At least, unlike Terri Schiavo, they are alive - show us your "family values", President Bush.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1505997,00.htmlThe Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has "purged" from the sect between 400 and 1,000 teenage boys and young men. The FLDS describes them as delinquents. Utah authorities say they were thrown out to make more girls available as wives for older men in the sect.
Jim Hill, an investigator in Utah's attorney general's office ... said although the boys may have been rebellious, their expulsion had more to do with the ruthless sexual arithmetic of a polygamous sect.
One of the boys, Gideon Barlow, said he was expelled from a FLDS community in Colorado City, Arizona, for wearing short-sleeved shirts, listening to CDs and having a girlfriend. He said his mother rejected him on orders from the sect's leaders.
"I couldn't see how my mum would let them do what they did to me," he told the Los Angeles Times. After his expulsion, he attempted to give her a Mother's Day present but she told him to stay away. "I am dead to her now," he said.
Joanne Suder, a lawyer representing some of the Lost Boys in a case against the sect, said there had been "a conspiracy to excommunicate young boys to change the arithmetic so there are more young girls available for polygamy." She said some of the boys were simply driven out of town and dumped on the side of the road, leaving them traumatised. "I think anyone who finds themselves ousted from the only environment they ever knew and left in the middle of nowhere, and then is not allowed to be with their family and loved ones, and is led to believe that they can no longer go to heaven, is going to be troubled," Ms Suder told The Guardian.
Of course, they will find themselves in the US army in no time at all - offered a fast-track back to the promise of heaven.