Episode 53: Polygamous Fundamentalism and Beyond
with advocate Shirlee Draper
Amy is joined by Shirlee Draper of Cherish Families to hear her courageous account of leaving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and a polygamous marriage, sharing personal stories, exploring the alarming similarities between the explicit patriarchy of the FLDS Church and the allegedly more egalitarian world beyond it, plus discussing the practical work we can all be doing to help while avoiding condescension.
Our Guest
Shirlee Draper
Shirlee Draper is a former member of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints community. She holds an MA in Public Administration and is the Director of Operations for Cherish Families, a non-profit organization providing compassionate support to individuals and families from polygamous backgrounds
Amy Allebest: It is a bittersweet feeling to introduce the last podcast episode of Breaking Down Patriarchy before our finale. It's the last time I'll be interviewing a guest in this format, like I've done every week for the past five years. But there's no need to be sad, because, first of all, this isn't the last podcast episode. Make sure you catch our finale next week. And also, because this is not the end. Listeners, please just hop on over to YouTube, where Breaking Down Patriarchy is continuing to produce incredible content. And now, for today's episode, I could not be more excited and honored about our topic and our guest today. I'm joined by Shirlee Draper, who grew up in the FLDS Church, which still practices polygamy, and she is now the director of operations for Cherish Families, an organization that provides compassionate support to individuals and families in need of help, primarily from polygamous backgrounds. This is the work of Breaking Down Patriarchy that is in a realm that has been really hard for me to even look at, let alone really deeply understand. So I am so excited and so honored that Shirlee agreed to join me today. Thank you so much for being here, Shirlee.
Shirlee Draper: Thank you for having me. This is an honor for me.
AA: I want to get right into your personal story, introduce listeners to who you are, but I think even before we can introduce you, we need to understand the context. And we have a lot of listeners who are familiar with what people think of as the mainstream LDS Church, but we also do have a lot of listeners who aren't even too familiar with the LDS Church. So could you give us a little primer on the LDS Church, the FLDS Church, how they're the same, how they're different, and then how that set the stage or set the landscape for the world that you came into when you were born.
SD: You bet. That's kind of a big topic, but just very briefly. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is commonly known as the Mormon Church, was brought into existence in the early 1800s by Joseph Smith, who wrote about this vision he had from God, was told not to join any other churches, so he received all of these revelations and wrote them out. And this became the basis for what is the current Mormon Church. Part of what they practiced over time was polygamy, and it became very unpopular in the areas that they had settled in the eastern United States. So after Joseph Smith was killed, his community, his people gathered up and went across the Great Plains to leave the United States, to actually go outside into what was then Mexico, to be able to have religious freedom and live their religion. And over time, the doctrines changed and new things were added and some things were dropped. And there was a lot of history in between where the federal government came in and took the territory that the Mormons lived in, which became the territory of Deseret, and the Church started to conform more to the laws of the land. So there were manifestos that decreed that polygamy would no longer be practiced. And this is all just a very, very brief summary, because it's much more complex than that. But pretty much after that time is where what we call the Fundamentalists started to separate from the main body of the Church. Because the Fundamentalists had been told by the prophet that they had to continue living polygamy and never let a year go by without a child being born under the New and Everlasting Covenant, which is how it's referred to in the Doctrine and Covenants, one of the foundational doctrines of the Church. So, those were my ancestors. My ancestors came across the Plains, suffered all of that hardship, and settled the state of Utah.
And then when their Church started to abandon those practices, my ancestors decided that they were going to continue to live those. So that's what became the separation between the mainstream Church and what is now referred to as the Fundamentalists. The complication with that is that there are many, many strains of fundamentalism, and the strain of fundamentalism that I came from was an organized group. At the time, it was the largest organized group, called the FLDS, which stands for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and that was actually an incorporated name for my community. There are at least 54 other actual formal groups. And then the vast majority of people who practice fundamentalism currently are independent of any group, that are just living these fundamental principles in their family, not as a part of any group. So that was my background, the FLDS, and it's become infamous because of the crimes of Warren Jeffs. That's kind of my background.
AA: Yeah, thank you for that. And I do want to say, for listeners who are familiar with me and have heard me talk about my LDS background, our ancestors probably knew each other. Maybe we should do the test where we see how related–
SD: Oh, are we related?
AA: I'm sure we're related, because my ancestors also walked across the Plains and settled Utah. But the difference is that mine stayed and stopped practicing polygamy, and yours left and kept practicing polygamy. I said to you the other day when we got together, I said that I feel like meeting you and really realizing that polygamy is still practiced so much more than I realized… And because the mainstream LDS Church separated themselves so hard from Fundamentalist LDS when they were trying to assimilate into broader American society and be accepted into Christianity, they pushed the narrative I heard was like that that was over in the 19th century. If people would say, when I grew up in Colorado, “You're Mormon? How many wives does your dad have?”
SD: That's right.
AA: It would make me cry, because I'd be like, “No, Mormons do not do that. How could you say that horrible thing?” I feel like the analogy of when I met you and realized, I was like, I feel like I'm meeting cousins that my parents told me were dead. I'm meeting my first cousins and I'm like, “Whoa, I was told all of you died in a car accident.” I'm sorry, but I cried and cried and cried when I first learned about this. I was like, there are these relatives, close, close relatives that have been having a completely different experience, and we are cousins. Partly biologically because we probably are, but religiously. And also, I didn't know this, I'm so ignorant of it, but I think we lump all of the still-practicing-polygamy LDS folks into the FLDS umbrella, and that's not correct. So, I'm glad that we're specific about that. There are lots of different groups that practice things pretty differently from each other.
SD: Yes, that's correct. And I like to explain this as, like, all of the different versions of Christianity can't all be called Baptists, right? And it's really important to disambiguate, because the FLDS, or at least the leadership of the FLDS, has done some pretty heinous things. So when all of the groups are lumped together in one basket, it creates a lot of harm, where people aren't able to access services because of that, and we can get into that. But to your point about being cousins, I really love that Family Search tree app that you mentioned for that same reason. When I need to have conversations with legislators or people in hospitals that can have an impact on my community based on whether they're prejudicial or not, I always pull that up and I always say, “Let's find out how we're related.” I don't say “if”. Because we always are, and generally it's a lot closer than people are comfortable with. I mean, one legislator, we pulled it up and he's like, “Oh, we're third cousins.”
AA: Wow.
SD: And then he was like, “Well, I guess that makes sense because my great-grandfather was a polygamist.” I said, “Exactly.” And to that point, the fact that I am a polygamist– and I still say it in current terms even though I'm not, but that I was a polygamist and that you're not, wasn't anything that you and I decided. These are decisions that our grandfathers made. Not that you're better than me. So just having that conversation that opens up this thing that it's like, “If you're currently a polygamist, I'm not going to consider it a factor of your birth. I'm going to consider that you're stupid for having opted into it.” So, that's part of the conversation that I always want to have.
