Poisoning the Well

Brooke Adams again:

Last week, a lead attorney for FLDS parents had William John Walsh testify about Mormon and FLDS practices. He shot down one of the most inflammatory allegations made by Texas law officers about what they saw when they entered the sect's temple two weeks ago.

An affidavit filed in court by a Texas Ranger said that on April 5 an ex-FLDS member who had served as a confidential informant for Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran said there were beds in the temple where ''males over the age of seventeen engage in sexual activity with female children under the age of seventeen."

The ranger said that on that same day, officers entered the temple and saw a bed (later described as on the third floor) with rumpled linens and a ''strand of hair that appears to be from a female head.''

Okay, we bit. And then Walsh offered up an entirely different explanation for the beds-in-the-temple story.

Although he has never been inside the FLDS temple, Walsh said it was likely set up like an LDS Church temple.

LDS Church temples, he said, typically have several beds available in case people doing temple work -- marriage ceremonies, baptisms for the death -- become faint or feel ill.

Law enforcement (and CPS) release salacious speculation and hearsay. This increases the ick factor, adn the rest of us, totally creeped out by polygamy, funny dresses, and teen pregnancy (except for when it occurs in secular settings), are predisposed to believe all kinds of things about these people without any further proof. "Fifty year old men married to young girls?" Of course that's disgusting. Just one problem. The original allegation about an abused 16 year old who prompted the raid on the ranch because of her calls for protection from her abusive fifty year old husband turned out to be false, and not from anybody who has ever been in the FLDS sect.

And so far, even in the actual evidence presented in court, I am not aware that they have found any such cases at the ranch. None of the husbands of the five under-aged mothers girls are that old. I'm not saying it's okay if the husband is 40, or 36, or 26 and the girl is 16 (does the ick factor decrease with the men's ages?), but why is it that we latch onto 50? Isn't it because that sounds worse?