“I think it’s a form of pedophilia hiding behind a religion as a protection,” Carolyn Jessop told TODAY’s Matt Lauer from Salt Lake City on Tuesday. “There’s just a desire to control and manipulate and torture people, and religion is just used as the cover.”
As well as:
“Everything you did was monitored and controlled and everybody reported on everyone else,” she said. “It was a police state. You were not allowed to make decisions in your life. I had no power over my life or the lives of my children. It was a terrible way to live.”The alleged control began in infancy.
“The method he would use with infants was a form of water torture,” Jessop said of her former husband. “He would spank the baby until it was screaming out of control, and then he would hold the baby faceup under a tap of running water so it couldn’t breathe. He would do this repeatedly. Sometimes, it would go on for an hour, until the baby was so exhausted it couldn’t cry anymore. This method he called ‘breaking them.’”
I have no idea what Carolyn Jessop, (who must be a very strong, brave lady to have escaped a bunch of demented control nuts,) actually thinks about polygamy, as she never talks about it in the article. She mentions torture, pedophilia and mental abuse under the guise of religious conformity, but doesn't mention polygamy, negatively or positively, once during the article.
Wouldn't a more honest phrasing have been "Woman Describes Escape From Abusive Religious Sect"? Not enough shock value? How about "Woman Describes Escape From Pedaphilic Torturers"? If you don't like the adjectives in those, try it old school: "Woman Describes Escape From Cult".
Maybe I'm just being a bit sensitive, but it seems to me it might be just as accurate to have the headline read: "Woman Describes Escape From Typhlobasiacs".
