The FLDS Mess

The Engineer is addicted to the news. From the time he gets home until the time he turns off the lights the TV is on, playing the news. Since we live in Utah, the El Dorado FLDS mess has been playing on the news nightly and occupying the front page of the newspaper.

Last week, a group of FLDS women were on CNN on the Larry King Show. It was heart wrenching to listen to them. Not, as I'm sure the FLDS men were hoping, because their children had been taken, but rather because it looked and sounded like their minds and souls had been stolen.

If you keep up with the news at all, you've seen images of them, all dressed in pastel shirtwaist dresses with leg o' mutton sleeves, their hair pompadoured and french braided. They walk slightly hunched, showing their submission to the world.

All of them seem to speak in a childlike half whisper. The women interviewed on Larry King refused to deviate from their scripted answers regardless of what questions they were asked. They must have been instructed not to say anything about the FLDS men because when they were asked about their husbands, they would respond, "The women need their children back. Our children are crying. We are good mothers."

Women who have escaped the FLDS and boys who have been cast out are pretty much universal in their stories of isolation from the outside world, of lack of education and the requirement of absolute obedience to the men in power. It's hard to believe that such subjugation can take place in this country.

I wish that scores of women could proudly walk into that compound in El Dorado with backs straight and heads high, speaking in loud confident voices to liberate the brainwashed women and children.

And I'd like to empty the wallets and bank accounts of the dehumanizing elder men to pay for unbrainwashing their chattel women and children and integrating them into the modern world.

If it was even possible.