AA: And I want to keep having that conversation throughout our conversation today, because that's one of the main things that I'm learning and being humbled in learning, and that I want to pull out for listeners. But backing up, let's talk about you and your life. As you said, your great-grandparents made the choices they did. Where were you born? Who were your parents? If you can paint a picture for us, even starting in utero, if you're comfortable with who your family was and what the universe was like that you were born into.
SD: Sure. So, the FLDS were fundamentalists in every way about the doctrine, not just about polygamy. I think that's a mistake that so many people make, that the Fundamentalists worship polygamy, like that's their be-all and end-all, and nothing could be further from the truth. Polygamy is one part of the faith, and it's not more important than all of the other doctrines. And as part of that, there were overt messages about women's roles, and the way the family should be operated, and who was in charge of what. Everything was very highly structured. A very, very patriarchal system. Quite rigid in gender norms and roles, quite rigid in conservative dress, conservative thoughts, all of all of these things. My family was not different at the time that my mother was carrying me. My dad had another wife during that time, so I was actually born into a polygamous family, but my mom was really outspoken and quite a feminist, which is a little bit anachronistic in that community. And because she was not this picture of submission and obedience, there was a lot of disharmony between my parents.
While my mom was carrying me, my dad actually beat her up, and it was bad. I mean, she was bruised from head to toe. And when that happened, she went to her father in the community and asked for help. She asked if she could leave and come back home, and her dad told her, “No. The reason you were beaten is because you're a disobedient woman and you wouldn't need to be beaten if you just knuckle down and submit yourself to your husband.” She went to the community leaders and asked for help as well, and was told the same thing. “You just need to learn how to be a better wife and be more submissive. Stop talking back to your husband so he won't need to beat you.” And so she did. She did go back to him. And I didn't find this out until much later, but I came into this world, because of that experience, with this raging sense of injustice and distrust toward men and this sense that I needed to protect my mother. I had to protect my mother. I had to protect my siblings. I had to protect every person who was vulnerable. I had that sense from my first breath. I have no memory of not feeling hyper-responsible for vulnerable people. And that was a thread throughout my life. I remember screaming at boys in eighth grade when I was in second grade because they were teasing a special needs kid on the school ground, and making them run away. A second grader. And it was just like, “This is my role in life.” But I didn't find out that that was why until much later. And growing up I was also very outspoken, I was a feminist, and that was not popular.
AA: Did you know that word then? Did you have a language to describe how you felt?
SD: Yeah, my mom was an avid reader. She provided me with a lot of reading material. Everything from, I always say, Asimov to Ziglar. I was reading non-sanctioned literature all the time. I read every book in the school library, which was the only library we had in town. I was reading everything. And I was forming opinions that were more informed by outside sources than a lot of people were, so I did know about the feminist movement, I knew about bra burning, I knew all of these things because my mom was also reading that.
AA: Was that technically allowed?
SD: No.
AA: What would Warren Jeffs have said about women reading stuff like that?
SD: Well, this was when Leroy Johnson was still in charge, and things were a lot more permissible then. There were a lot of people that had television. We didn't, but people were going to the movies. We were doing a lot more reading the newspaper and doing more of those kinds of things at that point. My dad did not appreciate my mom reading those things, and so that was another source of tension with them, but I was reading all of these things. So yes, I did have language for it. And I also felt empowered by it. There were times where I would get into arguments with my school teachers because they'd say, “The boys can do this, but the girls have to go do that.” One teacher said, “Girls can't do math.” And I'm like, “Oh yeah, no, that's not how we're doing this.” So that was how I grew up. I was also very close with my mom. She was very musical, so we did most of the music in town for all of the programs and everything. We were quite well known, but she also suffered a lot of suspicion because of her outspokenness. So that was the environment that I grew up in, knowing what I was supposed to be doing and knowing what my roles were supposed to be. And the thing about the FLDS and probably fundamentalism in general, is that they're very overt about this. It's like, “This is what God said. You have to be obedient. You have to do what you're told, you have to do all these things.” I knew what I was supposed to be, but at the same time, this was water to fish. This was the only world I knew. So, while I am being a feminist and learning everything I can and standing up for myself, I'm also learning my religion and learning my scripture, and I truly believed it at the time. I sang in the choir. I would go to church every Sunday and take good notes and try to learn how to apply that to my life, as long as it fit in with the other things that I believed and held dear.
AA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I ask another question really quickly? Was your town completely comprised of FLDS families? Was your school part of the Church, or I guess what I'm asking is how much contact did you have with people who were not part of your religious community?
SD: Thanks for asking that, because I always assume that everybody knows. Our town was Short Creek, which is Colorado City, Arizona, and Hilldale, Utah, on the border there. It was fully owned by a trust that was fully owned by the Church, so all of the homes there were owned by the Church and in order to live in that town, you had to be part of the Church.
AA: I see.
SD: It was a public school. The school did receive public funding from the state of Arizona, and any person could go there, but it was 99% FLDS. The teachers were all FLDS and they were enforcing the FLDS codes, the dress and the behavior and all of those things, while they were teaching US history and math and science. That was my context. And everybody I knew, all of my family, all of my friends, everything I'd have to do with my healthcare, everything, was contained in this community. And because we dressed so conservatively, we were also very visually identifiable. So whenever we would leave the safety and belonging of this little enclave, I'm gonna call it, even though we didn't have walls around it, then I would have to go and navigate this really hostile world. If I had to go to St. George to the dentist or the doctor or anything, I knew that I would be treated with hostility. It wasn't something that was really fun, to leave the safety and belonging and friendship and all of this to go out and have those other friendships. So, yeah, my exposure was quite limited. And this was made more complex by the fact that my dad was taken from his parents during the 1953 raid on Short Creek, which is pretty famous. If people haven't heard of it, you can look it up and see.
AA: Will you say just a few sentences about it?
SD: Yeah, absolutely. There had been raids against the polygamists in 1935 by the FBI, in 1944 by the state of Utah, and then in 1953 by the state of Arizona. And it was all an effort to wipe this horrific thing off the face of the earth. In 1953, the state of Utah cooperated by having the Washington County sheriff go herd everybody across the border so that all of the men could be arrested in the state of Arizona. And the governor had stated that he was going to arrest the man and open up the cages where they keep the women, because obviously no woman would ever choose to be in this. The women were just going to be so grateful, they were going to leave and fly free, and they were going to take the children and adopt them out and destroy the records. And in this way, they were going to take care of this problem. But there were a few problems with that. One of them was that the women were not grateful to be freed from their families. And the second was that this was in an era where now there's television, so all of these activities were being televised across the nation, and people were horrified that the governor had decided that he was judge, jury, and executioner, that he was going to summarily decide what happened. So there was this huge outcry and people stood up and said, “No, we have due process for a reason. You can arrest people, but you don't get to decide what's happening with them.” Because of that, there were these trials and everything and they couldn't find what they wanted to find.
