Mary Batchelor's Introductory Comments at Rally in Support of FLDS Women & Children after Texas Raid

* Some of you requested a copy of Mary's introductory remarks at Monday's rally at the City and County Building. They are transcribed below.

RALLY IN SUPPORT OF FLDS WOMEN AND CHILDREN AFTER TEXAS RAID
April 14, 2008
(Introduction by Mary Batchelor, Director of Principle Voices)

To begin, we want to explain who we are and what we are doing. I’m Mary Batchelor; I’m the director of Principle Voices. Our organization is a non-profit organization that is dedicated to building bridges between the Fundamentalist Mormon culture and members outside of that culture including representatives of government agencies, non-government agencies, service providers and the average citizen. We have been actively involved in the Utah and Arizona Attorney Generals’ Safety Net. We feel we have accomplished a great deal of good with the Safety Net. Over the last several years, we have actively worked to bring representatives of the Fundamentalist Mormon Culture from several different groups that practice polygamy to become involved in the Safety net and participate openly with government officers as well as service providers.

We have provided hours and hours of training to service providers, domestic violence representatives - those who would provide services to our people if there was a problem with abuse, domestic violence or a report of need from a member of our culture. They (our people) would have somewhere to turn and they would have people who know how to approach them and how to be culturally sensitive to their needs. We have trained them to understand the dynamics of polygamous families. We have also brought these service providers into the various polygamous groups so that they can provide training to the communities on how to define abuse, what it looks like, how to recognize it, as well as how to respond to it, and to provide them with resources so that they would be aware that there are people outside of their group, so that if they did have a situation of abuse or domestic violence, they would know whom to contact and feel safe enough to do so. This has been a great success in Utah.

Our great disappointment is that we never were able to encourage the FLDS people to come forward. We have not been able to work with them actively or reach out to those people.

Our hearts go out to the women and children of that community. As you can imagine, many of the people of the Fundamentalist Mormon culture have parents and grandparents who were involved in the 1953 raid. The raid in Texas was deeply personal and felt very eerily similar to what their families had experienced. It’s been a shock-wave of a great deal of pain and emotional grief. We cannot explain the depth of that grief for these people.

That in no way justifies if there is abuse in that community, or if there are problems, or if the allegations that come out of that community are true, they must be investigated, and we recognize that. We are not here to justify anything or to condemn anyone. We recognize that Texas is dealing with a very complicated situation. We are concerned, however, that the culture of these children be respected and that the trauma that they have had inflicted on them will be understood and recognized.

You cannot strip a culture of value system, or a foundational belief from a human being and not expect that it will cause identity crisis and internal trauma. These children do have a cultural identity, they have a religious belief that is very similar to Mormonism and the LDS belief system.

I know that that feels offensive to some who are LDS. We acknowledge that we are not members of the LDS church, and we want to make this clear to all the media, that that distinction must be made.

There are many Fundamentalist Mormons who do not belong to any group, they are considered independent. There are some who are members of groups and they socialize together in churches. We have several groups and they are not necessarily affiliated with each other nor do they have the same belief system. They may come from the same root in their beliefs or the same foundation.

We do not know what the FLDS believe. We do not know what is true that is being said about them.

At the same time we have decided, because of a great outpouring of love and compassion for those children and for their mothers who are with them, that we wanted to donate and take up a collection on behalf of them. We don’t know where they are going to go. Right now they are in shelters in Texas, and the shelter hearing is on Thursday, and the likelihood is that they will move into different shelters and move into the foster care system.

We know that their needs are very unique compared to other children who are in foster care. That does not make them more important, for all children in foster care have great needs, but their needs are very specific. These are children who need to be talked to by individuals who dress modestly. It is important to respect that they have a value system. That would be very difficult for them to understand, being approached by outsiders who would wear shorts, short-sleeved shirts and tank-tops. We did see pictures of social workers in the first few days following the raid who were dressed like this. However, I have also seen a progression where the social workers have tried very hard to accommodate this cultural understanding and I have see pictures now where they are, in fact, dressing more modestly. I think this is very important for people to understand. We have a very conservative value system.

Heidi is going to talk at greater length about the things that we have collected, but what we have here is just the beginning. We have more offers coming in. We know that we are going to continue to receive more donations for these people. The exciting thing about this is that it has a dual purpose for us. This was created in response to an outpouring of phone calls, people who have called me, even men in tears, both from inside and outside our cultures who wanted to do something. They asked me, “Can you get this money and these things to them if we get them to you?” So we, Principle Voices, responded by pulling together our coalition of representatives of several polygamous groups in this state to answer that cry, and this is the result. We have invited them to bring their donations and we will find a way to get it to Texas.

We have been in touch with Texas shelters and they have told us that we can deliver it but we will need to wait until the kids are placed after Thursday’s hearing. We expect that, by the time we deliver these, we will have many more donations than you see here.

One of the things that we did was to collect letters from women and children from our communities to let them share their feelings with the women and children of the FLDS and help them know that they are not alone, that this foreign place that they are in is not full of hatred and antagonism, that there are people outside that do love them, and we want to applaud people from all over this country, from their churches, from everywhere, who have brought donations to those shelters and poured out their hearts for those kids and their mothers.

These letters are a very unique thing. This is our first opportunity, we never thought of doing this before - for a polygamous child to write and be made public. So we will be giving some of those letters out to the media so they can see them.

The second part of the dual purpose of this, we learned it second hand, we learned it vicariously, we didn’t realize this was going to be a benefit that came out of this process... It was personally therapeutic for us to be able to do this, write these letters and work on this activity. It has helped us to work through our own emotions about the raids of the forties and fifties, and the experiences that we still feel, and we still carry the wounds around with us even generations later.