So we find out that the supposed call from the 16-year-old FLDS ‘victim’ was actually a prank call from a woman in Colorado Springs who has been connected to similar prank calls in Colorado. After careful examination of all of the children involved, not a single substantiated claim was confirmed. But the judge decided that there was still a ‘pattern of potential abuse’ that would require all of the children to be remanded to foster care.
It’s pretty clear that this miscarriage of justice has some significant pre-raid roots that have directed the actions of many individuals. Why else would law enforcement conveniently overlook the fact that the call came from a known prank caller? Why else would the judge continue to presume some sort of systemic abuse that was otherwise never demonstrated during the trial?
I say again that the raid and the theft of the children was a coordinated effort by state authorities to force the Texas FLDS to disband. This obviously has nothing to do with child welfare or family values. These are bald-face bully tactics of the sort you expect from people wearing bedsheets.
So when the Hays County sherrifs are at hand with the Federal marshals to arrest the leader of Barsana Dam — the largest Hindu complex in North America — it makes it extremely difficult to take at face value that any of the charges against the man are real. State authorities have been demonstrating their bad faith and duplicitous ways before us for three weeks and I’m supposed to believe that this arrest is somehow not related to the fact that a very large, non-Christian “compound” happens to be in Texas?
Please note that they arrested Jeffs several months before entering the FLDS ranch, SWAT-style. Won’t it be funny when they’re in there, rounding up all those dark-skinned pagans kids in the Barsana Dam “compound” and shipping them around the state for institutionalization in a couple of months? At least when Texans find a formula that works for them, they really know how to go to town with it.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
14 Responses:
April 25th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
if dna proves ,as they say, that
numbers of women below the age of consent
were being married off and bearing children
then would that not constitute something
that the Sate might rightly intervene in?
this not to be argumentative but to
clarify your point a little further.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I’d greatly like to give the state the benefit of the doubt and assuage my badly tarnished Texan honor. The longer this farce drags on, however, the harder it is to see the good in the actions of my representatives and officials.
Polygamy is without a doubt the most obvious crime here, but in this state, it isn’t generally prosecuted unless one of the wives chooses to contest the arrangement. You don’t see SWAT teams busting down doors because someone has two wives, it just doesn’t happen.
Nominally, the actions the state has taken to this point have been limited to actions by the CPS, which has much range and leverage to intervene into any family arrangement that they see fit to obsess upon. I’m probably not seeing the successes of this agency, but my impression is that they cause far more trouble than they ever resolve, due largely to criminally neglected and underfunded social services in the state. Even if the lives these children led may have been a little different, is that difference such a problem that all of the children must be shocked into the 21st century? From farm food and family to fast food and foster care. We really leave no child behind here.
All of this is to say that if a crime has been committed, then the state will either now have plenty of ammunition by which to conduct a number of prosecutions. If no prosecutions are forthcoming, then the state will continue to look extremely crude and provincial, for all the world to see.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
A couple of comments..
I don’t think that polygamy, while illegal in the state of texas, is something CPS is investigating. What they are concerned with is sexual molestation/rape/abuse of minors.
Unfortunately CPS generally does get a bad rap particularly for situations like this. Someone puts in a call reporting child abuse, CPS must investigate. They can’t not investigate. Sadly too many calls are put in falsely by malicious or, yes, overly self-righteous people. In any case, CPS can’t not respond.
Not all children are being sent to foster care. There are in fact some who are staying in custody of their mother.
This is a muddy situation from all sides, for FDLS, for CPS, for Texas Rangers, everyone. All we have to go on is what is printed in the media.
April 25th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I was thinking that if the CPS had been investigating polygamy that there would at least be a real crime to be demonstrated. As it stands, there is a lot of rumor and expectations without any demonstrable crimes.
April 25th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
“Even if the lives these children led may have been a little different, is that difference such a problem that all of the children must be shocked into the 21st century? From farm food and family to fast food and foster care. We really leave no child behind here.”
Isn’t that the case they are using for why CPS is keeping the boys? I’m sorry, but somehow acclimating to society now with help may be better for the boys (even in a foster home, it hurts to say) than being exhiled when they turn 18.
To your original post, Iraq?
April 25th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
I keep seeing these veiled references to some ‘lost boys’ out of the FLDS crowd, but I haven’t seen anything where a real person who was once a member of the FLDS but was ‘exiled’ for being male and over 18 says something about their experience. I haven’t read about this process in any of the descriptive material about the FLDS and the YFZ ranch that I’ve come across — and this is something that has captured my interest, so I find it rather strange that everyone else seems to know about this but me.
Do you have any references to an article or a YouTube where a verifiable FLDS member describes this active culling of the pack? I’m not saying that you’re responsible for proving this to me, but I can’t really argue your point one way or the other because I don’t know what the motivations for such bizarre behavior would be.
Without further information, I’m afraid that I would have to go with keeping the boys at home with a bunch of freaky Mormons until exile as being superior to crapping them through the CPS blender and then ejecting them into society when they turn 18.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Not all children are being sent to foster care. There are in fact some who are staying in custody of their mother.
Not anymore.