“This was water to fish. This was the only world I knew...”
And in the end, it took 12 years for the last family to finally be reunited. But you have to know, if you know anything about adverse childhood experiences, childhood trauma, the way it informs the rest of your life. These kids who had been taken from their parents were horribly traumatized. And so my dad, I said some really awful things about him, but I also know that he's a product of his environment. I'm not denigrating him for behaving the only way he knew how to behave. And he lived with terror, literal terror, his entire life, knowing that I could be taken from him if I were to venture into the outside world if anybody found anything out about us. So his whole life was spent telling me, “Don't ever talk to the police. Don't ever go outside when the Washington County sheriff is in town. You're not allowed to go to college because they'll find out about us.” Those kinds of things. My experiences were very, very limited because of his experiences. So when you talk about context, my context was that: that we are terrified of the government, we're terrified of outsiders, they mean us harm, and that was a well-founded fear for my dad.
AA: Oh my gosh, it's so complicated. I've even heard, too, that women would be scared to take their babies to the doctor, like if they had a terrible fever or if they were worried, or take them to the hospital if there was an injury, for fear of having their children taken away. Did you grow up with that fear?
SD: Oh yes, always. If a child fell and hit their head and ended up at the hospital, there was always going to be a child abuse investigation opened up. Because what we know about them is that they are bad people, so any outcome is a result of whatever evil thing they have planned. That was the suspicion that always greeted us. My sister went to a doctor because she was having a hard time conceiving, and he just unloaded on her, “Why do you people from Colorado City think you have to have so many children?” She hadn't had any, but she's going away saying, “You know what? I don't actually need your help.” It really was that way. My daughter, and we'll talk about her later, but my experience in the hospital with my daughter was horrifying. We knew we could count on being treated like that in the outside world, so that compounded the environment and the context in which we were raised. My dad had this fear and then I'd go outside and I would experience that and it would confirm everything that my dad told me was going to happen.
AA: Mm-hmm. And sorry to keep going on this one topic, and maybe we'll talk about this later too, but when there then was abuse going on– Because what you're describing is when there's not abuse and it is families taking care of their children and the child just fell or something. But then sometimes if there is abuse, if your husband does beat you up from head to toe, then you can't go report that, right? Because you're terrified of the outside police, so then you don't have recourse, is that right?
SD: Yeah, that's absolutely the truth. My mom, for example, if she had gone and reported that abuse, because in the state of Utah it was a third degree felony for her to be participating in that arrangement, she could have had her children taken from her because she reported that abuse. So that was not an option for her. And it was the same for me. Nobody's going to go and report a crime from this community, so what that does is it protects abusers and it makes it so that they have more access to more victims.
AA: Mm-hmm. Oh my gosh. Well, thank you for all of this context and background about your childhood. Let's keep going, even just chronologically through your life. You're this firebrand of a feminist and also deeply taking into your heart your religion, everyone you know, and your community, and you’re connected, as all humans are, to your family. And with lots of love. How did your teenage years unfold? And as you approached marriage, what were your thoughts and feelings, and then how did that unfold for you?
SD: Yeah, I'll just finish saying that as a youth, I look back on my life with fondness. We had a village, and when people say it takes a village to raise a child, nobody even knows what that means anymore. And we had that. I knew where everybody lived. I knew how their kids were. All the moms in town were my moms. If I was out after dark, anybody would stop and pick me up and take me home. Because being home at dusk is the rule. I could count on a meal or a spanking from anybody in town. And it fulfilled that number one human psychological need to belong. We belonged. We had these strong roots, we had this sense of belonging and identity and safety within that community. And at the same time, I'm not saying everything was wonderful and lovely, it had issues, but there was that belonging and safety, which was a big deal, particularly when we weren't getting it anywhere else. We weren't welcome in mainstream society.
It makes such a huge difference if people understand that when they say, “Why don't women just leave?” And I'm like, “You don't know what the cost is. You don't know what they're giving up, because it's so one-dimensional from your perspective. You don't understand the village and the fact that your entire life, your family, your friends, everybody you ever grew up with, are there.” And then there are rituals and ceremonies and celebrations and all of these things that make up the very fabric of life and existence that you're going to rip yourself out of. It's very complex. So yes, growing up, my family was singing all the time, we're doing plays and programs and dances, and we're having these celebrations that were unique to us, like this three-day harvest festival that was just a riot. So, I'm growing up in this community with this strong sense of belonging and identity and purpose. Boy, did I have purpose. I was volunteering for everything. I was on every committee. And the tension of holding this religion that I was born into, so frankly I knew nothing else, so I'm believing in this religion, but I'm also holding this other piece of me that's a feminist and outspoken, and I'm not going to give that up.
By the time I was reaching marriage age, which was 19, 20, around then at that point, Rulon Jeffs was then the prophet, and he started to ask me if I wanted to get married. And I just kept saying no, because I didn't. I didn't want to give up the freedom I had. I was also an anomaly in that I had a job, I had my own car, and I would travel for work a lot solo, so I had a lot of freedom that not a lot of gals did. There were a few who did, but not a lot. And I was really enjoying that. So I got to be nearly 23 years old and saying, “No, I don't want to get married.” And he finally just said, “It's time for you to get married,” instead of asking me. So I'm like, “Okay, fine. Whatever.” So I was placed into an arranged marriage, because that's how we did things.
AA: And the prophet arranged those marriages, right?
SD: Yes.
AA: Not the people's parents, but the leader of the Church. Or no?
SD: So, the prophet was the final say. There were families whose father had enough clout and was powerful enough that he would say, “I think my daughter belongs here,” or, “I think this would be a good match.” And many times he would honor that, but he had the final say. My dad did not have any clout, and I was always taught that God makes the best choice for you. If you make your own choice, you'll be questioning it for the rest of your life. But if God does it, you will have that solid foundation. And I thoroughly believed that. I didn't want to be married anyway. I literally used to tell people, when people would ask me, “Why aren't you married yet? You're getting so old. Why aren't you married yet?” And I would say, “I'm waiting for my husband to get 50 wives,” because I really wanted to be far down the line so that he couldn't keep track of me. That's how much independence I wanted.
AA: Yes. And that's your only option to have independence.
SD: That’s right.
AA: It’s crazy that those were the parameters in which your mind could think about freedom. “I guess I'll just be the 51st.” That's so interesting. Wow.
SD: Yeah. It was really, really interesting. And of course to me, the water I swam in, there was nothing wrong with polygamy.
AA: Of course.
SD: I'm seeing all of these families. There are some very, very happy families, some very well-functioning families, and there are some families that are not, and frankly, that's what monogamy looks like too.
AA: Yeah, yeah. For sure. Okay, so keep going. This is fascinating.
SD: So, the day that I got married, my dad got a phone call around 9 or 10 in the morning. He was summoned to the prophet's house, and he came back and said, “Here's who you're marrying, and you'll be married at five o'clock this afternoon.” So we went to the prophet's house and got married at five o'clock that day. The first time I ever kissed anybody was at my wedding.
