On polygamy, a crackdown and a bid for legitimacy

Shurtleff has charged that young men are often driven from the communities to provide free reign to the elders to arrange plural marriages.

Sex crimes are just part of the law enforcement focus. Shurtleff's office is also investigating allegations of welfare fraud, tax evasion, and organized crime in which polygamist groups may launder money in offshore accounts.

Since the men's excommunications, three 16-year-old girls are known to have run away from the enclave. Two are in foster care in Phoenix, and the other is in state custody in Utah.

Some former plural wives have formed a group, Tapestry Against Polygamy, designed to help those trying to break free from bigamous marriages.

Vicky Prunty, a founder of the Tapestry group, was raised a mainstream Mormon but began gathering with polygamist groups. She says that after her husband brought a second wife into the home, she began to question the lifestyle. But it was only after a two successive polygamous marriages that Prunty sought aid and ultimately helped form Tapestry.

Rodney Parker, an attorney for the FLDS community, has called the probe of the sect a "complete waste of taxpayer money." Mr. Parker, who is not a member of the FLDS or the mainstream Mormons, believes the real issue is whether the institution of marriage will be extended to polygamists.

That's the issue at stake in the lawsuit filed earlier this month by a couple who was denied a plural-marriage license in Salt Lake County. The case will test the possible broader implications, beyond affirming privacy rights of homosexuals, of the US Supreme Court's ruling last June in Lawrence v. Texas.

Shurtleff filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Lawrence case, arguing that overturning the Texas sodomy law would open the door to challenges of other banned sexual behavior, including polygamy.

The state will "have to step up to prove that a polygamous relationship is detrimental to society," says Dani Eyer of the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah. "The model of the nuclear family as we know it in the immediate past is unique, and may not be necessarily be the best model. Maybe it's time to have this discussion."

But some experts say the Utah couple will have a hard time using the Texas case - which involved private behavior, not marriage - to apply to polygamy.

Andrea Moore Emmett, president of the Utah chapter of NOW, agrees with Eyre that the nuclear family has changed. "But to understand polygamous relationships, you have to understand cult dynamics. In every case of polygamy, human rights are being violated - education is denied to young girls, marriages are forced, incest and physical abuse are practiced."

• Material from the Associated Press was used in this story.

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