rebellion—eloping with her high-school boyfriend at age 17, rather than waiting for an arranged marriage. Polygamy and bigamy are illegal in Utah, but the practice is more or less allowed, with the state rarely prosecuting polygamists unless crimes are being conducted. The positions were held by clergy. I try to say: What can I do for you now? He started a religion and almost immediately spawned a subculture, one whose faith, for better or for worse, the people of Hildale are still hashing out. As one official put it: “In Hildale, every single, solitary action is colored by the conflict.” A city councilman phrased it differently: “It’s all tied up, pardon my language, in the same old shit.”. In 1890, a Fundamentalist sect split off from the mainstream Mormon congregation. “We’re all alone out here. Apostolic United Brethren (The Allred Group) The group, headed by 85-year-old Owen Allred, is centered in Bluffdale, south of Salt Lake City. Take, for example, a Christmas concert, hosted in an event center on the Arizona side of town, a few days after the December city council meeting. I started to sweat,” she said. Polygamous towns in Arizona, Utah discriminated against non-believers, jury says The compound built for polygamist leader Warren Jeffs in Hildale, Utah. The revelation, written in Joseph Smith’s second sacred text, Doctrines & Covenants, is a flowery 66-paragraph treatise, with more than one verily, that gets to the gist around graf 61: “If any man espouse a virgin and desire to espouse … “The energy here was just very, very dark,” she said. The pair were relatives—not uncommon in a small town where most descend from the same few families. “They think I’ve gone off the deep end,” she told me. The new mayor embraced the DOJ decision. “I couldn’t quite catch my breath.” (It was like that until the fifth time she came back). She can call Jeffs “Uncle Warren,” the Fundamentalist epithet of respect, or cite his doctrine. When she drove over the hill into town, she started to hyperventilate. The schism concerned a chunk of church doctrine called “Section 132,” which was a little more salacious than its sounds. Bigamy is no longer a felony in Utah. They want to revamp the building. “It feels like we’re abandoned,” they told her. “My blood ran cold. We need community.”, In 2016, Jessop moved back to help build it. “They asked everyone: Who is willing to put their hat in the ring?”, In some ways, Donia Jessop was an unlikely candidate to take on the Church: For decades she swore she’d never leave it. Under Jeffs’ watch, Short Creek devolved into a kind of feudal stratification. "Utah law is really absurd, because if a man were to live with another woman besides his wife and then call her a wife and support her children, that's criminal and they can get zero to five years for that. The Community Alliance began challenging registrations en masse; one candidate told me her campaign alone reported 111 out-of-district voters. In one infamous Church meeting, Jeffs called out the names of 20 prominent polygamist men, ordered them to stand before the entire congregation, accused them of fire-and-brimstone-sounding Biblical crimes, from “sinning against the Holy Ghost” to “denying the divinity of Christ,” banished them to “repent from afar,” and redistributed their wives like chattel. For years, handling emergencies was his job: first as a paramedic, then in search and rescue. We have to build the systems around it that it’s never had.”. As a kid, she lived the Fundamentalist Short Creek life, and liked it. The audience bounced around ideas and edits for the better part of an hour. As it turned out, the whole propane tank ordeal stemmed from a technical legal detail. The morning after Hildale officials drafted their new mission statement, councilman Lawrence Barlow gave me a windshield tour of town, pointing out major landmarks. At the city council meeting that month, locals poured in and seethed over due process, private property, bully tactics, government overreach, and the tiny technicalities of utility contract law. The Utah US state is very popular for polygamy thanks to the fact that they have a lot of history dating back few hundreds of years ago when polygamy was widely spread across the territory where Utah is now situated. In total, 263 minors were separated from their families. In Hildale, being “trauma-informed,” is a kind of oxymoronic move—disavowing the past, without degrading it. Jeffs’ influence didn’t end with his arrest in 2006. As with all things in Hildale, where propane tank-type wars are commonplace, each agenda item arrived with some echo of the town’s past. In September, the desert town of Hildale, a community of 2,000 or so, squished along Utah’s southern border, erupted into an amazingly ferocious battle, centered around a propane tank. 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