So, the state of Texas has been slapped for going after polygamists.
I’m often amazed that people seem utterly convinced there is no polygamy problem in the United States. It’s actually quite common in both Mormon and Fundamentalist Christian circles throughout certain states. Yes, they’re radical separatists from the mainline versions of their faiths, but there are hundreds of thousands of them. The arguments that what they’re doing amounts to child abuse and fraud are strong, but the fact is that authorities usually ignore the problem because they’re afraid of the bad press–and, frankly, because a lot of prosecutors are probably afraid of what will happen if the courts are pushed too hard on the question of whether or not banning polygamy violates people’s 1st amendment rights.
Any time they do polygamy busts, they wind up having to make tough choices and calls that could go either way, and the chances of bad or at least embarrassing press are very good. Which is why it’s mostly a problem you don’t hear about–authorities are not real fond of making these busts in the first place.
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Okay, I’ll bite,
So how often have you been often amazed that people seem utterly convinced there is no polygamy problem in the United States and what exactly do you know personally about polygamy busts ?
The simple fact is, is that 130 children got yanked out from their maternal parent’s arms for no valid legal reason as ruled by a Texas appeals court.
I think we should exclude the " which is why its mostly a problem you don’t blah, blah, blah" for the moment.
Please continue.
I’ll go out on a limb here. Â
I’ve thought this through from every angle I can imagine, but I still don’t see what the problem is with polygamy. Â
Can someone educate me?
One of the problems with polygamy is it leaves a whole bunch of young men with no hope of finding a wife. There is also the problem of being able to support that large a "family".
I also don’t see the difference legally between this and some city dude with 3 or 4 kids by as many different women.
The Appeals Court ruling was unrelated to "going after polygamists", but related to the wholesale seizing of over 400 children from the care of their parents.
For all the bad stuff that goes on in those compounds, and I’m sure there is plenty and it should be addressed, if that taking of the children were allowed to stand, the likelihood is that the children would have been more harmed than by what goes on in the compound.
Govt bureacrats don’t make good parents for other folks children. Can you imgaine them using the same logic about underage parents and seizing the children in entire inner city neighborhoods when there was so much press about "children having children" a few years ago.
McKiernan: God, you’re an obnoxious man. But since I can be obnoxious too, I guess I shouldn’t point fingers.
Anyway, from the very earliest days of Dean’s World, going back 5 or 6 years now, we’ve been semi-regularly involved in the debate over gay marriage/civil unions. While I favor some sort of state recognition and protection of these relationships, I have always granted what I consider the fair arguments made by conservatives. One of the things I have long argued is that if we enshrine same-sex unions as a Constitutional Right (as some courts have been trying to do), this will almost certainly lead to polygamy next receiving such recognition. Invariably, advocates for gay marriage pish-tosh that and insist there is no polygamy problem in the United States and this is simply never going to happen. To be blunt, they’re full of it: there are hundreds of thousands of fundamentalist Christians and Mormons in the United States who do practice this.
I notice a similar phenomenon here on Dean’s World when we are having one of our regular go-arounds about the eeeeee-vul Muslims, small minorities of whom practice polygamy. Whenever there’s a story about polygamy in their ranks, it’s treated as some sort of unique Muslim Problem. Which is also laughable. (Although I got the choicest laugh of all from the lady who claimed that Fundamentalist Christian Polygamists are not Fundamentalist Christians.)
Anyway, I’ve been reading stories, and seeing news and documentary stories, for decades now on plural marriage in America. I’ve posted about it many times. Sorry you’ve missed or forgotten it. Furthermore, I’ve got lots of family in law enforcement, as it happens.
Here is a story from last year on one case. I’ve been reading about cases like it for probably about 20 years. If you haven’t, it’s probably because you haven’t had the interest.
Everyone else: The problems with polygamous sects is that they are often guilty of what many would consider child abuse, and, they often practice what amounts to welfare racketeering. Which is (part of) why there are laws against the practice in the first place.
Not that this automatically makes all polygamous relationships abusive and rife with fraud. It’s just part of what appears to be the tendency when the practice is widespread and openly condoned.
From the linked article:
"…the court seemed to have demolished a main pillar of the state’s argument for seizing all the sect’s children, instead of only those for whom there was proof of physical abuse."
This has always been the main problem I have had with this case. My position, and your position, on polygamy is irrelevant. And I have to agree with the court. Without any evidence of individual child abuse, the state had no right to seize every single one of the children of those families that way.
Imagine how you would feel if the state had seized every single child living in your subdivision, apartment complex, or housing development, just because of a few cases of child abuse the state CPS merely thought might be going on there.
In my opinion, the Texas state authorities have gotten it backwards. In our system the state first gets the warrant based on probable cause, then searches for the evidence, and then takes whatever action is necessary based on that evidence. In this case, they got the warrant alright. But then they got the cart before the horse by taking the action before they got the evidence. And now they are still desperately searching for evidence enough to justify this hard-handed action – evidence that so far, has not been forthcoming.
Now, I will grant that in the beginning, the state of Texas CPS might have had the children’s best interests in mind when they committed this overzealous atrocity. But it’s gone way beyond that now. It has now become a nationwide big story, and if there is one thing that I have learned in my lifetime it is that politicians and bureaucrats are easily stampeded by news reporters.
Now the best interests of all of those children will take a back seat to the best interests of the CPS bureaucracy. They will do anything to save face – including ruining innocent lives.
In my opinion, the best thing the state of Texas could do right now would be to return all of those children to their parents and apologize for the screwup. But I know that will never happen. Without the intervention of the courts, the CPS bureaucrats will happily ruin any or all of those families lives for no other reason than to avoid saying "we were wrong".
If I was one of the parents, the first thing I would do upon the return of my children is immediately remove my family from the jurisdiction of the state of Texas.
Okay,
I’m sorry about the obnoxious and short.
greenwell says it the best.
Our first instinct should not be to assume that a member of a religious sect is a criminal.
Our first move should not be to kidnap someone’s children because we find their lifestyle to be distasteful.
I’ve been saying it all over the net — the government should not be in the marriage business. If the government wasn’t deciding what marriage is, then the ruling in CA wouldn’t have happened. If the government left marriage up to the religious leaders, then it would be up to FLDS to decide who is and isn’t married.
And I think we would all be a lot better off.
Phelps’s last blog post..Dancing
dean,
would you say that there’s a kkk problem in america if the kkk had a member roll of 100,000?
frankly i think in a country this size you could round up 100,000 people who agree with anything. that doesn’t mean we, as a country, have a problem with all of those things. we simply can’t have that many problems.
there are 5.5 million mormons in the u.s. alone. even if all estimated 100,000 polygamists in the united states were mormon, that would still be less than 2% of the u.s. mormon population, and less than 1% worldwide. how is that "common"?
Dean,
Polygamy was not outlawed because of child abuse or welfare issues. It was outlawed because it violated the norms of the majority. At the time of the greatest conflict in the U.S. over polygamy, in the late 1800s in Utah, the women involved were not different in age from women that were getting married in monogamous relations all over the country and welfare wasn’t an issue.Â
Those may be relevant issues now, although I expect that the child abuse angle is at least partially a result of polygamy being outlawed and thus engaging in it is ‘outlaw’ behavior anyway. Those who are willing to violate the law in one way (having multiple marriages) are more likely to be willing to violate it in other ways (underage brides.) Add in that it being an outlaw arrangement requires more indoctrination to make it acceptable, and you greatly increase the odds that those practicing it will engage child abuse. I would guess that were polygamy legalized, the child abuse aspect of it would reduce to being more similar to what we see in the general population.Â
There are a number of societal issues with polygamy, but I am not sure they are any more severe then the societal issues we generally accept. Serial monogamy, single parenthood and other similar things have their cost too, costs that most of us agree are acceptable trade offs for greater freedom.Â
Dave Justus’s last blog post..Joe Leiberman in the Wall Street Journal
I also have a problem with the state claiming these people are polygamists. I agree that the state shouldn’t be in the marriage business but it is. In order for your marriage to be legally recognized you must first buy a marriage license from the state. If these people didn’t do that then legally, where is the marriage? And if there is no legal marriage, where is the polygamy? I think at most they have a case of rampant fornication and I doubt that’s illegal if every one is of age.
