OUR OPINION: New chapter in FLDS saga
 
San Angelo Standard-Times
 
SAN ANGELO, Texas — It wasn’t so long ago — only about seven years — that few Concho Valley residents had heard of an obscure religious sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that practiced polygamy and whose members dressed as if it were the 1800s.

Then word came of a compound and temple being built on land near Eldorado, then came a raid by law enforcement on the Yearning for Zion Ranch that resulted in the removal of more than 400 children, and over the past year several FLDS members have been convicted of sexual assault on underage girls.

And last week the story advanced even further, with the arrival of Warren Jeffs, the man many members of the 10,000-member sect still regard as the "prophet." The president of the FLDS from 2002 until his conviction in 2007 for arranging marriages between adult men in his church and young girls, as well as other charges, Jeffs for a time was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

His appearance at the Tom Green County Courthouse on Wednesday was surprising only in its suddenness. It had been known since his conviction in Utah was overturned earlier this year, and after his attempts to fight extradition to Texas were unsuccessful, that he would come here to stand trial for his own alleged "celestial marriage" to a young girl.

Jeffs is being held in Big Lake, 65 miles west of San Angelo, surely a surreal arrangement both for him and for his jailers. It puts the Reagan County community in the national media spotlight perhaps unlike any time since Santa Rita No. 1 began gushing oil nearby nearly 90 years ago.

Jeffs’ arrival marks the approaching crescendo of the FLDS saga in West Texas that has moved from apprehensiveness about the group among Schleicher County residents to curiosity to astonishment at the criminal charges brought against 12 of the church’s men.

Seven cases have been disposed: Two men pleaded guilty and five were tried and convicted, three in Eldorado and two in San Angelo. A pretrial hearing for Jeffs on Wednesday is expected to deal with the venue for his trial, and that place will be ground zero for the most FLDS media attention since the April 2008 raid.

As bizarre and incongruous as the story has been, the Jeffs trial at last will help to bring it all into focus.
 
gosanangelo.com
Originally published December 4, 2010
 
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