AA: Wow. Oh my goodness. Was this a man you'd grown up with? I mean, everyone knew each other, right?
SD: We did know each other. This was a man who had moved to the community. His family were members of the FLDS, but they'd lived in Salt Lake for most of his life. I think I was around 16 when they moved to the community, so I did know him. And he was part of all of the music and everything, so I did know him. I didn't look at him that way, I was never attracted to him, and I did end up being a first wife, which was all of the bad things that I expected it would be.
AA: How so? What does that mean?
SD: He was kind of a clone of my father in that he really wanted to be very controlling and wanted a very obedient, submissive, sweet, meek wife, and I just was not that. It was very difficult for him to know how to interact with me, so we had a lot of tension in our marriage about that. He could not figure out why I couldn't just be what he'd always dreamed of having in a wife. It was a source of issues for us. And I don't think I ever really fell in love. I think, looking back, there was a fondness and things like that, but we never even had terms of endearment for each other. We never called each other “honey” or “dear”. It was just our names. Looking back, it felt more like a business arrangement than anything.
But I was a good woman in that I immediately started having children. I had three sons in three years. And then my younger sister was placed into our family, so then we became a polygamous family. And during this time, well actually it was a little before my sister married my husband, Rulon had a stroke. And nobody knew this at the time, but all I knew was that right around 1998, things started to really change. I started to see a change in the way things were done, in the way families started to be taken apart. Things were being said from the pulpit that just insulted my soul, that I had some profound disagreements with. But at this time, again, it's everything I know, and I've got complications in that. I've got three young children, I'm living in a house that the Church owns, I have no assets, no income, no rental history, no credit history. But I'm also looking around going, “My family's all here, my friends are all here, this is the only place I know. And every time I go out of town, it's not comfortable. It's really hostile. I might not believe so much, but I'm just going to keep my head down and keep going. This is all I have.” And it got worse and worse and worse. And then in the year 2000 is when my younger sister got married, and by then I was fully wary of everything. I remember at her wedding standing there looking at her thinking, “If I tell her to run, I wonder if she will. Really, don't do this, just run.”
AA: As she's marrying your husband.
SD: As she's marrying my husband. And I was pitying her. And of course I didn't say anything, because by that point people were being kicked out for the slightest thing and sometimes not even knowing what they'd done. And I couldn't afford to be kicked out because I didn't have any way to support my kids and I would've had to leave them there, and that was not an option for me. So I sat there quietly. She got married to my husband, and immediately after that, I got pregnant with my last child, my daughter. And while I was pregnant, I was violently sick. I was so sick and my younger sister was in the home supporting me, taking care of things. She also got pregnant pretty quickly, but she was taking care of my kids, making meals, helping me. I think we had a great relationship. I did not have a good relationship with my husband, but I had a good relationship with her. So then when my daughter was born, she was born through an emergency C-section, and then she suffered a medical accident, which made her medically fragile. And oh man, that was such a dark time in my life. I ended up living pretty much in Las Vegas at the hospital with my daughter for the next three years.
AA: Oh my goodness.
SD: And during that time, my sister was home taking care of my kids and loving them and raising them as I would have had I been there. And it was one of those tension things, that nobody really wants to confront the benefits of plural marriage, of why women might opt into this. Aside from the indoctrination, which, tell me who's not indoctrinated in their religion? But the fact that there really are benefits for women, there are some benefits. So I was definitely benefiting from that structure during that time. It also benefited me that during those three years there were more and more and more, in my mind, atrocities that Warren Jeffs was perpetrating that I could not stand behind. And my daughter was a really great excuse to be missing the Church and the indoctrination. I got to where I couldn't stand the sound of his voice. It was like a pot scrubber to my nerves. I could not abide his voice. And every time I would come home and my husband would tell me about this wonderful thing that's happening, and this way the prophet's wives are dressing, which is what people call the prairie dresses, and that's when everybody started to go to that. And I'm just like, “No.”
AA: So you were dressing conservatively before, modestly, but not the prairie dress, not the big puffy bangs and the French braid.
SD: Yeah, that's correct. There were just rules about how you dressed, but there weren't rules about what it looked like. So as long as my sleeves were long and my skirt was below my knee and my neck wasn't low, I could do whatever I wanted. And I bought my clothing, you know, I was buying suits from JC Penney.
AA: Ah, okay.
SD: Until Warren came along. And then because he was so actively kicking people out and separating people from their families, then everybody was watching his family very anxiously for cues of what pleased him. So his wives were wearing these dresses and everybody's like, “Well, that must please him, so we're going to wear those dresses.” And then he's starting to say, “You can't wear this color and you can't wear that pattern,” and he started to really narrow down what people could wear. So during this time, I'm still just wearing my clothing, I'm still within the rules, and it was a source of tension, again, between me and my husband. And there was one time– he managed the local grocery store, and he came home one day and he just said, “You know, you sure can tell the families that are united by the way they dress.” And I said, “Really? So clothes hold the priesthood now?”
AA: Oh boy. Oh boy.
SD: And he just did not know how to deal with me, because he couldn't logically tell me why it was so much more holy to wear the same amount of fabric, only it had to be configured differently. He couldn't rationalize that. And then he said, “Well, when I die, you can just put it on my headstone, that ‘Father sure loved the pretty dresses.’” And I said, “I will. And I'll also put, ‘But he wasn't allowed to wear them in this life.’”
AA: Hahaha! Oh, that's so awesome. Oh my gosh. You're the best. Wow.
This is crazy. Okay, so the screws are tightening down.
“nobody really wants to confront the benefits of plural marriage, of why women might opt into this”
SD: The screws are tightening, yeah. At the point where Warren– it was in the year 2000, I think it was before Rulon died, and that was the other thing, I could see that Warren suddenly had all of this control. And Rulon is just sitting there, and sometimes Rulon would say something and Warren would stand up and say, “Father means this,” and it was diametrically opposite of what he said. And all this time I didn't know that Rulon had had a stroke. All I knew was that Warren was behaving like the great and powerful Oz, and I was not here for it. So I was just so suspicious of everything he did. I'm looking around in church going, is anybody else looking like, “What the hell is happening here?” And I didn't see any of that in anybody's faces. And I thought, “Am I just living in a parallel universe? This does not compute.” One time he stood up in church and he said, “Father said to take our children out of public school because the children have to associate with apostates there.” And I'm like, “Oh, I've read enough history. I know how the Third Reich came about. I know you separate people and you make sure they're not educated. This is not a world I want to raise my children in.”
