Ex-FLDS mayor heartsick over Texas 'Gestapo' raid

ST. GEORGE — Former Colorado City mayor Dan Barlow — ousted from the FLDS Church in early 2004 by Warren Jeffs and asked to leave his family and community behind — is heartsick over the news he is hearing from Texas.

"I'm not a member any longer (of the church). I was cut off, but I have to speak out," said Barlow, 75, who was 21 at the time of a similar raid conducted by Arizona officials in 1953 on families living in Short Creek, a polygamous settlement on the Utah-Arizona border now known as Hildale and Colorado City.

"This is so much like an ethnic cleansing, to persecute these people," Barlow said.

Barlow said he happened to be in Jerusalem, enjoying a two-week tour of the area, when he picked up an English-language newspaper and saw the headlines about the Texas raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch.

"I'll tell you the truth, as soon as I saw that I called home," he said. "All the same, old emotions came back into my heart and mind. It's the very same thing they did in 1953."

Barlow said the flood of memories was so strong, he knew he had to do something "to help the young people at that ranch."

"Many of those young people aren't in plural marriage, they're just young people trying to live right," he said. "Those children have got to be put back with their mothers. This is so wrong."

Barlow is hoping that he can convince contacts he made during his years as mayor to help call attention to the situation in Texas. He is trying to set up meetings with political allies and others he has worked with over the years in Washington, D.C.

"I don't know what can be done, but I have to try and help," he said. "This is wrong. Texas should not be acting like the Gestapo."

Barlow's memories of the 1953 raid haunt him to this day. He was one of several dozen men arrested and jailed by Arizona officers.

"I had a 10-day-old baby girl, and a police officer told me he had a court order to take her away from me," he recalled. "They said I was teaching her to break the laws of the land."

Barlow served as mayor of Colorado City for 18 years before resigning his elected position and leaving the community, all at the behest of Jeffs who was the spiritual leader of the FLDS Church at the time but who is now facing criminal charges in Arizona, accusing him of performing child-bride marriages. He was convicted last year in Utah of rape as an accomplice, stemming from a marriage he performed between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin.