"The great and grand purpose of the Law of Celestial Marriage is to perfect a man and his wives, his dominion in this order under the family Order of Heaven, and to bring forth and bear the souls of men," the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints prophet Rulon Jeffs preached in 1964 to his followers.
While polygamy was preached and practiced by early prophets of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the principle was abandoned when Utah sought statehood. The LDS Church excommunicates any members who practice polygamy.
The FLDS church, on the other hand, teaches its members that the modern-day Mormon or LDS Church turned its back on God by rejecting the one true principle of celestial or plural marriage.
Men and women in plural marriages are expected to create as many children "as the Lord requires of them." Women often have more than a dozen children and men with more than one wife routinely count their offspring in double digits.
"In the FLDS culture, the loss of a man's priesthood means he can no longer take his family to the celestial kingdom," said FLDS attorney Rod Parker. "In their belief structure, the man and woman have to go together. She can't go alone. It's a patriarchal structure. It then becomes a matter of the woman's free agency. It's her right to choose."
Dissidents and those who have been excommunicated are essentially shunned by the church, although the extent to which families ostracize apostate relatives can vary. In addition, Parker said, the FLDS church should not be forced to allow dissidents to live on consecrated lands that never belonged to them.
"Many of these donations were made by people who are no longer here, and they did it for significant, deeply held religions reasons," Parker said, adding that donations given freely to religious organizations are not later reimbursed to a disaffected donor.
Jeffs, like the other eight prophets of the FLDS who came before him, is a polygamist with an untold number of wives and children.
The reclusive 48-year-old, whose beehive of homes in Hildale is surrounded by a newly erected 8-foot-high block wall, never grants interviews and is rarely seen in public. Jeffs became the FLDS prophet after his father, Rulon Jeffs, died last year. Many of those excommunicated by him call the tall slender leader a paranoid, controlling man who secretly tapes confessions and other church meetings.
Under Jeff's rule, FLDS parents pulled their children from public school, began holding Sunday services in their own homes and no longer celebrate seasonal events such as the annual Harvest Festival.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has issued an invitation through the media for Jeffs to meet with him to discuss allegations of child abuse, underage marriages, welfare fraud and other crimes anti-polygamists claim are occurring in the FLDS culture.
Rumors persist that Jeffs has married underage girls and fathered children from those unions, something that Shurtleff and others would love to prove in a court of law. But proving such a claim would take more than a birth certificate; it would take a victim who is willing to testify, and as Shurtleff knows, willing victims are hard to come by.
A meeting between Shurtleff and Jeffs has yet to take place.
E-mail: nperkins@infowest.com