And so on that day, I made the decision that I had to take my children and leave. Now, this is in 2000, right? Might've been 2001, I can't remember the exact date. But I also have this medically fragile child. It's constant, you know, sometimes I would sleep upright over her crib to make sure that she would keep breathing. She was really fragile, and she wasn't even supposed to live. But I was very determined. She had a tracheostomy, she had a G-tube and she had oxygen, and she had all this medication and heart monitors and all of these things. And my world was caught up in keeping her alive, at the same time that I'm seeing the rest of my world and my life and my family being destroyed by this horrible person and having no control and no way to help anybody with this. And so I decided I just have to take my children and leave. But I already mentioned that I didn't have any money. I had no income, no assets, no way to take care of myself and my kids. And my oldest son is also special needs, so I had two special needs kids and no way, you know, no credit history, no rental history, no way to make it work. And so I decided that I'm going to start piecemeal, I'm going to start saving money and I'm going to start packing up one thing at a time and kind of taking things that wouldn't be noticed. Because if I had declared myself, then I would be kicked out and living on the side of the road with my kids. So I'm trying to figure out how to keep quiet enough about how I'm feeling while figuring out how to create a way to take my kids. And it took three full years from that point until I was able to save up enough money and take my children and leave.
AA: How did you get them out? I mean, I actually know this because you told me, but listeners have got to hear this part. How did you drive away or walk away, and where did you store things that you were packing?
SD: It was rough. One of the big things that was pretty ingenious on Warren Jeff's part was making the cost of exit so high that nobody would do anything to be in his bad graces, because they couldn't afford to lose literally everything: their families, their friends, their identity, sense of belonging, all of that. And so people were trying so hard to please him so that they wouldn't lose their families. And I was facing that as well. I am having conversations with my siblings one-on-one, just asking very innocent questions about how they feel about this and how they feel about that, just to see if there's anybody I can talk to. Because one of the things I know is that once I leave, I will never get to see them again. And all of them, my parents and my siblings, were all saying, “Yes, this is what God wants. This is just a trial from God, and we love our prophet,” and all of these things. I'm like, “Okay, I can't talk to anybody.”
And then one day I saw my younger brother on the side of the road. He was walking home. I pulled over and I said to him, “What are you doing?” He said, “Nothing. We're not allowed to do anything. They tore down the basketball court. We can't even say the word ‘fun’.” And he was mad. And I'm like, oh, good. I said, “Get in, let's talk.” And so I told him what I was doing and I said, “I need some help.” And he said, “I want to help you.” So he said that once I have a box full, because my closet was starting to pile up with these boxes, bring it over to my parents' house. He lived in the basement, but had his own entrance. He said, “I will put your boxes in my room so nobody can find them.” So I did. I would have a van full of boxes and I would go walking into my mom's house and I'd just give him a little look and talk to my mom, and he'd go unload my car around the back. Until early 2004, and I was getting a lot closer to being ready to go.
And then I think it was early February when Warren had that big famous meeting where he had called 21 men up to the front of this meeting, and several of them were leaders and people I looked up to and people I loved, and he pronounced to the entire congregation that they were evil and that they were to leave and never see their families again. Their families had to go out a different door from them at the meeting. And I'm like, “This is it. I am done.” All during that time, it felt like there was a band around my chest, from 1998 until 2004, and that band was just getting tighter and tighter and tighter to the point where I was breathing very shallow breaths. And at that meeting, that was it. There was no more breath to be taken. So I said, “Okay, this is it.” I told my brother on Saturday, “I need you to go to St. George and rent a U-Haul and drive it to my house.” And I made plans that day that I was going to have this big confrontation with my sister and my husband, and I was going to tell them why I was going to pack up and leave. And I was really scared. And that morning I got up and my sister and husband came to me and said, “We are going to go to St. George today.” And I said, “That is fabulous. Fantastic. You go.” Haha. So they left, and my brother pulled a U-Haul up to the front door. And in broad daylight, I'm loading out beds and boxes and everything. And it would've been unusual enough that people would've been asking questions, but by this point people were used to seeing people get kicked out, so they just kind of kept quiet and just watched. It's like people didn't dare have conversations. So I was loading up my vehicle, and my brother took my U-Haul and drove to St. George to the house that I talked somebody into renting to me over the phone, because he couldn't tell over the phone that I was a deviant.
AA: Oh, wow. Okay.
SD: So he took my things and went to St. George, and I loaded my kids up into my car and I drove around to each of my family members, because I was so close with them. And giving them up was probably the thing that kept me there longer than anything, was knowing that I would never see them again, that they would not be allowed to talk to me. It was like pulling off my skin to go tell them goodbye. And I said, “I know you're not going to be allowed to see me. You're not going to be allowed to talk to me. But I just want you to know that I love you and that my door is always open to you. I won't impose myself on you, but my door is always open to you, and here's where I'll be.” So I left town, and I thought it would be the last time I would ever go there. Life has a way of throwing us curve balls. On the way to St. George, I'm nearly to St. George, and my phone rings. It was my husband, and he had gotten home. We'd crossed paths on the way, and he called and said, “What do you think you're doing?” And I said, “I left you a big, long letter that explains everything. I know you know that I do not believe in this. I don't believe in Warren Jeffs, I don't believe in what he's peddling. I can't live that way. And you know as well as I do that if I don't believe it, then I'm not welcome there anyway.” He said, “I just want you to know that–” everybody called Warren Uncle Warren. He said, “I called Uncle Warren and told him what your letter said, and he said to ask you where you think you're going to get your blessings from.” And I said, “You can tell him from me that I don't need the kind that he dispenses, but if God needs me, she knows where I am.”
AA: I love this. That's amazing. Did you have that prepared or did you just think of that on the fly? Because that is funny.
SD: I don't think I had it prepared. You have to know that in those moments, and for four years from when I started to lose my faith and trying to reconcile everything, and my baby is medically fragile and everything, I'm spending so much more time in my amygdala than I am in my prefrontal cortex. Everything was fight or flight. It was chronic toxic stress from all of those things, so I don't remember planning many things. Except for the things that were about survival.
AA: Yeah, yeah.
SD: I had to plan my survival and my kids' survival. But as far as those kinds of things, I don't have memories of them.
AA: Ah, that totally makes sense. Wow. So then, yes, keep going.
SD: I arrived at my house, and this is in February, so the middle of winter, and I'm unpacking, but my mom and dad showed up. My brother and his wife, Donia, who's one of my best friends, Donia Jessop, everybody knows that she's the mayor of Hildale. They showed up and they helped me unpack, and they helped me set up my furniture and they made sure that I had food and that my house was warm and that my kids were safe. And they didn't leave until 1 or 2 in the morning. And I just remember them driving away, watching them and saying to myself, “Well, dammit, if I had known you were going to be like this, I would've left a long time ago.”
AA: Yeah, wow. Oh my goodness.
SD: And it was so great because after that, those four particularly did not shun me. They would come and see me. But the rest of my family, not so much, particularly at first. But they didn't, and my mom was at my house all the time. It was so courageous of her, and I honor her for teaching me that, for teaching me that family is so important and that we don't give up on people. Because based on what we were being told, I didn't have any reason to believe that she was going to do something else. So that was huge for me. That was huge.
