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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.)