Toddlers & Tiaras = Warren Jeffs

[Jessica]

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7001 ... etter.html I found this article in the Deseret News today. I tried to leave a comment but it got rejected because I put the word "CHOICE" in capitals and DN doesn't like capslock. Anyway, am I overreacting or is the person who wrote the article really trying to make the outrageous claim that a mom taking her toddler to a beauty pageant or an ADULT woman dating Charlie Sheen or Hugh Heffner by CHOICE is the same as a brainwashed 12-year-old being forced into a marriage to a 55-year-old?!

 

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this article because I've been stewing over it all day! Yeah, I don't like beauty pageants either and I think little girls are oversexualized too, but there is NO WAY that it's similar to what is going on with Warren Jeffs/the FLDS!

[gustava]

BE outraged!

To be sure, there is a big difference between the physical abuse committed by Jeffs and what can only be described as the mental and emotional abuse of a popular culture. But they are differences of degrees along the same sliding scale.

NONONO....It isn't difference of degree along the same scale: Jeffs acted in the name of GOD. His behavior has NO relationship to popular culture.

The article is interesting because DN is the UNOFFICIAL mouthpiece of the mainstream LDS church. I wonder why the church would support this softpedaling of Jeff's perversion.

[debrand]

Sexually abusive, megalomaniac, cult leaders have always existed. Modern culture did not create Jeffs.

I am not defending shows like Toddlers and Tiaras, or the sexualization of young girls but those are seperate issues from Warren Jeffs and FLDS.

A commentor, goitalone, compared the adult women who live voluntarily with Hefner with the 12 year old rape victims. What the hell? Does that person not realize that an adult can make a choice, even a bad one, while a child can not make the same choice. Women are not children and it distrubs me that the poster doesn't understand that.

For all the hand wringing that the posters are doing about the evil of modern culture, Warren Jeffs acts might very well have been ignored fifty years ago.

[ADoyle90815]

Sexual predators who become cult leaders are nothing new, as they've been around as long as there has been religion. As far as Hefner's girlfriends, they were adults when they chose to move in with him.

Those girls that Jeffs raped after "marrying" them weren't given a choice as their families were cult followers. While they send their daughters to be "married to men old enough to be their fathers, they banish their teenage boys so they don't become competition with the cult leaders. The girls themselves are raised from birth with the idea that eventually, they would become "sister wives" when God through the leader tells them who to marry. If the mainstream LDS church wanted to further distance themselves from the FLDS and other polygamist cults, they would remove Section 132 from their Doctrine and Covenants. They would require divorced men to get the temple "sealing" canceled first before they could remarry in the temple.