Too Many Wives

How many wives is too many? All but the most sporting of men might say that sometimes one is too many. How many wives can a man truly love and really take care of? How many children can he truly love and care for? If you live in the U.S., the culture and legislation strongly suggest the answer to the question of the number of wives is, and shall remain, one at a time.

I’m a human-traffic hunter, or at least I have fancied myself to be such over the past several years. In the course of my work, I’ve become aware of a group that doesn’t share that widely held perspective on polygamy. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they’re a mob of ghoulish folk barricading themselves behind a religious pretense in order to practice their aberrant lifestyle in an area known as Short Creek AZ/UT, otherwise simply known as “the Crik.”

“But polygamy is against the law in the U.S.” I even said so myself. Yes, polygamy is illegal, and yes the Crik crowd is doing it anyway, because screw the U.S. and its oppressive laws. They will do exactly as they please and will not stand for religious persecution. The culture there was established by the self-proclaimed “prophet” Warren Steed Jeffs.

Short Creek, “the Crik,” is actually a settlement that overlaps at the borders of Arizona and Utah.

Oh, him? Yeah, he was arrested by the FBI for charges that spelled out the rape of underage children. Jeffs was sensible enough to rape his 12-year-old “wife” and record it all. He was even so kind as to keep those recordings in a safe where nooobody would eeever find them. Jeffs had more than 80 “wives” ranging in age from 12 to older than 65.

Prosecution: “Mr. Jeffs, what would you say it would do to your plea of innocence if the prosecution pulled out and played for the jury the tapes that you made of yourself having sex with a 12-year-old girl?”

Defense: “Well…I’d say you have a…pretty compelling point there.”

Women of the Crik as they typically appear, clad in prairie dresses, usually in pastel colors, sporting “Plyg-doo” hairstyles approved by the “church.”

False Prophet

A self-proclaimed prophet? Hell yeah! I wanna be one of those too. I wanna walk around all day declaring stupid shit in the name of God. My first stop will be Taco Bell: I’ll waltz in there and tell them I’m a prophet and God communicates through me, and right now, God is a mite peckish for some quesadillas de pollo and a large Dr. Pepper.

Hiding behind religion—we all know about it. It’s been in all the papers. Peeps have been making billions of dollars off of the very practice since the dawn of man. The only older profession is prostitution, but when I consider folks who will do anything for money, I see the two practices as fundamentally identical.