AA: That's incredible. And I think it's so touching, too, back up just a little bit, picturing your brother helping you. And I know that's something that maybe we'll talk about in a minute, is that people look at polygamy and think of women as victims and men as villains, just really flat characters. I think it's so beautiful to picture your brother being the one saying, “I will help you.” And taking a risk, honestly, that he was hiding your stuff for you, not knowing how that was going to work. And it sounds like both of your parents came and helped you and didn't shun you. What, how beautiful.
SD: That really was beautiful. And I love that you brought that up. I hope we come back to it about the men, because I say this all the time, my brothers were born into the same soup that my dad was born into. They did not as adults choose to go and take on this dogma and this ideology about their place in the world and women's roles. These were things that they were programmed to do since conception. So the idea that men are evil because they had the temerity to be born into the wrong system is really, really problematic to me.
AA: Yeah, for sure. Let's make sure that we do circle back to that. I think it's really, really important. For now, let's pivot and talk about this huge transition in your life. Now you're on the outside. What did you find on the outside once you were there?
SD: Thank you for asking, because this is one of my favorite soap boxes.
AA: Please, please. Preach.
SD: All my life, I had heard about how evil the outside world was, for a number of reasons. One of them is that they can wear whatever they want and all these evil behaviors. But one of the charges laid at the feet of mainstream society was that women had equality with men. I heard these words that “women rule over them” in different ways. Women are judges and women are leaders of businesses and women rule.
AA: And that was bad.
SD: And that was bad. That was not what God intended. As anybody with a cursory examination of the Bible will tell you, this is not what God intended. So I'm like, I'm leaving this patriarchal, very misogynistic society, and I am a feminist, and I am so excited to take my rightful place in this egalitarian world. I just can't wait to see all the places I will go. Haha. So you can imagine my dismay, my horror, and not a small amount of anger to discover that the outside world was not really different from the FLDS.
AA: Whoa.
SD: I mean, that sounds harsh, but I stand by that. I will tell you, I did not find structures that were egalitarian. I did not find places where women were treated with the same respect as men. I didn't find any kind of equality. I found a lot of talk about it. Oh yes, women have the same rights, but when it came right down to it, the hidden societal rules and codes, the covert messages were the exact same. And I'm just like, “Well, at least the fundamentalists are honest.” They're overt about it. Mainstream society is covert. If you look at our politics and our financial systems and our social structures, we don't have the representation that looks like our society. We don't have 50% women in our legislature, it's 75% men. How is that egalitarian? How is it that we have representation? We don't, when we have people that are making rules and laws about what women's bodies are allowed to do. Are they women? No, they're not. And so I'm encountering this on a daily basis.
And because I came from, I'm going to say a different planet. I came from a different planet and I had all of these ideas about what this world looked like. So for it to be so obvious to me, you know, I'm encountering these walls that are invisible, but they're definitely walls. And I'm going, “Oh.” But I'm looking around at women, and women are saying things about specific things here and there, but most women don't realize how similar it was to the structure that I came from. So when I start pointing it out, even women are going, “Oh.” Because women have been socialized and indoctrinated in the same things. Only, again, it is highly coded language. It's in a look, it's in a microaggression. When I speak out in a meeting but I wasn't called upon, but a man can do it. And I'm like, “No, I can see this. Because this is fresh to me. I haven't become desensitized to this.”
AA: Wow. This is so interesting. And because of your expectations, you noticed it so much more than the fish that were swimming in their own water. You noticed it in a way that they couldn't.
SD: That's exactly right. So I'm here calling this out, and I see this look on people's faces, and I'm like, “Oh, that's not acceptable to call that out.” I'm starting to see all of these looks at me, and I'm like, “Oh, I see how we are. I see how this is.” There are expectations on women and their behavior the same way there was, only we're not saying it out loud. We're not saying the quiet part out loud like the Fundamentalists do. And the other thing that I encountered is that I keep hearing how evil Fundamentalists are because of how disempowered the women are. And I'm like, have you read the Bible? Have you read your literature? Because you are being taught the same thing. I've encountered zero religions that don't teach the disempowerment of women, but everybody loves to hate the unpopular ones for doing exactly that. And I'm like, uh, no. There are few things that bother me more than hypocrisy. So, that's the world that I joined.
AA: My goodness. That is such an important insight, and that kind of blows me away. Okay, so we talked a little bit about men and the way that these systems hurt men and that they're born into it also, and I want to make sure that we do circle back to that and talk about it. So let's just do it right now. In your view and in your experience, what are some ways that polygamy specifically hurts women? And then less commonly asked, what are the ways that it specifically hurts men?
SD: So, I'm going to disambiguate a little bit, because I think so many times when we say polygamy, we're talking about Fundamentalism.
AA: Ah, okay.
SD: And not necessarily just the way the families are configured. So I want to say a couple of things about that specifically. I believe that people really target polygamy because it is the thing that they think that Fundamentalists do, right? But Fundamentalism really is about all of the archaic rules, you know, the way God set it up in the Bible and the way Joseph Smith set it up. It's, “We're going back to those fundamentals.” So the entire system is a very patriarchal, controlling system that includes polygamy, okay? So there are polygamous configurations and polyamorous configurations that are not patriarchal and controlling. I don't want to say that polygamy as a catchall is what I'm going to talk about here, as much as patriarchy and misogyny. Because like I say, it's all one package. So, I believe that Fundamentalism and patriarchy hurt women in those ways. We are told from before we're born, it's indoctrinated into our grandmother's cells and our mother's cells and then our cells, what women's roles are supposed to be, how you're supposed to be in this life, how much control and how much choice you have in this life, and that can be very, very harmful. The same is true of men. When men are encoded from their grandfather and their father, and their mother, right? When they're encoded about what a man's responsibilities and privileges are, how a man behaves, that ties men up so tightly that they don't get to have a human experience.
So, one of the things we're seeing with men, particularly, as the FLDS has come apart, it's decimated. And when I say decimated, I mean in the literal term, there are fewer than 10% of the people who were FLDS in 1998 who are still FLDS. The rest of us have all fallen away and have tried to go out and create new lives and meaning and identity. It's a very, very difficult process. But the men are taking it the hardest because of what their roles were and how they were overtly supposed to be in charge of women, how they were supposed to overtly be the master and have women be obedient and have all this privilege, that doesn't overtly exist in the outside world. So men go to these same structures, and if they say the quiet part out loud, women are like, “No, no, no, no, no, we are not doing that.” But that's all they know. So it's really hard to give up, first of all, a ton of privilege, and then create new meaning and new identity and new belonging. This is deep, deep psychological work that most people don't have to encounter even one of those things in their life. And we, from Fundamentalism, are encountering all of them: rebuilding a new identity, rebuilding a new sense of belonging, creating new connections. And for men particularly, it is so, so difficult. And many men fail to make that. The suicide rate from our community for the young men is about 10 times higher than the national severe benchmark. So I see very, very clearly, in sharp detail, how patriarchy hurts men.
