I have been following the reports on the raid on the polygamist sect since it broke. The whole bothered me from the beginning because I found it quite surprising that the state could not locate the girl who made the phone call despite having removed all the children from the compound. Three weeks into this the police still have not located this girl, although they have found that a significant number of girls have been or are pregnant. My hope is that the police do locate the girl who made the call, not just for her safety and well-being, but to make sure that the girl is in fact real. While that may strike some as an odd concern, the handling of this case is in and of itself rather peculiar, so I cannot dismiss the possibility that someone faked the phone call just to give the authorities probable cause to raid the sect.
That said, what has bothered me more is the way this case has been presented. If we were to listen only to the news, men and boys in the sect enjoy some bizarre level of substantial privilege while only the women and girls are physically beaten, mentally brainwashed and sexually abused. The only real acknowledgment of”abuse” against boys in the sect came in the form of accusing them of being miny rapists:
Texas officials allege the sect encourages adolescent girls to marry older men and have children, and that boys are groomed to become future perpetrators.
That probably explains why it took Texas authorities three weeks to acknowledge that some boys may have been kicked out of the sect (we are talking about boys as young 12 and 13 years old) and that boys within the sect maybe have been physically and sexually abused:
In written and oral testimony provided to lawmakers Wednesday, officials with the state Department of Family and Protective Services said interviews and journal entries suggested that boys may have been sexually abused.
One would think that in a situation where there is allegedly wide-spread abuse, where members of the sect are kicked out while their family remains behind, where whole family groups are passed around as forms of punishment that it would not be that much of a stretch to imagine that the same men and women in positions of power in the sect would emotionally, physically and sexually abuse the boys as well. Had Texas authorities not stumbled onto the journals no one probably would have bothered to ask the boys if anything had been done to them.
That is how the sexual abuse of boys goes unnoticed.
“My hope is that the police do locate the girl who made the call”
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695271894,00.html
They did and it was all a hoax. So now hundreds of kids have been ripped from their parents and forced to live with strangers because the Texas gestappo (who all along wanted a pretext to raid the compound) are now even placing newborns with strangers. The police admitted that as soon as the FDLS started to build in that town, they were making plans to raid them.
I don’t like the FDLS beliefs but this is just religious persecution. If an adult living their believes the tenants of FDLS, they are found guilty of child abuse – no specific evidence needed.
If they can present evidence on a case by case basis, then fine. That is not what they have done. They used a bogus phone call, easy enough to authenticate before the raid to take over. Then they dragged them off to a kangaroo court where all the normal rules and laws treating each person as an individual where thrown out and the mothers treated as a single borg – equally guilty of an unspecified instance of offense. This is unconstitutional. That judge wouldn’t allow them to individually present their cases.
Even if they are guilty, this does not bode well for the justice system nor does it offer help to true victims.
Well, the article says that authorities are still trying to figure out if this is the woman who made that phone call. It does seem entirely possible, which in and of itself makes it increasingly disturbing that the police did not bother to actually investigate first before raiding the sect.
That said, even while respecting the tenants of a given religion those citizens are still bound to the laws of the land. The laws of Texas state that no children under a certain age can consent to sex, so even if the child could legally get married the state would be within its rights to remove the child should sex occur.
The problem as I see it is that without probable cause it is a constitutional problem to bring charges against anyone from the sect or to keep the children in state custody. Technically, all the evidence gather could be thrown out if the sect can demonstrate that the state acted with bias and malicious intent (which the state has apparently admitted) and if it determined that the state had no probable cause as a result of a (potentially) fraudulent phone call.
However, that does not seem very likely, so yes, this does create a legal standard in which the state could deliberately violate religious rights with weak or fabricated evidence.
Morally speaking, so long as the children are not taught that there faith is a lie and do not have their identities further shattered, it is probably best that they not go back into the sect.
I see a big battle coming over whether the age of consent is valid as a means of determining whether male-on-female rape was committed.
I agree that they should have shored up the legitimacy of the call first. I also agree this raises substantial First Amendment issues, however uncomfortable their teaching make me personally.
http://reason.com/news/show/126240.html
This is a different take on the situation than the main stream media portrays. You may not agree with his conclusions. He does however point out the conflicting statements that authorities continue to make to the media (are they covering for more wrongdoing than what they have admitted?)
If you read this link, you will see that the age of consent in TX is 17, and age of marriage 16. So even if some children are pregnant younger than that, where is the evidence that all are guilty of this crime? Also, how do they know the father’s aren’t also minors. Then two children would be ’sexually abusing’ each other (as is common in every American high school.) Is adhering to a belief and practicing the illegal tenants of the belief the same thing? Not according to the law of the land.
Unless they have proof each parent is guilty of a specific crime taking them away from their parents (however cultish/odd/archaic they may be) with out specific proof terrifies me.
In many countries including our “ally” Pakistan marriage at menses is the norm. If it really is immoral to do this, then we ought to be sanctioning them for widespread child abuse instead of propping up their leaders. I’m not comfortable defending this position but I am even more uncomfortable with ripping kids away from unpopular parents.
I have followed this case very closely and have concluded that the Texas Authorities have committed a gross crime against the constitutional freedoms of American Citizens.
Freedom of religion is one of the most cherished of American values and that value has been ridden over roughshod by a blatant display of bigotry and intolerance.
The initial phone call was a hoax (remember weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?), and no specific charges have been brought. The whole community has been labeled ‘guilty until proven innocent’ and by default the families will remain torn apart until proven innocent.
Unfortunately the ego of people like Barbara Walther will go to any lengths to prove their point and save face, even if it calls for great suffering and the undermining of the rights of every one of us who call this country our home.