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

homosexuality are egregious crimes against God and nature, punishable by death—yet gays and polygamists have joined forces to keep the government out of the bedroom. This partnership is made even more incongruous by the fact that on the other side of the issue, radical feminists have allied themselves with the resolutely antifeminist LDS Church to lobby for aggressive prosecution of polygamists.*
    * In 1993, LDS Apostle Boyd K. Packer (currently second in line to become president and prophet of the Mormons) pronounced that the church faces three major threats: “the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement, and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals.” Over the years, the Mormon leadership has made numerous pronouncements about the “dangers” of the feminist movement and has excommunicated several outspoken feminists. But perhaps the greatest rift between Mormon general authorities and advocates for women’s rights occurred when the LDS Church actively and very effectively mobilized Mormons to vote as a bloc against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (despite the fact that a poll published in the church-owned Deseret News in 1974 showed that 63 percent of Utahans approved of the ERA). Most political analysts believe that had the LDS Church not taken such an aggressive position against the ERA, it would have been easily ratified by the required thirty-eight states, and would now be part of the U.S. Constitution.
    As they have been forced out of the shadows into the probing glare of the news media, polygamists continue to insist that they are simply trying to live in accordance with their deeply held, constitutionally protected beliefs. “What goes on in our homes here is nobody’s business,” asserts Sam Roundy, Colorado City’s polygamous police chief. “We’re not infringing on anybody. Don’t we have the right to practice our religion?”
    But polygamy is a crime in all fifty states, as well as in Canada, and police officers are sworn to uphold the law. This point became problematic for Chief Roundy on February 6, 2002, when Ruth Stubbs—the third wife of one of his police officers—fled Colorado City with her two children and appeared on the evening news in Phoenix, complaining that she had been beaten by her husband, Rodney Holm, and that polygamy is intrinsically abusive.
    Ruth, nineteen when she left Holm and visibly pregnant with her third child, had been pulled out of school following the sixth grade. Immediately after her sixteenth birthday, she was summoned to a meeting with Uncle Rulon and his son Warren Jeffs, who informed her that in twenty-four hours she would be marrying Officer Holm—a handsome, taciturn man who was exactly twice as old as she was. Ruth had wanted to marry someone else, a boy much closer to her own age. When she balked at becoming Holm’s plural wife and asked for some time to consider her options, her older sister Suzie Stubbs—one of the two women already married to the police officer—called Ruth “an asshole for doing that to Rod.” Suzie leaned hard on Ruth to become Holm’s third wife, until Ruth finally caved in and married him.
    “They told me who to marry,” Ruth asserted after she escaped from Colorado City. “I think women should have the right to say ‘yes or no’—to have the right to say what’s going on in their lives.” Not only had Holm broken the law by marrying three women, he had committed statutory rape—a felony in both Utah and Arizona—by having sexual intercourse with Ruth when she was sixteen.
    To date, the Colorado City police department has not disciplined Officer Holm, who is acting like the aggrieved party in this dispute. Assisted by UEP attorneys, Rodney Holm is presently trying to obtain legal custody of Ruth’s children so they can be “raised with FLDS values,” in the company of his other eighteen kids.
    In October 2002, the Utah attorney general’s office charged Holm with