Message to America
Child Abuse Is Not Religious Freedom
By Tommy Garrett
Aug 7, 2011 - 6:50:30 PM

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The trial of polygamist cult leader Warren Jeffs in Texas this week brings attention to the plight of human trafficking and sexual abuse of children in our country. Surely everyone seems to be up in arms over the acquittal of Casey Anthony last month, who faced charges of murdering her own daughter, but in America, a nation that was founded on religious freedoms, we have a hard time wrapping our minds and emotions around the idea of religion being used by some evil men, including the self-proclaimed prophet Warren Jeffs, to sexually violate our nation’s children.

Convicted Rapist Warren Jeffs With 12 Year-Old Wife

The Catholic Church has been chastising every American politician who stands up for a woman’s right to choose when it’s best for her to end her own pregnancy. This is not a debate about abortion; that has already been decided on by our nation’s highest court over 40 years ago with Roe v. Wade, when the high court decided that women in the United States have a right to an abortion.

While President George W. Bush was in office, this Jeffs rape case began. He did nothing at the federal level to have the FBI investigate and prosecute sexual abuse cases that fall under the federal statute because these children are often trafficked not just across state lines, but there is an intense and increased influx of children to and from Canada and Mexico on a regular basis in order for polygamists to find new wives, some as young as 10 years old. Current President Barrack Obama has also done nothing to help save the children abused by polygamists. In his defense, after having the vile attacks by Republicans over the past three years calling him a Muslim, if he dared to entertain any ideas of having the U.S. Justice Department investigate this throw-off sect of the Mormon religion, he’d be faced with the greatest attack in his life. The vitriol from the political right would be swift and vicious, as they have mastered all the verbiage of bigotry and intolerance. So that’s his reason for not spending time on this important matter.

Therefore, we are left with governors of states such as Texas, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada ignoring and in some instances allowing the trafficking of young girls and boys to be handed over to adult pedophiles in their jurisdictions, who have in turn used the U.S. Constitutional right to religious freedom to prey upon little kids. However, these polygamist predators are the same people who preach and decry our Constitution when their behavior or actions are being investigated. They teach their followers to consider the U.S. Government to be “the Beast.” And in using our welfare system, which costs us hundreds of millions of dollars per year to care for inbreed victims of sexual abuse, they refer to that as “bleeding the Beast.”

While we fight thousands of miles from our borders using our amazing military, many on the right argue about the mistreatment of the women and girls in Afghanistan as well as other Muslim nations, while they ignore right in our backyard the sexual abuse of children and the discarding of young boys, as young as 10 as well, when they are considered competition for these dirty old men, who want to have the young girls, often their own close relatives, for themselves. These boys become the “lost boys” of the American southwest, hidden away from tourist sites, so we can pretend nothing in our society is wrong, it’s all the fault of politicians, not our own lack of caring for our fellow man here at home.

Former Mass. Governor Mitt Romney wants to be our nation’s next president. However, just as silent as he was about the debt ceiling debate we just endured, his silence in this matter, of which his religion is often associated with, is also extremely silent. He has spent more time talking about his competitor’s (Michele Bachmann) migraines. The silence is deafening, and even though the Latter Day Saints Church long ago dismissed the practice of plural marriage, it is still a matter that should be discussed in our nation. We should stop allowing the use of religious freedom as a cover to rape and torture young children. The bedrock of religious freedoms in our nation is an important one. We also can never return to a time as our European forefathers once had to endure when kings, queens and popes decided what religion everyone would worship.

Though, we cannot continue to allow this type of abhorrent behavior in our great nation. The audio tape played on Wednesday morning in a Texas courtroom of Warren Jeffs allegedly raping his 12-year-old wife while her sister wives and church elders held her down on the bed in their Temple was disgusting. Why is this protected by religious freedom? This man has also been accused of having sex with other underage girls and boys. His barbaric behavior is certainly a small fringe of behavior in the name of religion in the country. But how much longer can we ignore the plight of hundreds of thousands of young girls and boys in our country who are being violated and then we allow their perpetrators to explain it away as religious freedom?

The Catholic Church decries the end of abortion, however, it protects pedophile priests all the way as high as the Vatican itself. Mormons claim they do not believe in polygamy anymore, however, their political and religious leaders are silent in this fundamentalist sect’s practices. However, morally outraged Americans then complain that moderate Muslim politicians and leaders around the globe don’t renounce terrorism loud or harshly enough. All the while terror in the heartland of America goes on involving young children with equal silence and disregard for what is right or wrong from so-called Christians in America.

Please pray for our brave soldiers who fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and around the world against the terrorists abroad, and do your part to help save a child in America by speaking truth and speaking out against abuse of our children. All of our children.