Racist remarks by Church Leader causing a big stir

The voice of Warren Jeffs, leader of the nation's largest polygamous church, can be heard on various news media Web sites today, and that is causing quite a stir. The Eldorado Success, a weekly newspaper in Schleicher County, Texas, first posted the audio clips of Jeffs on its Web site, www.eldoradosuccess.com. The tapes feature a soft-spoken man's voice saying the black race is a cursed, immoral, filthy people devoid of blessings. "It's not going over really well here in Schleicher County," said Randy Mankin, publisher of the Eldorado Success. "A lot of folks worked pretty hard to improve race relations here, and this is kind of unsettling." Jeffs is the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which practices plural marriage as a central tenet. Over the past year, the FLDS church bought 1,600 acres about four miles outside of Eldorado, a town of around 1,900 residents, and began building a community that could house hundreds of people. [more]