A couple of days ago I posted about the HOPE organization and their efforts to help the "lost boys". I was impressed by their neutrality and their focus on helping not judging. The article also mentioned two powerful groups who are voices for polygamy that are NOT connected with FLDS. Principle Voices and the Centennial Park Action Committee. Principal voices is headed up by two women, one of which is Mary Batchelor. She gave a speech in April where she addressed the situation occurring in Texas. Mary defines herself as an "Independent Fundamentalist Mormon". She is NOT FLDS as she mentions in her speech below. This is a transcript of her speech from back in April.
blogspot.com/2008/04/mary-batchelors-introductory-comments.html
* 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.
Our great disappointment is that we never were able to encourage the FLDS people to come forward.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
A post script to this speech is that the FLDS leadership met with these two groups recently. A formerly unheard of thing.