State officials searched for a week for evidence of sexual abuse and rounded up all the children into mass shelters. As of Friday, the children had all been bused to foster group homes hundreds of miles away; only nursing infants still have their mothers with them.
[source]
April 26th, 2008 at 12:51 am
I do not see how the two statements are fundamentally different. I made no qualifications of which children were being kept in custody of their mothers.
April 26th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
From September 2007:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/us/09polygamy.html
And another: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/07/lost.boys/index.html
Third report, from 2005: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/06/19/polygamys_lost_boys_expelled_from_only_life_they_knew/
And Warren Jeffs’ nephew Brent has pressed charges against Warren: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4679825&page=1
Brooke Adams mentions that 85% of the children in custody are female: http://blogs.sltrib.com/plurallife/2008/04/why-more-girls.htm
April 26th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
That was very disappointing. It reinforced my previous assumption that the ‘lost boys’ thing is a manufactured media point. The only people who draw those conclusions are currently in litigation against the group, and are thus not inclined to look favorably upon any actions this group may or may not take.
Although it may be crass for that community to kick out members without assistance, but it is also not entirely distinct from what happens in many mainstream families and churches in America. It’s not illegal for a parent to wash their hands of their wayward children after 18, and there’s no requirement for a community long tormented by delinquent spawn to provide assistance or aid when they are finally free of their abuse.
I would understand a coordinated effort to deliberately weed out “bad seeds” as an entirely rational form of group self-preservation. What I don’t see is a conspiracy to fiddle with the gender balance to provide more fresh meat for old men. That’s exploitative nonsense. The 85% figure is as reliable as the one that said that all of the 12-year-olds coming out of the YFZ ranch were pregnant. Straight from CPS, I was told that was — a friend’s sister’s cousin worked there an that’s what everyone said.
If you’re going to bias your population for a specific gender, you usually root out the problem before you’ve invested 18 years in rearing — I would look for evidence of infanticide if I was going to try to make this point.
All of this is so very weird, and the worst part seems to be our expectation of extreme freakiness in any situation.
April 26th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
The NYTimes article covers a 15 year old, a 16 year old, and a 17 year old who were kicked out.
The CNN article seems to be talking about someone who did leave at 18 (21 now, left 3 years ago, when his father was kicked out.)
The Boston.com article covers another 16 year old.
The 85% figure is one that Brooke Adams, the Salt Lake Tribune reporter that Grits for Breakfast favors, was comfortable posting on her blog. Have you seen figures that number the boys versus the girls collected by CPS?
And there are, indeed, questions about unmarked infant graves in in the Hildale/Colorado city area: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0503/S00014.htm
“Most unsettling is the revelation of countless numbers of unmarked baby graves in the canyonlands attached to the FLDS polygamy cult headquartered on the Utah-Arizona border. Local residents call it “Babyland” and law enforcement’s response to human rights activists questioning the graves has been that unmarked graves are not illegal.”
Those graves are in Arizona/Utah, however, so not much risk that Texas would dig them up to count male versus female bodies.
Then again, anti-FLDS Flora Jessop has formally requested that the FBI investigate why the graveyard has over 50% of the interred bodies as small enough to be that of children. Infant deaths? Perhaps the FBI is investigating this.
The authorities in Texas at least admit that there have been federal search warrants, but do not elaborate on what may be the topic for the search: http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695269233,00.html
April 26th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
The rumors I had been hearing made it sound like FLDS had a Logan’s Run type policy that all of their sheltered, helpless boys turning 18 were turned out like wild dogs onto the street. All this was supposed to be so pedophile oligarchs could marry more child brides. On the face of it, this sounds like exploitative nonsense, so I’m curious where it comes from. Behold! It comes from folks either prosecuting or litigating against the FLDS.
The stories you gave me to read were about kids who didn’t follow the rules and were given an opportunity to work within the community or to leave. This is very different scenario from one in which a large percentage of males are ‘expelled at 18′. It doesn’t connote systemic abuse to enforce established community rules. If you were surprised to hear about 15- and 16-year-olds abandoned by their parents, then I guess your high school was a little nicer than mine.
The baby grave thing is creepy on the face of it, and may, in fact, provide evidence of a systemic favoritism toward females. Or it could be that in a culture that shuns birth control and starts women conceiving as early as possible that a relatively high proportion of still births and miscarriages occur. Again, without documentation (which doesn’t appear to exist) we don’t have a whole lot to go on.
We do know that there are 72 kids, presumably boys, from the YFZ group that were shipped up to Boys Ranch up near Amarillo. If you presume that only boys were sent and that no boys were sent anywhere else, you get an 85% bias toward girls. I don’t think diet alone could generate that sort of disparity, so the likelihood that the graves will hold the offset in males does seem more likely — if our assumptions about the male population are correct. The Boys Ranch number could simply be that of the teenaged boys, in which case, 72 is probably a pretty reasonable number. Or it could be that those are the boys in certain categories of defendants, in which case we’ve got no clue how many there are in total.
In any case, if infanticide is one of the crimes we can hold against these folks, even that is still a very different problem than abandoning helpless teenagers like unwanted pets.