Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer Read Free Book Online Page A

it was a good decision… They are prosecuting Tom based on nineteenth-century morals. Now, who cares who sleeps with who? They are all consenting adults. Right now, there are lesbians, homosexuals and single people living together all the time. There are married people living with others who they are not married to.”
    David Leavitt doesn’t consider Green’s plural marriages a matter of religious freedom or a harmless sexual relationship between consenting adults. Leavitt views Green as a pedophile, plain and simple. “He preyed on little girls who, from the cradle, knew no other life but polygamy,” Leavitt told Holly Mullen, a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, in August 2002. “He robbed them of their childhood. When I looked at this picture I realized it was about five women, all of them given in marriage by their mothers, all of them raised by their fathers to marry as children. They are victims of pedophiles, and they are victims of the state of Utah, which turned its back on polygamy for sixty years.”
    Leavitt’s case proved convincing in court. In August 2001, Green was convicted of four counts of bigamy and one charge of criminal non-support of his family. He was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $78,868 in restitution.
    A year later, Leavitt put Green on trial again, for the additional— and considerably more serious—charge of having sex with Linda Kunz when she was thirteen, a crime that could have put him in prison for life. This time around, however, Green got lucky: although he was found guilty of first-degree felony child rape, the judge gave him the minimum sentence, five years to life, to be served concurrently with his previous five-year sentence for bigamy.
    The relatively soft punishment riled many Utahans. Two days after Green was sentenced, an editorial in the Spectrum —the daily paper of St. George, Utah, an LDS stronghold less than forty miles from Colorado City—opined,
    Taxpayers and—most importantly—children lost during Tuesday’s sentencing hearing for now-infamous polygamist Tom Green…
    In some polygamist relationships, particularly those involving young girls, there is a bit of brainwashing that goes on both before and after the illegal “marriages.” Girls are led to believe that such a relationship is one way to salvation. Then, they typically are taken as wives by men twice their ages.
    Without the context of spiritual marriage, there would be no debate that these are acts of pedophilia…
    A man committed what amounts to statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl and, basically, won’t serve any time for it.
    David Leavitt was also dismayed by Green’s lenient sentence. “People in the state of Utah,” he proclaimed, “simply do not understand, and have not understood for fifty years, the devastating effect that the practice of polygamy has on young girls in our society.” But Leavitt went on to say that a change in how polygamy was regarded by Utahans had begun: “The ball is rolling. Time will demonstrate that this society will understand that the practice of polygamy is abusive to children, is abusive to women, is abusive to society.”
    Leavitt prevailed against Green in court, and he won plaudits from the LDS Church and establishment editorial writers. But like Arizona governor Howard Pyle, who was voted out of office for masterminding the Short Creek raid of 1953, Leavitt discovered that his anti-polygamy crusade was not popular with the people. In November 2002, the voters of Juab County responded to the conviction of Tom Green by giving the boot to prosecutor David Leavitt.
    Ever since the conviction of the Kingstons—even before Tom Green was first charged with bigamy—Mormon Fundamentalists have received support from the American Civil Liberties Union and gay-rights activists in advancing their claims of religious persecution. It has been an especially curious, and uncomfortable, coalition: FLDS doctrine proclaims that sodomy and