Ascent of Women (10 page)

A power struggle had broken out in 2002, when the U.S.-based leader of the cult, Rulon Jeffs, died. His son Warren presumed he’d succeed his father, but Winston Blackmore, the bishop of Bountiful, felt that role was rightfully his. By the time I got there in 2004 the pressure within the community was explosive. One woman living inside the colony said, “It could boil over—it could get perilous here.” Women outside the colony rallied to rescue those who wanted to leave and were determined to use the leadership chaos to expose the sect’s seamy truths.

Linda Price, from the neighbouring town of Creston, told me, “It was knowing that young girls are having babies against their will that moved me to action.” She and other neighbours already had been questioning their town’s live-and-let-live philosophy toward Bountiful, but Winston Blackmore was wealthy, with half a dozen of his businesses providing income for the town—a good reason not to rock the boat. Then Price’s own adult daughters called her after seeing the CBC documentary. “How can you live in a community where women are being abused?” they asked her. “How can Dad play hockey with those men?”

The women in Creston organized a province-wide protest, as well as a secret safe house where the women and girls of Bountiful
could find shelter and advice. It operated like an underground railway, shuttling the frightened souls of Bountiful to a world they’d never known—a world that their church claimed would lead them to being burned alive with the non-believers. But mostly the Creston women were working on getting criminal charges laid.

When I spoke to Winston Blackmore on the phone, he wouldn’t confirm that he had twenty-eight wives and eighty-some children, but his followers claimed that was the case. Basing their gospel on a literal interpretation of the Book of Mormon, members of the FLDS believe the only way to survive the apocalypse is through plural marriage. So a man should gather as many wives as he can—preferably the prettiest, smartest and youngest women available—and produce an abundance of children.

Although most men in the sect have only three or four wives to service in the name of God, those with more require breeding charts to record each woman’s ovulation date. This way, a wife knows who is getting bedded by her shared husband on which night. It’s hard to imagine a thirteen-, fourteen- or fifteen-year-old child having her cycle marked on such a chart. Yet some of the girls believe that to carry the child of a man like Blackmore is a guarantee of admittance to heaven.

Blackmore’s religious Waterloo came about because of another extreme: the Blood Atonement law. Vanessa Rohbock, a young woman from Colorado City, had been found guilty of sinning in the eyes of the American sect leader Warren Jeffs, and before she could be made to “atone” she fled to Canada, where she was sheltered by Blackmore. “The blood thing has nothing to do with the fundamentals of our religion,” Blackmore said. “The girl is [now] safe and sound and happily married to a fine man.” His actions helped Rohbock, but they were seen by Jeffs as
blasphemy. He stormed into Bountiful and tried to discredit Blackmore in front of the Canadian followers. Some chose to obey Jeffs, but others defied him. Ever since Jeffs’s father, the revered ninety-three-year-old Rulon, had died, the battle for the souls and the million-dollar property at Bountiful was on.

Although he refused to meet me in person, Blackmore had consented to several e-mail exchanges and a few phone calls. He claimed that he didn’t know what Warren Jeffs was up to: “He has several people convinced that he talks with his [dead] father, our past presidents and God on a daily basis. A gigantic claim, but one that holds the imagination of the masses.” (Blackmore’s steadfast followers also claimed he talked to God.) Regarding the split in the colony at Bountiful, Blackmore said that before the leadership struggle began, a woman would never speak out against her husband or family. “Today, every woman among them would leave her husband and hate him in a minute if Warren directed that she do so. Children spy on parents and without notice it is over for their families.”

Barry Beyerstein, a cult expert at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, told me that the power struggle in Bountiful wasn’t unusual. “Cults tend to implode due to internal contradictions, jealousies, slights,” he explained. “But when they tie that to the end of the world being near, danger is also near.” His international research shows that when cults reach that stage, most split and start new and smaller colonies. Others turn into Waco and Jonestown and self-destruct with a vengeance.

