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Religious Freedom Has Limits

Editor's Blog: Daily Dish

Big Love and Big Apathy

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August 11, 2008 1:16 PM by Dorothy Allred Solomon | 100 Views, COMMENTS

Warren Jeffs gets love letters in his prison cell, some of them written by the young girls he married-twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old. It's pathetic and a little nauseating to think of a pretty young woman wiling her tender life away with dreamed-up concoctions of celestial bliss with a convicted felon. Yet the desires of fundamentalist girls aren't too different from the fantasies of other young women, who are notoriously dreamy in adolescence. Such has been the subject of novels and plays throughout literary history: Romeo and Juliet, Kathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Maria and Tony in West Side Story. As long as Warren Jeffs is beyond reach-whether in a prison cell or in a grave-fusty, fickle reality can't interfere with the pristine ideal.

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Posted by Dorothy Allred Solomon

Dorothy Allred Solomon is the twentieth-eighth of forty-eight children born to polygamist leader Dr. Rulon C. Allred and his fourth wife. She is the author of several books about her upbringing, including In My Father's House (Franklin Watts, 1984) and Daughter of the Saints (W.W. Norton, 2004), the latter winning the WILLA award for memoir. The paperback version of her latest book, The Sisterhood: Inside the Lives of Mormon Women (Palgrave, 2007) will hit bookstore shelves in October.

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