Can someone speak to this description babe has given. This sounds horrifically dysfunctional.
Of course nobody here knows anything about the FLDS, just as FLDS folks don't really follow the Jazz much. Trout was not ever anywhere near the FLDS. I grew up in St. George, not far from "Colorado City", and knew a lot of folks, or rather the kids of folks who for whatever reason made the turn to come back to mainstream life. Yes, I believe Warren Jeffs opportunistically abused boys, even calling them out from Sunday School classes, and yes it is horrifically dysfunctional.
You can google the subject as there are some books out on it now, and some groups trying to help the kids. Fully indoctrinated believers dismiss the criticisms as evil or malicious lies, or possibly as merely ignorant takes of high and holy practices, saying who are these outsiders who just don't know the ways of the Lord.
I frankly consider the "normalists" today who push for public acceptance of gay practices as perhaps not much different from the FLDS. Some "practitioners" of sexual practices that go wide of strictly heterosexual and strictly biologically- and structurally- "natural" sex competent for procreational purposes seem to get hung up on their particular fetishes to the extent that they want authoritative approval of their notions or ways. So how are GLBT ideologues any different from Warren Jeffs. The quest for authoritative sanction of weirdness is certainly a common link to the wildly diverse sexual ideologies.
Down there in the LA area, I have an acquaintance in a person who works in the criminal justice system who tries to help the abused kids from the FLDS mindset, while she deals with the pedophiles and others with what most people would call perverse ways.
Just a call for help here, Vinny. You speak of "horrifically dysfunctional" systems. Where are we going as a mainstream society with our Rainbow church, the United Methodist landmark in Hollywood? Just how do we parse the FLDS into that fabric? How far are we going to go towards accepting, as a legal rule, all kinds of sexual practices. Is sympathy for pedophilia our next step? Probably we are as a species naturally rather "hippy-oriented" with a wish to just do our own thing, whatever that is. But culty authority laying down the law can just go all wrong, whether its done small scale or on a global campaign.
