The Binary Circumstance

Just for fun I plotted this map of where my last 400 visitors came from. The Internet has really changed the world.

Evil requires the sanction of the victim. - Ayn Rand

In the life of polygamist Warren Jeffs, who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, you see more crimes against individuals committed in the name of religion. He was arrested yesterday.

HILDALE, Utah - In his two years as a fugitive, polygamist church leader Warren Jeffs never loosened his grip on his 10,000 congregants, and people close to the sect say his arrest this week won’t change that.

“I think there’s a structure in place that if Warren got caught they’ll still carry out his word, and they’ll figure out how to keep communicating with him,” said Andrew Chatwin, a former church member who moved back to Hildale last year.

Jeffs, 50, was caught by chance when a Cadillac Escalade in which he was riding was pulled over by the Nevada Highway Patrol for having a temporary Colorado license tag that was hard to read, FBI and Nevada Highway Patrol officials said.

When Trooper Eddie Dutchover walked up to the vehicle, something seemed amiss. Jeffs said the group had stayed in Las Vegas for a night, but they had too much luggage, Dutchover told The Associated Press. Jeffs also offered a contact lens receipt from Florida with the name John Findley as identification, the trooper said.

“Something was obviously wrong,” Dutchover said. “I even told him, ‘You’re making me nervous. Is everything OK?’”

“Once the FBI got there … he gave his full name, Warren Jeffs, and kind of gave a sigh,” the trooper said.

No weapons were found in the vehicle, but authorities said they found three wigs, 15 cell phones, letters to “President Warren Jeffs,” $54,000 in cash and $10,000 in gift cards.

Jeffs’ brother, Isaac Jeffs, who was driving, and one of Jeffs’ many wives were with him but released and will not be charged, said FBI Agent Steven Martinez in Las Vegas.

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard told KTAR-AM of Phoenix that Warren Jeffs’ arrest marks “the beginning of the end of … the tyrannical rule of a small group of people over the practically 10,000 followers of the FLDS sect.”

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, with congregants mostly in Hildale and neighboring Colorado City, Ariz., split from the mainstream Mormon Church when the Mormons disavowed polygamy more than 100 years ago.

Jeffs, who took over the renegade sect in 2002 after the death of his 98-year-old father, has been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list since May, charged in Utah and Arizona with felony sex crimes that include alleged arranged marriages between underage girls and older men.

Federal and state law enforcement agencies will now determine whether he goes first to Utah or Arizona, said Steve Sorenson, a federal prosecutor in Salt Lake City. Utah’s charges are more serious.

The insular communities Jeffs leads are expressing quiet sadness as they learn of the arrest, said Salt Lake City attorney Rod Parker, who has defended the FLDS church and some of its members in the past.

“I would say they were a little shocked,” Parker said. “Shocked to the point that they didn’t really even know how to respond.”

Polygamy has been practiced here for more than 100 years, and FLDS members have survived wave after wave of persecution, Parker said.

Jeff’s arrest, he said, “It’s just sort of reinforcing that this is their burden … and I think it may make them stronger and more insular as a group.”

In Hildale on Tuesday, women with plaited hair and long dresses hoed gardens under the late summer sun, a few kids rode bikes or played basketball at the local school and men in pickup trucks drove through town casting wary looks to outsiders.

“They’ll stay loyal,” Chatwin said. “Warren’s not dead yet.”

He said the arrest might provide a window of opportunity for some members who have silently questioned the state of the FLDS church. It also might shock fiercely loyal members who consider Jeffs an untouchable prophet of God.

“It will shake people’s testimony,” Chatwin said. “It will make some stronger and it will make some weaker.”

Jeffs’ capture is also unlikely to affect the work of Bruce Wisan, a Salt Lake City accountant appointed by a Utah judge last year to manage the church’s United Effort Plan Trust. The $100 million trust holds most of the property in Colorado City and Hildale and was placed under Wisan’s guardianship to prevent Jeffs and other church leaders from using its assets for personal gain.

In the past, the trust had been used to punish disobedient members by forcing them out of their homes.

“I don’t think it (Jeff’s arrest) will change much in town,” Wisan said. “Warren has controlled them from afar and I think he’ll still be able to control them from jail.”

Jon Krakauer who has researched this sect and wrote Under the Banner of Heaven was interviewed on ABC’s Good Morning America this morning. He noted that underage girls are forced into marriages with much older men. When the older men can have so many wives, they young boys become essentially useless unless they become passive slaves to what Jeffs and the other cult leaders want of them.

The result is that young boys are taught that they are unfit to breed. As teenages, sometimes as young as 13, they are driven miles out town and simply left by the side of the road and told never to come back.

Krakauer said that he felt the way to deal with the problems created by a polygamist cult like Jeff’s was to decriminalize polygamy. That would bring it out in the open and put the focus on other problems like child sexual abuse, parents discarding their children, and the tyranny of the sect leaders rule. In fact, Krakhauer stated, authorities in Utah have not prosecuted polygamy for years to that end, and he suggested that decriminalizing it would further help to bring the abuses out into the open.

I completely agree with him.

I dealt with this issue on a philosophical level in my book, Reality and the Taboo Against Truth, where I discussed the relationship between freedom and reality. I noted that they are linked. It is an objective reality that humans are born free of chains, and in giving them a political freedom that reflects that reality we allow individuals to reveal who they really are. Only then can we see the reality of who they are and make our own individual judgments about how to relate to them.

For news you can trust look forword to the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric.”

NEW YORK - No, Katie Couric didn’t suddenly lose 20 pounds. The incoming “CBS Evening News” anchor appears significantly thinner in a network promotional magazine photo thanks to digital airbrushing.

The touched-up photo of Couric dressed in a striped business suit appears on the inside of the September issue of Watch! which is distributed at CBS stations and on American Airlines flights.

CBS News President Sean McManus said he was “obviously surprised and disappointed when I heard about it.”

The original picture was snapped in May and was widely circulated to the media as an official photo of Couric.

Couric, 49, said she hadn’t known about the digitally reworked version until she saw the issue. The former NBC “Today” show host told the Daily News, “I liked the first picture better because there’s more of me to love.”

Gil Schwartz, executive vice president of communications for CBS Corp., said Wednesday in a phone interview the photo alteration was done by someone in the CBS photo department who “got a little zealous.”

But he dismissed any notion of heads rolling over the matter.

“I talked to my photo department, we had a discussion about it,” Schwartz said. “I think photo understands this is not something we’d do in the future.”

He said the photo department “services tens of thousands of photographs every year” for all parts of the company and that it “does a fantastic job.”

“The article that accompanies the picture is very responsible, very interesting,” he added.

Schwartz said the magazine has a circulation of over 400,000.

While expressing regret, McManus tried to make light of the matter.

“I’ve asked that three inches in height be added to my official CBS photo,” he quipped to the News.

Couric debuts in the anchor’s chair Sept. 5. CBS has spent millions on marketing to prepare viewers for her arrival.