Dean said: The problems with polygamous sects is that they are often guilty of what many would consider child abuse, and, they often practice what amounts to welfare racketeering. Which is (part of) why there are laws against the practice in the first place.*
Well, certainly the latter can’t be the reason, since polygamy was outlawed before the welfare state was significant at all. The former, well, I don’t know – most of the early arguments against the practice that I know of basically boil down to "it’s icky/immoral" or "God don’t like it". (With a lot of overlap between the two.)
(Now, I think polygamy is usually a bad idea, and I’m not an advocate for legalizing it**, but historically, I don’t think that argument holds.
Certainly some polygamous sects act abusively, but that’s a dubious basis for the historical bans on polygamy, since they go back a very long time, to when young marriage and holding women essentially powerless was <I>unremarkable</i>.)
I’m also unsure of this "hundreds of thousands" claim. Hundreds of thousands of members of churches that say polygamy is acceptable, <I>maybe</i> (though I’d love to see the numbers); but as we saw from even the FLDS case, not everyone in such a church is a polygamist. The idea that there are over 100,000 active polygamists in the country seems unlikely – and over 200,000, to have full on "hundreds of thousands"? I’m not going to believe that without some references.
(*If there’s a way to edit comments to put in formatting, I can’t find it, so no italics for you!)
(**I mean, Jesus, isn’t one woman enough God-damn trouble?
I kid. But I’m also serious. One’s almost more than enough.)
We do indeed have a KKK problem in the United States. It was once a much, much bigger problem. Now that their membership is numbered no more than a few thousand nationwide, it’s not much of a problem, but the authorities still monitor them. And a good thing they do, too.
Polygamy wasn’t outlawed due to abuse of the welfare state, but it was outlawed in part due to the fraud that was/is often inherent in the practice, and because of the social problems it was generally seen to cause–commoditization of women and surplus boys. That it also offended moral sensibilities was of course a big part of it, but then, traditional morality typically has some basis in negative social repercussions like diseases, children not properly cared for, etc. in the first place.
In modern polygamy cults (which are quite often not Mormon, by the way, they’re frequently fundamentalist Christian instead) the usual practice is to get married, then, file almost immediately for divorce, so the husband legally doesn’t have more than one wife. That’s part of how they skirt the law.
The entire reason authorities usually get prodded into going after these cults is because of either fraud (usually welfare-related) or because of child abuse, with sexual molestation of girls and physical abuse or abandonment of boys the most frequent accusations. If you’re the authorities and you’re going to try to bust what amounts to (from the authorities’ perspective) a child abuse cult, then, you’re going to have to round up all the kids in the cult to make it worthwhile. Because basically what you’re saying is that you’ve got a widespread problem in a community because the community itself is the problem. So, most likely, to do the bust at all they had to take all the kids. They’d also have a case to be made that if they didn’t do a roundup of all the kids, then, there would be a flight risk by the unindicted abusers.
This all illustrates, as I said, why the authorities generally won’t go after these groups unless they really feel they have to. You see it in the news so seldom not because these cults don’t number in the hundreds of thousands of members–they do–but because it’s damn near impossible to go after them in significant numbers without getting massive bad press.
You could make a case that they should just give up and leave the cultists alone. But you could also make a case that keeping it illegal but mostly looking the other way unless abuses are massive works to keep a lid on it, the same way that some argue that having prostitution illegal lets authorities keep a lid on it without actually busitng every known prostitute every night she works like they could.
