'Apostate' challenges radical FLDS sect with civil rights lawsuit

http://www.modbee.com/2012/07/15/2282506/apostate-challenges-radical-flds.html

Sunday, Jul. 15, 2012

'Apostate' challenges radical FLDS sect with civil rights lawsuit
By JOHN M. GLIONNA
Los Angeles Times


COLORADO CITY, Ariz. -- Isaac Wyler is one of the unwanted ones.
For years, he has endured a cruel banishment from those he once considered brethren - followers of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Out here on the desert high plains, guarded by big-shouldered buttes, church outcasts are dismissed as "apostates," ostracized in life and condemned to burn in hell after death. Wyler was among several members banished by church leader Warren Jeffs in 2004 for unspecified sins.

"Jeffs told the women and children not to say goodbye to their husbands and fathers," said Wyler, a horse rancher with a white cowboy hat and piercing blue eyes. "It was his will that we now simply failed to exist."

But Wyler, 46, has refused to disappear. He and others collected evidence of church harassment that has become the basis of a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking to protect nonbelievers from the church and from civil and law enforcement authorities said to be under its control.

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