Preventing the consequences of hyper-religious behaviour means using the law. In the case of the religious sect at Bountiful, the law is clear: it is illegal to practice polygamy in Canada. Cross-border trafficking in girls is also illegal—but it’s happening in
order to broaden the gene pool in Bountiful and its sister colony in Colorado City. A man setting up each of his polygamous wives as single mothers so they can get a child tax benefit for all their children is also illegal, but it’s a money-making scheme for Bountiful.

Audrey Vance, who has lived in Creston for forty-two years, was also moved after seeing Winston Blackmore’s first wife, Jane, on the
fifth estate
documentary. “She had the courage to go on national TV and tell her story about being the [community’s] midwife, about listening to a fifteen-year-old girl crying while she delivered her baby because she didn’t want to be married or to be pregnant.” The fifteen-year-old was the daughter of one of Blackmore’s other wives. As Jane recounted on the documentary, when she raised her concerns with her husband, Blackmore said, “Well, Mother, I want you to mind your own business because you are not the bishop.”

After Jane Blackmore’s stunning account of underage sex, coercion and sexual abuse, all the people I talked to, including Jane, told me they presumed the attorney general would subpoena the birth records she’d kept as a midwife. But her phone never rang, and a search warrant was never served.

Since the justice system continued to ignore the polygamy issue, the women in Creston decided to hook their protest to the Education Act instead. They sent letters to the editors of major B.C. newspapers claiming that the Bountiful Elementary Secondary School (BESS) was receiving an annual government grant of $460,826. Vance, a former school trustee in Creston, wanted to know why a polygamist school funded with taxpayers’ money was left alone to teach a cult lifestyle to school-age children.

Vance’s information came from women inside Bountiful, who could not be named for fear of repercussions. They had told her
that the department of education routinely gave the school several weeks’ notice before an inspection—time enough for the school staff to remove all the white-supremacist slogans that had been posted on the classroom walls. Inspectors apparently were fooled, but Vance thinks they should have been wise to the fact that the teachers were never able to explain why the school had hardly any graduates. The reason, of course, was that the girls left school to be married, and many of the boys were sent away. Only a few students were allowed to finish high school. But that information was never shared with inspectors, and it seems they never did ask for it.

The new complaint from the women of Creston didn’t spark any action, either. In the meantime, then attorney general Geoff Plant explained to me somewhat impatiently, “Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, they are protected by Freedom of Religion. I cannot prosecute because it could result in a Charter challenge.”

One of the authors of the gender-equality guarantee in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the lawyer Marilou McPhedran, saw this as “flimsy reasoning from a high-ranking representative of the people in a free and democratic society.” She was surprised that Plant would justify his inaction because of speculation that the Criminal Code prohibition of polygamy might be trumped by the Charter’s guarantee of freedom of religion. “There are no absolute rights or freedoms in Canada,” she explained. She pointed to the Supreme Court case of the Jehovah’s Witness family who refused a blood transfusion for their sick child—their right to freedom of religion was overruled in favour of the safety and health of the child.

“In the Bountiful case,” said McPhedran, “the excuse that women and girls have consented to their treatment would likely
collapse when measured with the Criminal Code prohibition of polygamy and equality rights of women and girls in Sections 15 and 28 of the Charter.”

So why were government officials dithering?

Doug Barron, a corporal in the Creston RCMP, told me they would investigate a complaint but hadn’t received one. When I reminded him that the daily news was full of RCMP investigations into other criminal activities where no one had made a complaint, such as terrorist cells and biker gangs, he had no comment.

As for Plant, he replied curtly, “My only source of knowledge about Bountiful is the media. Most of what I say is misrepresented by the media, so why should I believe what they say about others?” He took the same line as the RCMP. “If people think there’s been an offence, they need to go to the police. It concerns me when people think I have some responsibility for this.”

The women of British Columbia disagreed. They saw the inaction as morally bankrupt and a failure to protect Canadian citizens, and launched three protests in April and May 2004. One was the letter from the Creston women regarding the Education Act, another came from the Western Women’s Committee of the Canadian Employment and Immigration Union (CEIU), who sent a letter to Geoff Plant, copying it to every other level of government and minister that seemed to be responsible, including Prime Minister Paul Martin, asking that the laws governing polygamy, statutory rape, incest and provincial and federal tax fraud be enforced in Bountiful. And a third came from a group of women, including Debbie Palmer, who filed a complaint to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.