"The entire reason authorities usually get prodded into going after these cults is because of either fraud (usually welfare-related) or because of child abuse, with sexual molestation of girls and physical abuse or abandonment of boys the most frequent accusations. If you’re the authorities and you’re going to try to bust what amounts to (from the authorities’ perspective) a child abuse cult, then, you’re going to have to round up all the kids in the cult to make it worthwhile."
So, can I assume then that you would have no problem if the authorities had decided to seize every single Catholic child due to the recent abuse scandals within the church? **
No?
I didn’t think so.
Never forget that one man’s cult is another man’s religion. And unless there is clear evidence that child abuse has taken place, then the state should not be seizing anyones children. And right now, there is not one scintilla of evidence – other than a single hoax telephone call – that those "cult" members, as you call them, have committed anything illegal – let alone child abuse. The state has no right to be going in and seizing children and putting these families through this kind of trauma merely on a supposition. That is itself a form of child abuse – an abuse much worse than anything the FLDS members have been accused of.
And no matter what opinion me or you have about the practices or teachings of the FLDS, unless or until they commit a crime it is none of our business. Period!
(** Don’t go there. I was raised in the Catholic church so I know what it is all about. And believe you me, there are a lot of people in this country that believe the RCC is just as much a cult as the FLDS. I am not one of them, but my point is made.)
Greenell: You’re leaning too hard on the reductio ad absurdum fallacy. It does not follow that if we go after one subset of cultists who are all part of a collective crime scam, that means we will be attacking all religions.
Indeed, why not swing the other way on your reasoning? If we refuse to go after a cult group of a few hundred people that’s regularly abusing a large number of children, does that not indicate that soon we will refuse to go after tiny cults that practice kidnapping, human sacrifice, and cannibalism? Heck, if a cult makes random murder of hispanics a central part of their faith, I’m sure you’ll say that we need to protect them so we can make sure the Presbyterians remain unmolested at their spaghetti pot luck dinners. Right?
"One man’s cult is another man’s religion" is a bullshit statement. People who think that don’t know what the word “cult” means. The assertion that there was "not one scintilla of evidence" of widespread abuse is also false; the authorities in fighting the appeal are pointing to multiple accusations of abuse, and objective evidence like 18 year old girls with children 3+ years old.
An example of a very real and truly dangerous cult might help bring this argument into clearer focus.
And no, there is not one scintilla of evidence that the FLDS are murderous cultists. I use the example only to show, in graphic manner, how silly it is to suggest that one man’s cult is merely another man’s religion. No. Cults are called cults for a reason, and it’s not just because they’re weird or unpopular.
"…You’re leaning too hard on the reductio ad absurdum fallacy."
Yes, maybe I am. I use it sometimes to make a larger point. But just because something is defined as a fallacy in the formal rules of debate, doesn’t mean it can’t be useful in an internet comment thread.
"The assertion that there was "not one scintilla of evidence" of widespread abuse is also false; the authorities in fighting the appeal are pointing to multiple accusations of abuse, and objective evidence like 18 year old girls with children 3+ years old."
The assertion is not false.
First, an accusation is *not* evidence, it is an accusation. Just because someone says it, does not make it so. Now, don’t misunderstand me. An accusation is a different beast from the testimony of a sworn witness. In the case of the FLDS, there have been exactly *zero* sworn witnesses produced. And as far as I can tell from the information made public so far, the only accusation that has been forthcoming is the original telephone call that set off the entire chain of events. (I will grant that I may not have all of the information available. If you know of any other credible accusations or witness testimonies, then by all means, enlighten me.)
And as far as the "…objective evidence like 18 year old girls with children 3+ years old." goes, I would agree with you if the authorities had produced any, you know, actual 18 year old girls with children 3+ years old. So far, they have not.
