The Power of a Kiss

 

It happened in April, 2003, at a town meeting in St. George, Utah, hosted by Dixie College. Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was the principal speaker. All was going well. The senior Senator from Utah had the crowd eating out of his hand when Bob Curran, co-director of Help The Child Brides, asked Senator Hatch if he was aware that young girls 13 and 14 were being forced into marriages with older men in nearby Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona.

According to an article in the Deseret News, dated April 18, 2003, Hatch replied: "I wouldn’t throw accusations around unless you know they’re true. I’m not here to justify polygamy. All I can say is, I know people in Hildale who are polygamists who are very fine people. You come and show me evidence of children being abused there and I’ll get involved. Bring the evidence to me."

Sonja Blancke, a spunky grandma newly arrived in Utah, said she and her husband arrived late at the meeting. "Bob Curran had the floor trying to get Hatch to address the issues of polygamy. He [Hatch] was so rude to Bob that I thought I could simply not let him get away with that. It took me awhile to get the floor, but I finally stood up, addressed the Senator and let my questions fly. [The] confrontation was simply spontaneous. I asked if the reason that he did not enforce the laws against polygamy was the fear that it would bring national attention to the great state of Utah."

"I think he was so shocked that I was so assertive that he didn’t quite know how to handle me, and I would not give an inch. Some of Hatch’s supporters were screaming at me to shut up and sit down." Sonja yelled back, "No sir, you shut up and sit down, I have the floor."

When the meeting came to a close, Sonja decided she would walk up to the Senator and shake his hand, but still let him know she wasn’t going away. For her, the issue of spousal and child abuse was a sensitive subject. At age 18, a non Mormon, she had entered into an abusive marriage with a Mormon boy. For 13 years she endured extreme subjugation while being coerced into complying with all the Mormon rituals including a temple marriage. Finally she found the courage to leave. Building a new life was not easy, but she worked hard and advanced from a simple saleswoman to Assistant Vice President of Security Pacific National Bank in California. She is now retired.

Sonja elbowed past some men she assumed were Senator Hatch’s bodyguards. She introduced herself and said she appreciated the time he gave her, but she wanted him to know "who I am and that I was not going away, I am going to stay in your face ....."

The Senator suddenly reached out, grabbed Sonja, gave her a bear hug and kissed her on the cheek. Then he said, "I just love you!"

Sonja said, "I was somewhat stunned as it did not fit with what had just happened."

Senator Hatch’s kiss on Sonja’s cheek indicates that the Senator is an accomplished and innovative politician. Although the kiss defused Sonja, it did something else, she became active in Help The Child Brides.

On August 11, 1998, Senator Hatch was interviewed by the Salt Lake Tribune, the subject - polygamy. A transcript can be found on the Internet.

The Senator said he was opposed to polygamy and supported the LDS Church ban against polygamy.

When asked: "What’s your view of polygamy? Do you think it’s strictly a religious belief?" He answered: "I have no way of knowing that. I have met some of our constituents who are polygamists. I found them to be – the ones I know – to be very nice people. Very hard-working, very dedicated, very sincere about their religion. But to make a long story short, where there are allegations of incest, rape, sexual violence, violence against women, abuse of children ... I don’t care what your religious belief is. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what your status in society is. There’s no excuse for it. And the laws should be enforced against those types of things. Whether you’re a heterosexual, a polygamist, a homosexual, whatever."

Senator Hatch went on to say, "I happen to feel that a legitimate argument can be made that Reynolds vs. United States was wrongly decided, and its progeny since. I think you can make a legitimate argument that it was wrongly decided. [Reynolds vs. United States was a supreme court decision that in essence, removed plural marriage from the realm of religious freedom.]

I suspect the Senator Hatch’s thinking about polygamy pretty well personifies the general thinking of most native Utahans which seems to be, thin out the bad ones and leave the rest alone!

During Tom Green’s prosecution, The Salt Lake Tribune published a story about Governor Leavitt [now Director of the EPA] having polygamist ancestors.

For a Utahan to have polygamist ancestors is no big deal. Probably at least one-half or possibly two- thirds of native Utahans are second, third or fourth generation polygamist offspring.

Utah fundamentalists think that if you have polygamists ancestors you should automatically defend plural marriage to justify great grandpa. Fundamentalists also think that because plural marriage was once the central tenet of the LDS Church, all Latter-day Saints should defend the practice. They do not accept the fact that the LDS Church is a living church with continuous revelation. Mormon fundamentalists, like Muslim fundamentalists, believe that their original doctrines should not be changed or tampered with.

A few days after Sonja’s confrontation with Senator Hatch, Vicky Prunty, a "career apostate" and director of Tapestry Against Polygamy, said she went to the office of Senator Hatch and attempted to make an appointment, hoping she could bring to the Senator’s attention important facts about wife and child abuse in polygamy. Vicky said she was responding to the Senator’s statement, "...bring me the evidence and I will get involved." However, Vicky said she was put on hold for three months and was never able to meet with the affable Senator.

Senator Hatch states that the legal argument is there to invalidate incest and bigamy in Utah.

 

The above statement, reported by Christopher Smith in The Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 27, 2003, is reminiscent of Senator Hatch’s earlier remark that Reynolds vs. The United States was wrongly decided. Following is an excerpt from Christopher’s article:

A Supreme Court decision that tossed a Texas law banning consensual sodomy by homosexuals may also invalidate Utah's constitutional ban on polygamy and other state laws prohibiting incest and bigamy, says Sen. Orrin Hatch.

"The legal argument is there," the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman says of the precedent the high court set in a June ruling that the anti-sodomy statute unconstitutionally infringed on individual rights. "The current Supreme Court ruled that whether a majority of the public opposes a particular practice as immoral, it's not sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting that practice."

Just as troubling to Utah's senior senator is the ruling's potential to legalize same-sex marriage. "I'm always concerned when the Supreme Court creates new rights out of thin air that are not in the Constitution," the Utah Republican said in a recent interview. "I believe God sanctioned a marriage between a man and a woman and this court decision is being interpreted by some to fly in the face of that."

There are Three women’s organizations [Tapestry Against Polygamy, The Center for Public Education and Information on Polygamy  & Help The Child Brides] working to solve the "polygamy problem," which is abuse of priesthood authority and abuse of women and young girls, most noticeably, forced child bride marriages. But it wasn’t until three major newspapers, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Spectrum [St. George, Utah] & Phoenix New Times, took public notice and Utah State Attorney General Mark Shurtleff took judicial action that the women’s groups were taken seriously.

In my soon to be published book, Polygamy Under Attack, From Tom Green to Brian David Mitchell, I explore alternative solutions to the "polygamy problem," one of which is "decriminalization."

From a writer’s point of view, decriminalization of polygamy between consenting adults is probably the most interesting, intellectual, subliminal, but controversial solution to the "polygamy problem."

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