'Polygamous Community Defies State Crackdown'

article by TIMOTHY EGAN here.

COLORADO CITY, Ariz., Oct. 19 - One year ago, Arizona authorities set up shop in a double-wide trailer here at the edge of the nation's largest polygamous community, trying to bring at least a semblance of secular law to an American small town like no other.

Theirs was the first independent government presence in half a century at this settlement straddling the Arizona-Utah border, a place frozen in a 19th-century frontier theocracy inspired by the early Mormon Church.

But the twin towns of Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, continue to defy the law, the authorities and dissidents say: under the direction of leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, women are still being removed from their husbands and assigned to other men, and girls under 18 are ordered to become brides of older men on a day's notice, all despite the presence of full-time outside law enforcement.