Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [179]
To hear myself speak about these customs in front of a roomful of people who had grown up in “normal” homes, outside of the FLDS, was strange. I felt conflicted about some of the things we discussed. Even though growing up in the FLDS had hurt me in so many ways, I still felt there was a lot of good in many of the church’s followers. It was difficult and maybe a little embarrassing for me to explain how we had lived, how we had learned, and how we had loved when I knew that it was extremely foreign to almost everyone in the room. Although I realized that it was part of the professional atmosphere of the courtroom, the jurors’ unchanging expressions made me a little uneasy. I couldn’t read what they were thinking, and I tried to keep my focus on Craig Barlow so I wouldn’t get flustered.
I was asked to explain how children of the FLDS were taught to treat people of the opposite sex, and I replied—“as snakes.” I detailed how if someone was forced to leave the community, popular speculation was that they had behaved in an “unclean” way. That for all our reserved behaviors, people of the FLDS, like people in any other society, had never been free of gossip and social assumption. I tried to show the members of the jury what it was like to grow up in that world, illustrating that to touch or look at a boy in an “unclean” way was a major offense.
By the same token, I had to explain the immediate shift in male/female relations once marriage occurred. No matter the age of either party, a couple would spend their entire lives premarriage with no romantic or sexual contact with anyone. After the union, there was a drastic change, just as I had experienced. Suddenly, within as little as a few hours, a child would go from having absolutely no sexual understanding, experience, or basis of discussion to being told that it was time to lie down and make a baby. The point was made clear through Warren’s teaching of “bars up, bars down.” Before marriage, a woman is to keep the “bars” and her defenses up, and as soon as she is married, she is to let the “bars” down completely and give herself fully to her husband.
I blushed a little when I was asked what I’d been taught about female and male anatomy and about sex. Of course I had to tell them that we hadn’t heard a word on either subject in any context. Once married, I explained, women and girls were to give themselves wholly to their husband and obey his every word. If you refused, eventually you lost your home, family, society, and everything else.
As I sat on the stand, the first pieces of evidence were presented. They played tapes of sermons Uncle Warren had utilized in our school curriculum as well as what we listened to at home. The first segment was from a recording made on November 23, 1997, of a home economics class, in which Warren explains the marriage covenant from In Light and Truth. His tone placed a soft lull over the entire courtroom, but the words were just as stunning as ever. When he arrived at the part when the bride takes her groom to be her “lawful and wedded” husband, he explained: “Do you give yourself to him completely? That means fully, no halfway, no going back. You are to obey him as you obey the law. Your covenant is to God and the prophet. Loyalty to them is expressed through obeying your husband.” The next words stung even all these years after I’d been forced to marry Allen: “You are literally his property.” And that was how it had truly been.
Reliving