Debbie Palmer was living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, with her three school-age children and one grandchild, when I
interviewed her for the magazine story. She could paper the walls of her four-bedroom duplex with the petitions and letters she’d sent to authorities in Canada. She had already written a book and kept up-to-date data on the goings-on within the cult. She also provided help for those who left. “There’s nothing for these women,” she said. “They have little education, absolutely no financial support and no status on the outside as a married woman.”

The emotional turmoil the apostates suffer is immense. “We don’t know how to deal with flashbacks and post-traumatic stress,” Palmer said. “We’ve been raised to always be sweet, to love the person you’re assigned to and to believe that you are safe in a community, apart from the world and its sins.” Of the ugly goings-on inside the colony—things like rape, molestation and abuse—she said, “We didn’t have names for that.”

Winston Blackmore, who is Palmer’s stepgrandson, brother-in-law and nephew, told me that he too is upset with any form of abuse: “As a long-time bishop, husband and father, I have been especially saddened when I see it among plural families.” But he also wrote that monogamists don’t have bragging rights on good behaviour. “When you monogamists can show us a system that is without abuse, divorce, infidelity, neglect, jealousy or any of the other things that you love to gasp at us over, then and only then should there be a story written about us.”

As I drove out of Bountiful, a thunderstorm was brewing over the mountains. One woman, whose identity had to be protected, matched the mood of the mounting storm. “What’s happening in there is pure evil,” she said.

Later in 2004, Plant said he had encouraged police to reopen the Bountiful file. He claimed that he had also begun looking into the school’s funding and the overall welfare of the young girls
in the community. “It has reached a point where there is enough concern in the public that we’d better be doing something about it, as opposed to standing by and doing nothing.”

Eventually, after a maddening collection of miss-starts and after much stomping and denying and accusing, a charge of practising polygamy was finally laid in January 2009 against the two most prominent men of the Bountiful community, Winston Blackmore and James Oler. But the prosecution failed to convict them, and the charges were stayed. Crown prosecutors were reluctant to try again because of that same old fear that charges would be declared unconstitutional on the basis of religious freedom.

By then there was another new attorney general of British Columbia, Wally Opal, who decided that the situation could not be sustained. On October 22, 2009, the B.C. government asked the provincial court for clarification—a process known as a reference—of whether Canada’s 121-year-old law against polygamy is consistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

As the case began, Rebecca Cook explained: “The polygamy reference case being heard in Vancouver is extremely important, not only for issues here but in different parts of the world. The documents that come out of this case will be important to other groups in other parts of the world by raising awareness about how these cases can be brought to court.” The gathering of expert testimony from around the world was fascinating, too, in illustrating the different ways that women’s groups were addressing polygamy. Cook said, “One way to try to eliminate it is to criminally prohibit it. Another way is to limit it: for example, in Indonesia a man needs the permission of his first wife to take a second wife.” She examined what the law in each jurisdiction actually says and found that though in one place all the wives must agree if a man
is to take another wife, in others they don’t. Similarly, some jurisdictions say women must inherit equally regardless of the type of marriage they are in. Others claim that women in polygamous marriages cannot inherit at all.

Cook wondered whether there is any instance where women could freely choose a discriminatory structure of marriage. The question she posed is this: Should the state sanction an unequal form of marriage that is unfair to women? “The reference case in B.C. is important in terms of how the court sees women’s equality versus men’s equality: the inherent role of unequal structure, how it stereotypes women particularly in the case of Bountiful into child-bearing-service roles, having sex at certain times, maximizing the chances of child-bearing and being trained to be sweet. The wrong is the unfair structure: it allows a man to marry multiple spouses but not women. It denies women sexual exclusivity and it stereotypes them in child-bearing roles.”