Related Research Articles
Lilburn Williams Boggs was the sixth Governor of Missouri, from 1836 to 1840. He is now most widely remembered for his interactions with Joseph Smith and Porter Rockwell, and Missouri Executive Order 44, known by Mormons as the "Extermination Order", issued in response to the ongoing conflict between church members and other settlers of Missouri. Boggs was also a key player in the Honey War of 1837.
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a Mormon fundamentalist group whose members practice polygamy. It is variously defined as a cult, a sect or a new religious movement. The FLDS Church has been involved in various illegal activities, including child marriages, child abandonment, sexual assault and human trafficking including child sexual abuse. The sect is not connected to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest Latter-day Saint denomination.
Warren Steed Jeffs is an American cult leader who is serving a life sentence in Texas for child sexual assault following two convictions in 2011. He is the president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamous cult based in Arizona. The FLDS Church was founded in the early-20th century when its founders deemed the renunciation of polygamy by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be apostate. The LDS Church disavows any relation between it and the FLDS Church, although there are significant historical ties.
Bountiful is a settlement in the Creston Valley of southeastern British Columbia, Canada, near Cranbrook and Creston. The closest community is Lister, British Columbia.
Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878), was a Supreme Court of the United States case which held that religious duty was not a defense to a criminal indictment. Reynolds was the first Supreme Court opinion to address the First Amendment's protection of religious liberties, impartial juries and the Confrontation Clauses of the Sixth Amendment.
Paul Richard Shanley was an American Roman Catholic priest who became the center of a massive sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston in Massachusetts. Beginning in 1967, the archdiocese covered up numerous allegations of child sexual assault against Shanley and facilitated his transfers to other states.
Thomas Arthur Green was an American Mormon fundamentalist in Utah who was a practitioner of plural marriage. After a high-profile trial, Green was convicted by the state of Utah on May 18, 2001, of four counts of bigamy and one count of failure to pay child support. This decision was upheld by the Utah State Supreme Court in 2004. He was also convicted of child rape, on the basis that he had impregnated his wife Linda when she was 13. The wife in question was his stepdaughter before they were married; she was the daughter of his first polygamous wife. In total, he served six years in prison and was released in 2007.
The Edmunds Act, also known as the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882, is a United States federal statute, signed into law on March 23, 1882 by President Chester A. Arthur, declaring polygamy a felony in federal territories, punishable by "a fine of not more than five hundred dollars and by imprisonment for a term of not more than five years". The act is named for U.S. Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont. The Edmunds Act also prohibited "bigamous" or "unlawful cohabitation", thus removing the need to prove that actual marriages had occurred. The act not only reinforced the 1862 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act but also made the offense of unlawful cohabitation much easier to prove than polygamy misdemeanor and made it illegal for polygamists or cohabitants to vote, hold public office, or serve on juries in federal territories.
George Reynolds was a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a longtime secretary to the church's First Presidency, and a party to the 1878 United States Supreme Court case Reynolds v. United States, the first freedom of religion case to issue from that court.
The Satanic panic in Utah is part of a broader moral panic that began in the 1980s as children in the United States, subjected to coercive interviewing techniques at the hands of zealous social workers, made unsubstantiated allegations of bizarre Satanic rituals and horrific sexual and physical abuse at the hands of day care workers. As the decade unfolded, clients of believing therapists began to make similar allegations, which are now generally seen as confabulations caused by iatrogenic therapeutic techniques such as hypnosis and automatic writing rather than the discovery of repressed memories. Despite the similarities between the allegations of adults and children, investigations produced only circumstantial, and in many cases contradictory evidence of the patients' disclosures. The court cases surrounding satanic ritual abuse (SRA) allegations were among the most expensive and lengthy in history and produced no convictions or convictions based solely on the testimony of children that were frequently overturned or dismissed upon appeal.
Polygamy is the practice of having more than one spouse at the same time. Specifically, polygyny is the practice of one man taking more than one wife while polyandry is the practice of one woman taking more than one husband. Polygamy is a common marriage pattern in some parts of the world. In North America, polygamy has not been a culturally normative or legally recognized institution since the continent's colonization by Europeans.
Wells W. Spicer was an American journalist, prospector, politician, lawyer and judge whose legal career immersed him in two significant events in frontier history: the Mountain Meadows massacre in the Utah Territory in 1857; and the 1881 shootout commonly known as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. After he left Tombstone, he returned to prospecting. He disappeared in 1885 or 1887.
Philip Edward Wilson was an Australian Roman Catholic prelate who was the eighth Archbishop of Adelaide from 2001 to 2018. He was President of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference from 2006 to 2010. From 1996 to 2001 Wilson was bishop of the Diocese of Wollongong, where he gained a reputation as a "healing bishop" for handling child-abuse scandals.
Von Gary Keetch was a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from April 2015 until his death. He was a shareholder in the law firm of Kirton McConkie and a member of the firm's Constitutional, Religious and Appellate Practice section. He defended land use rights of religious groups against state regulations, and argued against liability of religious groups for crimes committed by their members.
George Alexander Sutherland was an English-born American jurist and politician. He served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court between 1922 and 1938. As a member of the Republican Party, he also represented Utah in both houses of Congress.
Merrill F. Nelson is an American politician and a former Republican member of the Utah House of Representatives representing District 68. Merrill announced he was not seeking re-election in 2022.
Utah v. Lafferty was a 1984 murder case in the U.S. state of Utah. Brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty were found guilty of murdering their brother Allan's wife Brenda Lafferty, along with Brenda's young daughter. The case gained substantial publicity due to statements by the accused that the murders were the result of a divine revelation related to the defendant's extremist interpretation of Mormon fundamentalist beliefs.
Mormon abuse cases are cases of confirmed and alleged abuse, including child sexual abuse, by churches in the Latter Day Saint movement and its agents.
Polygamy was outlawed in federal territories by the 1882 Edmunds Act, and there are laws against the practice in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Because state laws exist, polygamy is not actively prosecuted at the federal level.
Barbara W. Snow is a practicing therapist based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. She was a central figure in the Satanic ritual abuse moral panic in Utah in the late 1980s and early 1990s.