Sect expels 1000 boys so men get more wives
June 15, 2005
Washington: Up to 1000 teenage boys have been separated from their parents and thrown out of their communities by a polygamous sect to make more young women available for older men, Utah state officials allege.
Many of the so-called "Lost Boys", some as young as 13, were dumped on the side of the road in Arizona and Utah by leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and told they will never see their families again or go to heaven.
The 10,000-strong sect, which broke away from the Mormon church in 1890 when the mainstream faith disavowed polygamy, believes a man must marry at least three women to go to heaven. The sect appeared to be in turmoil on Monday after its assets were frozen and a warrant was issued in Arizona for the arrest of its authoritarian leader, Warren Jeffs, for arranging a wedding between an under-age girl and a 28-year-old man who was already married.
Jeffs is being sued by lawyers for six of the Lost Boys for purging surplus males from the community, and by his nephew Brent Jeffs, who has accused him of sexual abuse. Utah state officials believe Jeffs may be in hiding in a sect compound near Eldorado, Texas, and they have warned that cornering him could provoke a tragedy like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas.
Jim Hill, an investigator in Utah's attorney-general's office, said on Monday: "From everything I've been able to discern about Warren Jeffs, he is someone who is capable of some very different things. Whether that includes a mass suicide, I don't know. But I worry about it all the time."
Sect leaders have argued that the Lost Boys were exiled because they were teenage delinquents who refused to keep the sect's rules. A state investigator, Jim Hill, said their expulsion had more to do with the ruthless sexual arithmetic of a polygamous sect.
"Obviously if you're going to have three to one or four to one female to male marriages, you're going to run out of females," he said. "The way of taking care of it is selectively casting out those you don't want to be in the religion."