AA: Hmm. I can see this, Shirlee. And I know you were saying that in your time under Warren Jeffs, they were kicking out men left and right. And sometimes, I think you were saying that even young men were just left on the side of the road, kind of with no training and no skills and no way of making a way in the world. And as I said before, I do have kind of this… I'm so sorry to say it, but I have absorbed this bias, and neither one is good. Seeing a woman coming out of this environment and thinking, just kind of flat, my only response is “victim, poor thing,” really diminishing her multidimensionality. But also looking at a man and thinking, “What a creep, what a villain.” And it's so not fair. And if a man goes into the outside and he's treated with such anger and hostility, how is he supposed to make his way? Oh, it's just rough. Especially for a young man, like a teenager.
SD: Yeah. On that note, I have friends who are social workers, and one was working in the hospital, and she came and found me one day. She was very angry. She said there was a 16 year-old in the emergency department, and she was standing at the nurse's desk, and one of the nurses came out and she said, “That FLDS boy keeps asking for water, and I'm just going to let him know that women are not here to serve him, so I'm not giving it to him.”
AA: Oh, gosh. And that was a social worker?
SD: No, that was the nurse. The social worker overheard that and came and told me.
AA: I see. That's still a nurse! The nurse is not giving her patient water. Oh, no.
SD: Because she's going to teach that polygamist a lesson, you know? And I'm like, this is so counterproductive. We can't have basic human kindness and dignity for another human being because of the ideas that we have imposed on them. And because it's his fault that he was born into that.
AA: Yeah. Oh, this is awful. Okay, well that brings us to– I mean, honestly, truly, I wish that we could talk for hours and hours more. And I know listeners are going to be listening to this and dying to know about your entire story, and how you got yourself resettled, and how you got a job, and how you supported your kids, and are your kids okay? And what you ended up doing. And I feel sad that we're going to have to kind of jump over what was decades of your hard, heroic work of establishing your life. But maybe you can mention a little bit of that as you describe the work that you do. Now you have an organization called Cherish Families, and I would love you to tell us all about what you do.
“if a man goes into the outside and he’s treated with such anger and hostility, how is he supposed to make his way?”
SD: Oh, thank you, because it is apparently my life's work. I'll tell a little bit of the story of how it happened. So, after I had left, I'd actually put some thought into this. I thought that if I just move far, far away, like Vermont, somewhere in the country where nobody can find me, I will change my name and I will never tell anybody where I came from. And if I never hear Warren Jeff's name again, it will be too soon. Then I can just start a new life with my kids, we'll start completely over, and we will be free of this. It was such a good plan, and I really wish I'd followed through on it. Haha. But what happened was that my daughter was medically fragile, and her pediatrician was in St. George. And she had been so amazing and pretty much saved Angel's life. And so I thought, I'm going to go to St. George, I'm going to get settled, I'm going to get Angel stable, and then we'll go.
But then I started having people show up asking for help, and saying, “How did you make this work? I need to leave.” I had young gals sleeping on my couch. I had people I was connecting with domestic violence services and housing services, and it kind of started to mushroom. And I'm like, “I don't have skills for this. Somebody needs to do this work.” But I would be looking around at organizations that were out there “rescuing” the polygamists, and I don't have any fondness for the word “rescue”, because it's so disempowering. But that's what I would see. I would see this big disempowering, like, “I want to rescue you.” And what that means is, “I'm going to take off this mantle of this bad religion and I'm going to impose the right one on you, and therefore all of your problems will be solved and you will be worthy of dignity and services once you look like me.” And then in that effort, they would put people on television right after they left and they'd make them say horrible things about their family and about their very own DNA. And they'd make them choose what they were going to do with their lives and choose that they were opting out of their families. And I'm like, “That is just as harmful as what Warren Jeffs did. I can't send anybody there. Somebody's got to do this.” I kept looking around saying, “Somebody's got to do this.”
And finally, I'm like, “I am somebody.” So I decided to go back to school. I enrolled in the University of Utah's bachelor of social work program, because they had a distance ed program here in St. George. And while I was doing that, trying to figure out how to make this work, I got connected with the Darger family, and they said they were also doing the same thing. And I'm like, “Yes, but how are you doing it?” So we had a lot of conversations about how we do this, what's our modus operandi, what's our motivating work. How do we do this in a way that's confidential and trauma-informed and evidence-based and strengths-based? How do we preserve people's right to choose what they want while they're receiving services? And the more we talked, the more I realized that I can work with these people. So I got connected with them. They already had the 501(c)(3) file, they had this paper organization, so I was able to just come in and we started working together. As soon as my bachelor of social work program ended, five days later I enrolled in a master’s of public administration program.
AA: Wow.
SD: Because I'm a sucker for punishment. So I'm writing grants while I'm doing this program, and we're starting to do this work of what Cherish Families does. And we have grown it. It started with two volunteers in 2014, and now we have 21 employees and a budget of about 5 million. And we've done work in every county in Utah, 17 states, and Canada and Mexico.
AA: Wow.
SD: So we're doing a ton of work, including crime victim services, family and peer support, mental health, housing, basic needs. We do robust case management to help people make choices in their life and move toward goals, so really helping families move from crisis to thriving with any input that they choose.
AA: Wow. So are these people who come to you? Do you have someone just walk into your office and say, “I just left everything I know and I'm trying–” like basically the past version of yourself? Is that a typical person who shows up at your doorstep?
SD: Many times it is someone who has left, but we also have people come in who say, “I don't want to leave my family.” We are serving all of the different groups, not just FLDS and the Independents as well. Sometimes we'll have somebody come in who says, “I don't want to leave my family. I want to remain with my family, and we need some tools. We're having conflict about this,” or, “We can't pay our rent,” or whatever. So we don't make decisions about what they're going to do with their lives, we just say, “Oh, you want therapy? You want to be empowered? Here are our tools.” It's a smorgasbord. But many times it is somebody who's like, “I just left my family. I just left everything I've ever known. I'm living in my car. I need help getting my kids back.” So we'll have people walk in. We also get referrals. We have an amazing network, so we work really closely with all of the state agencies, like the Department of Workforce Services. We get referrals from them, from hospital systems, from universities, from school districts. But word of mouth really is the best way we get referrals, because people are naturally suspicious of helpers because there's been so much exploitation. So it’s one person telling their sister, “Go to Cherish Families. They will help you.”
AA: One thing that was so touching to me when I learned about Cherish Families, and I have to say, I've told you this privately, but it was challenging for me to step into that space. I had to confront, like I said, a lot of my own ignorance and a lot of my bias as an outsider. And one thing that I sat with, and it really sank in for me how important it would be, I just put myself in the shoes of one of these people, a person who's grown up in this environment. And seeking help and how important it would be for me to have someone looking at me from across the desk that understood me and had been where I had been. And even some of the people who work at Cherish Families are currently plural wives, right? And that might challenge some listeners to think, like, “Wait, what?” But if you just step into those shoes and think with empathy, because of the exploitation that's happened, like you said, the hostility from the outside world, they're just not going to ask for help if they feel judged and condemned and othered.