And that begs an even larger question. How many under age girls are there in the larger Texas population that have children? Are the authorities seizing those children and separating them from their mothers? If not, why not? Based on the number of under aged FLDS mothers produced by the Texas authorities so far, it would seem to me that a young girl would be better off with the FLDS community than in San Antonio, Austin, or the greater Dallas metroplex. (… or greater Detroit for that matter.)
Look, I am not a champion of the FLDS way of life. Like most folks I find them a bit screwy. But my opinion is irrelevant because in our system of government, until they commit an illegal act, they have the right to live their lives as they see fit.
My larger point is that, so far, the Texas state authorities have not *proven* that any illegal acts have been committed. Yet based on nothing more than a mere "accusation" – an accusation that has been shown to have been a hoax – they have seized 430 children, traumatized those children and their families, and are well on their way to ruining innocent lives just to save face.
It is an abomination that should not be tolerated in a free country.
" An example of a very real and truly dangerous cult might help bring this argument into clearer focus. And no, there is not one scintilla of evidence that the FLDS are murderous cultists. I use the example only to show, in graphic manner, how silly it is to suggest that one man’s cult is merely another man’s religion. No. Cults are called cults for a reason, and it’s not just because they’re weird or unpopular."
Okay, Dean. I get it. Any group that you deem weird or unpopular gets tagged with the name "cult" and gets compared to Jim Jones and some fictitious group that makes "…random murder of hispanics a central part of their faith." (Who’s leaning hard on reductio ad absurdum now?)
Indeed, judging by your posts on religion in general, I suspect that you might believe fundamentalist pentecostal groups such as the "Assembly of God", or the Cleveland TN "Church of God" are also cults because they believe in sola scriptura and you don’t. But that’s okay, because those groups tend to believe the same about you and the RCC. The thing is, the members of the FLDS certainly believe themselves to be a religion. And that’s all it takes for the statement "One man’s cult is another man’s religion" to be true. Whether you or I agree with them or not does not matter.
We seem to be talking past each other because you keep coming back to statements like "…cultists who are all part of a collective crime scam."
There are two main accusations against the FLDS group. The first is that they are polygamous. And the second is that they are abusing children.
You know – they may very well be both. But until the state of Texas PROVES that they are – proof through at least a preponderance of the evidence – then in our system, they are entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
And "preponderance of the evidence" does not mean seize 430 children and ship them off into the dubious state foster care system because of an anonymous accusation that a few "might" have had underage sex.
While ya’ll are figgering it all, a few points to consider:
Child protective services in the states within which they associate with local law enforcement , and the same law enforcement agencies so operate under the premise that the potentially accused are guilty until they prove themselves innocent in suspected child abuse cases.
In other words in child abuse cases, one is not innocent until proven guilty, one is actually guilty until they prove their innocence and it is not the function of the state or CPS to exonerate the accused because their primary interest is protecting those that have not reached their majority.
That is the operative mode under which local law enforcement and child protective services operate.
greenwell, your last statement may have some legal inaccuracies.
Â
"That is the operative mode under which local law enforcement and child protective services operate."
Apparently so – at least in Texas. But as I read the Constitution, that is not the way it is supposed to be. And it is a very dangerous precedent to set.
Think about it for a moment. Regardless of what you might think about the FLDS religious practices, there were 430 children – children ranging in age from infants to teenagers (and as it has turned out – young adults as well) – who were forcibly removed from their families and the only life they have ever known, and sent miles away to live with complete strangers.
Look back on your own life to when you were, say, 8 years old. How would that have affected you? For me, it would have been a life-altering traumatic event. And when I say life-altering, I don’t mean it in a positive way. For the state to have done this on a mere accusation – and a hoax accusation at that – is simply wrong.
The precedent this sets scares the hell out of me.
"greenwell, your last statement may have some legal inaccuracies."
I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV. Please show me where I am inaccurate. I’m always willing to learn.
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