SANDY, UTAH — The polygamist sect preached that Dan Fischer was a heretic who had turned his back on God's chosen children.
But for Enos Deloy Steed, who was banished at age 17 for kissing a girl, Fischer was like a guardian angel, the kindest man he had ever met.
Steed's father disowned him and left him wandering southern Utah in search of menial work. Fischer gave him a place to live -- and volunteered to put him through college.
"He gives us a fair shot in the world, a chance to have a life, because he can relate," said Steed, now 22 and set to graduate in November. "It's really great that someone is willing."
It can take a long time to unlearn the tenets of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which forbids the color red, claims man never landed on the moon, and has allegedly forced pubescent girls to marry old men. (The FLDS split from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints long ago after the Mormon Church disavowed polygamy.)
Former FLDS members can count on loving support from Fischer, a onetime polygamist who invented a popular tooth-whitening formula in his barn and uses his resulting fortune to fight the sect and help fellow outcasts.
The 10,000-member FLDS "has become the Taliban of America," Fischer said.
The sect attracted national attention when Texas authorities raided a compound in April and seized more than 400 children after allegedly finding pregnant child brides.
A Texas judge ruled last month that the state overreached in taking the children. Most of the children have been returned to their parents while a criminal probe continues. A grand jury in Eldorado, Texas, is soon to hear evidence of adults marrying girls, which could lead to indictments of sect elders.
Fischer, 59, secretly practiced polygamy for years in the Salt Lake City suburbs, maintaining three wives and fathering 16 children. But he chafed under a church leadership that he considered increasingly authoritarian and "goofy," and he broke free in 1995 with his second wife, Leenie, the one he truly adored.
Well-off thanks to his dental company, Ultradent Products Inc., Fischer could have distanced himself from his polygamist past. Yet he felt that someone had to stand up to Warren Jeffs, whom the church considered prophet -- and after the church disgraced Fischer's father, he said, he realized it had to be him.
