My mom and I ran into the women at the fabric store. As a teenager, I pitied their horrible taste in fashion - the swooping bangs and flour-sack dresses. At the time, fitting in seemed most important.

Now, I realize the limits of polygamous wives' and daughters' lives are much more profound than mere dowdy dressing.

So initially, I was all for the raid on Eldorado. I support any closely monitored law enforcement action that targets the welfare manipulation, borderline pedophilia and emotional and physical abuses of polygamy.

As the raid drags on, there are troubling signs of civil rights violations. Holding more than 500 women and children indefinitely and putting their husbands and fathers under house arrest while looking for one abused girl seems like overkill.

And the Schleicher County sheriff's complete disregard for the sanctity of the sect's temple is disturbing. Immigration officials didn't storm a Chicago church, even though they knew an undocumented immigrant activist was using it as her political platform. I can't imagine state police forcing their way into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' temple in Salt Lake City.

But the rules are different for an ostracized society.

"That one person has been harmed does not seem to justify what has occurred," says Brian Barnard, a civil rights attorney in Salt Lake City who sued to make polygamy legal. "No matter what euphemism is used to describe their removal from the property, all those folks have been taken into custody, their lives and families disrupted and their liberties trampled upon."

After a few days of looking at pictures of girls with pompadours and billowing dresses meekly carrying babies and pillowcases and garbage bags of belongings into their latest barrack, I've concluded this show of force won't change a thing.

Whether the 16-year-old girl claiming abuse turns out to be a Mary Ann Kingston or an Elissa Wall - reluctant child brides-turned-polygamy whistle-blowers - remains to be seen.

Unfortunately, her courage won't matter in the end.

The 1953 raid on Short Creek became a public relations nightmare and changed little. Polygamists still returned to their counterculture ways.

Wall's lawsuit led to Jeffs' conviction as an accomplice to rape. But the dirty old men of Colorado City and Hildale still have their pick of nubile, teenage brides.

As it is practiced, modern-day polygamy makes kings of self-appointed religious leaders. Prosecuting a few for impregnating girls who could be their granddaughters will make a nice show. But we only have to look at history to conclude that, in the end, the public shaming will drive the practice further underground - this time out of Texas and into another rural locale.

I am the great-granddaughter of a Mormon polygamist. As I heard the story told, it was reasonable on a hardscrabble frontier for widows and abused wives and surplus women to be married to a single man for purposes of salvation and procreation. But even the LDS Church acknowledges that time has passed.

The problem is the Woodruff Manifesto left some wiggle room: the hereafter. Leaving open the possibility that polygamy will be lived in heaven allows "true believers" like the Allreds and Barlows and Greens to rationalize their way of life.

Tapestry Against Polygamy co-founder Rowenna Erickson, a former plural wife in the Kingston clan, believes if the Mormon church fully renounced polygamy, the modern-day enclaves would further unravel.

"It would be the beginning of a new era," Erickson says. "This is about many, many years of a lie evolving to convince men that God wants them to do this. It's all a big hoax. It's about sex."

The patriarchs of polygamy probably would keep their young brides regardless of what South Temple does. After all, it's easier to control uneducated, financially dependent women with a few toddlers hanging on their skirts.

But until the gaping window is closed on heavenly polygamy, Mormon leaders cannot completely disavow the practice. And the rest of us will continue to be embarrassed for living in the birthplace of plural marriage's most twisted modern-day interpretations.

walsh@sltrib.com