SD: Right. And having the assumptions that you are broken, you are bad, you are wrong because of where you came from. It has been a huge part of what we've done to try to make sure that we have peer support. Someone who's been through what you've been through, that you can come in and we are not going to be putting you on television. We are going to understand. You can use language that you would have to explain to somebody else outside. We're going to be able to pick up right with you and lean on. It's a big deal and very, very important. There's a level of respect and understanding people's resiliency and strengths when they come in. That is so important for us to do. We do have current plural wives working, because, again, these are women who have gone out and received services and then made a conscious choice to remain in their family configuration. And I think it surprises people, knowing what a feminist I am, that I was on the side of decriminalizing polygamy.
AA: Yeah. Talk about that.
SD: Because those seem to be opposing arguments, but I really actually believe those are the same argument. And as long as polygamy has been a crime, all it has done is drive people underground. All it has done is disempower women who are born into it. And I was born into it, I had no choices, I had no resources outside, and I was treated with the requisite hostility of a felon when I would go outside. What I realized is that if we can take away the curtain that's an excuse for denigrating people, and then actually make it so people can live their religion in the sunshine, then it widens women's choices. Because I had to stay within my community and my very structured life, my choices were to grow up and get married and have children. Those were my choices. Because I didn't have the luxury of being part of the rest of the world. So for me, I'm in this world with Lawrence v. Texas, the 14th amendment, the right to privacy, the right to free speech. The way the law was written in Utah was that a person is a felon if they cohabitate with somebody who's already married and they say they are married. Because polygamists don't get marriage licenses, so there's no way to come at it from the bigamy angle. You illegally married two people with marriage licenses. There's no way to enforce the law, so the way they had to write the law was that you say you're married, you purport to marry, and you cohabitate. Now, both of those things are protected in the Constitution.
So from my perspective, adult women get to choose if that's what they want to do. They get to say, “Yes, I choose to cohabitate with this man and his wife.” And nobody gets to tell them differently. For me, it's incredibly infantilizing to tell a woman, “You don't get to make that choice because I'm a feminist.” You hear how that comes across? It's like you're removing someone else's choice because you want women to have choices. And then the other argument against that is that women don't really have choices because that's how they're indoctrinated. They're told this is what God wants. And I'm like, and that's what religions the world over do to women. Every woman is indoctrinated. We are all under hypnosis from the media, from our religions, from our families, from our schools. We're all indoctrinated. Nobody has free will when you look at it that way. So you don't get to just say, “I'm going to infantilize women from this group because I don't like how they were indoctrinated, when I'm going to let everybody else be indoctrinated and let them make their choices.” I'm like, “No.” If we can make it so women can grow up, they have to be adult women and make that choice, then I'm going to be as respectful of that choice as I am for women who opt into monogamy within Christianity. Do I think that she's going to be fully empowered? No, I do not. Do I get to make that choice for her? No, I do not. She gets to make that choice as a functioning human. So for me, if I can make sure that people can live their religion in the sunshine, that kids get to go to public school, that they get to be exposed to other things, then if they opt into it, it's fully informed. But if we force people to live underground because we don't like that, then they don't get to be fully informed ever. So, it was so important to me that we stopped making it so that women can't even report a crime if they had opted into that. And it's made a big difference.
AA: Hmm. And it was decriminalized in what year, Shirlee?
SD: In 2020.
AA: Largely thanks to your efforts and people who were working with you, right?
SD: Well, there were a lot of people who worked on it, but yes. Lieutenant Governor Henderson was a senator at the time, and she was the one that pushed that. She came– and proximity's a beautiful thing. You get proximate with people, and suddenly you understand them and all of a sudden they're not as evil as you thought. And she made an effort to go and visit a bunch of different communities, a bunch of people who'd lived through it. She came to Colorado City in Hildale. She heard the stories of the raid and what that did to people, and how people were afraid to go to the doctor and were not allowed to go to college, and all of these things. And she was just like, “This is so counterproductive.” And thanks to her courage, we now have people who are reporting crimes. It's amazing.
AA: It is really amazing. Really amazing. Well, Shirlee, this has just been incredible, and I'd love you to tell us, as we wrap up, how people can get involved with Cherish Families. What do you need from people? Because I really do think this is something concrete that people who are listening can do to break down patriarchy. This is an organization that explicitly does that work, and I would love people to get involved and make donations. Tell us how we can get involved. And then I'll have you leave us with some of the most important points that you want listeners to take away.
SD: Okay. Well, we need a lot of help. Like so many other nonprofits this year, we've had lots of funding cuts. But our demand is increasing, so we are struggling to cover our services. We are at about a $500,000 deficit right now, so we really are struggling. Cash is key. Go to the website, donate, become a monthly donor, even if it's a tiny amount. That makes such a huge difference. And we can also use volunteers if you know how to do social media. That's not my expertise, and yet here I am. There are ways that people can volunteer. People can also be allies, in that when they hear people talking about my people, my community or other communities, and people are repeating things that are not true but are harmful, you can speak up and say, “Actually, that's not true. These communities represent humanity at large in that there are some really good people and there are some really bad people, but you don't get to define everybody by the few bad people.” I think it's really, really important to understand that that condescension, that judgment, it just does not help. It doesn't bring people out, it doesn't increase choices, it doesn't empower women. And then I think I talked about the hypocrisy. If you're looking at yourself, if you are consuming religious literature that espouses what you don't like about what the Fundamentalists are doing, maybe turn your gaze inward and let's fix this problem systemically. I am all about it. Let's fix this systemically and then we can go clean up the unpopular groups as well. But I think that becoming an ally, becoming educated and understanding that most people who are currently practicing Fundamentalism and/or polygamy, because it's not necessarily the same, that they were probably born into it. They probably did not just decide to become evil and do something you don't like.
AA: Mm-hmm. Yes, certainly not. Well, again, thank you for those takeaways. As I've said before in the conversation, this has been not only enlightening for me and interesting to learn about, but actually humbling for me. And I've done some work in other contexts on examining my own motivations and trying to not be a condescending helper from the outside. There are all kinds of ways that people have done that that have ended up causing more harm and messing things up, and this is one that I had never really examined in myself before. So, I'm so grateful for everything that you've taught me and so impressed and just astounded at what you've done with your life and with Cherish Families. I'm going to become more involved with Cherish Families. And I'm grateful to know you. I can't thank you enough for everything you've done, Shirlee. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This was just incredible.
SD: Thank you. I know it can be really uncomfortable to look at things like that, and it's so important. Thank you for doing that and having the courage to bring this up.
