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Believe it or not, an elected official in Arizona is pleased with something the federal government did.
Attorney General Tom Horne handed out his thoughts on the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division suing Colorado City — the town on the Utah/Arizona border that child rapist Warren Jeffs used to call home — and he’s likin’ what he’s seein’.
“I am very pleased that the US DOJ has taken legal action to join us in this fight,” Horne says. “I have offered the support of my office in pursuing this case and look forward to justice being served.”
Horne’s been trying to crack down on the weird stuff going on in Colorado City for some time now, as his main focus has been trying to get the state Legislature to pass a law that would disband the town’s “police” force.
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As Horne, the experts, and the feds have claimed, the “Marshals” in Colorado City have been taking their orders from the child-raping Jeffs, even though he’s still in prison for raping children.
Some legislators saw it differently, as the bill championed by Horne died toward the end of the last legislative session, but in an attempt to remedy that, he recently doled out some cash to the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office to patrol the city, in addition to the Marshals.
Several of the things Horne’s found out about the town are included in the Justice Department lawsuit, like the FLDS dictating who gets to occupy land, the Marshals preventing women from escaping the polygamist lifestyle, and loony-lord Jeffs was running the show.
It also includes weird things like the Marshals’ mass dog-slaughter event, orchestrated by Jeffs, and Marshals threatening to arrest children for playing in a public park.
Much of the Justice Department’s lawsuit focuses on discrimination in policing, but also includes housing-discrimination allegations and the land issues.
Check out former New Times scribe John Dougherty’s saga on polygamy in Arizona to get the background on what’s been going on in the town over the years.
