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Mormen Green prosecuted for polygamy
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A JUDGE refused to dismiss bigamy charges against avowed polygamist Tom Green on Monday, allowing a case that focuses attention on the state's tacit acceptance of plural marriages to proceed with jury selection.
Polygamist life style
Before Green, 51, was ever charged, the Green family paraded its polygamist life style before national audiences for more than a decade.
In the mid 1800s Mormons fled persecution in Illinois, following the historic Oregon trail and settling in Utah. But as the area grew and sought statehood, polygamy was banned by the church and members who practise it are excommunicated. Estimates put the number of practising polygamists at 30,000, mostly in Utah, although some live across the border in northern Arizona.
Their homestead, called ``Greenhaven'' in the western Utah desert is 100 miles from the nearest town and reachable only after navigating a string of unmarked dirt and gravel roads. Ironically, Green's appearances on talk shows and news programmes may be the unravelling of his own desired quiet life style.
Home is a ramshackle collection of trailers and sheds. Meals are served in shifts by ''sister-wives'' while teams of more than two dozen children do chores and schoolwork. It is not a typical American family and therein lies the problem and a looming court case.
"You have to be very organized,'' Hannah Bjorkman Green, one of five wives of Tom Green, says matter of factly.``Every mother will pretty much get her children dressed and ready for the day. We've got one mother cooking all day, one mother tending all day, one mother doing laundry all day. We try and have two mothers go to town each day to work or we telemarket here at home. We rotate doing that.'' she adds.
Polygamy a "religious practice"
The roots of polygamy, the practice of one man taking multiple wives, go to the early days of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon church is formally called. Green has argued that taking five wives is for serious, religious reasons and not a frivolous decision.
``My crime isn't so much being a polygamist in Utah, there are tens of thousands of those, and that's an old Utah tradition. My crime is being a polygamist in Utah that didn't stay in the closet, didn't keep his mouth shut and stay hidden,'' Green, the father of 29 children, told Reuters earlier this year before a judge clamped a gag orders on all parties in the case.
Worried about government intrusion
Green at times sounds like a civil libertarian. ``Does the government have the right to poke their nose in peoples' bedrooms to see who is sleeping with who? What business is that of the government? It's not just an issue of religious freedom of polygamy but it's the issue of freedom of everybody from government interference in their personal lives,'' he said.
Prosecutors argue Green's public proclamations and marrying and then divorcing the wives are a ``scheme'' and proof of his guilt. ``It's a civil rights issue,'' a passionate sounding Green replied. ``It's the issue of whether or not women have the right to choose to associate with the man of their choice whether he's associating with someone else or not,'' he said.
Fate
Green is believed to be the first man prosecuted for polygamy in Utah in nearly 50 years and he has said his outspoken support for the practice on national television is what prompted prosecutors to charge him.
Green has been charged with four counts of third-degree felony bigamy and one count of criminal non-support. The felony charges carry a prison term of up to five years.
Green is also charged with first-degree felony rape of a child, for allegedly having sexual relations in 1986 with a 13-year-old girl, whom he married, an offense that carries a prison term of five years to life. No trial date has been set for the rape charge.
Green's five wives, three of whom are pregnant, are expected to testify for their husband, wife LeeAnn Beagley told Reuters. But she said it had not yet been decided if Green himself would take the stand.
The trial, originally in tiny Nephi, Utah, was moved to a bigger courtroom in Provo, just south of Salt Lake City and is being prosecuted by Juab County District Attorney David Leavitt, the brother of Utah Gov Michael Leavitt.
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