The State’s case against the YFZ rancheros crumbles like a talc cliff. Now, the CPS has admitted in court that 9 of the disputed 27 “underage pregnant girls” were actually older, it turns out that the 14-year-old in the group isn’t actually pregnant.
Super-Kudos to Scott Henson for really staying on top of this whole fiasco. Even the stuff he merely suspected at the beginning has turned out to be ominously correct. At this point, if the State said that the YFZ women preferred Colgate over Crest, I’d be suspicious that the choice was rigged or the real answer was changed. But if Scott Henson were to report that the YFZ women sprouted wings and flew themselves to Utah, I would immediately post it in my blog like God’s own truth.
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14 Responses:
May 21st, 2008 at 2:06 pm
If the guv had any backbone — or wasn’t so beholding to the Baptists and their ilk — he’d call a halt to this mess, just because of the projected cost and blatent incompetence of the CPS droogs — and at least one judge. And I’m really in agreement with Scott that Schleicter County should eat the cost of this smelly little pogrom.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Mmm. I don’t yet see any particular reason why I shouldn’t maintain my view that the YFZ folks were nuts and were behaving in a damaging and illegal way towards their children.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Yah - me either. “9 of 27 were actually older” means 16 were underage. I understand that it has been a nightmare just figuring out who is who with the whole thing.
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:43 am
Uh, actually, there were 27 girls that CPS “disputed” their age based entirely on appearances — despite documentation provided by the YFZ folks, which CPS dismissed as ‘fake’. Strangely, as each of these girls has gone to court, CPS has quickly admitted their real ages as being 18 or over. The only reason that only 9 girls have been shown to be older is that only those 9 have been in front of the judge so far. There’s really no reason to presume at this point that any of the 27 girls were actually underage.
As far as the ‘underage pregnant girl’ demographic goes, this value was once “60% of the underage teens”, and later it was “five” and still later the disputed age girls were added in to make “31″. Of the five girls once mentioned, one was highlighted for being 14, but it turns out that she wasn’t actually pregnant, but had simply refused a pelvic exam so CPS assumed she was pregnant.
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:09 am
I can’t argue that all Mormons aren’t nuts, so I would be a bad person to try to convince you of that otherwise. But “damaging” and “illegal” are both clearly in dispute.
Illegal: If things were really as perverse as all of the rumors had been, prosecution would have been like shooting fish in a barrel. As it stands now, the state doesn’t even have any active indictments on the matter, even after the extensive fishing expedition they went on, so it’s unclear why CPS is even involved.
Damaging: Frankly, I expect that your attitude toward Catholics isn’t far removed from that of the YFZ folks, so I can’t be sure that you’re not just reacting to the practice of religion as a community function. Consequently, your measure of “damage” in this case may be inappropriate or even irrelevant from other perspectives.
In any case, your attitude is a great example why everyone is supposed to be assured of due process. The big problem with CPS is that they bypass due process, so they can take any crank call or prank message and use it as a reason to remove kids from houses. Like they did at the YFZ ranch.
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:20 am
Well, I suppose I ought to read the news a little more. So, I did some reading this morning. So far I can only see a cluster-f on the state’s part. Yeah - the connections with sex offenders will definitely raise the red flags and cause one problems. Believe me, I know that…
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:00 pm
AUSTIN, Texas (KXAN) — The Third Court of Appeals has ruled that Child Protective Services did not have the right to remove children from the Yearning for Zion ranch last month.
The ruling comes as a result of a document filed by Texas RioGrande Legal Aid last month. The TRLA is the largest provider of legal aid in Texas, on behalf of 48 FLDS mothers that TRLA is representing in their child custody cases.
“The way that the courts have ignored the legal rights of these mothers is ridiculous,” said TRLA attorney Julie Balovich. “It was about time a court stood up and said that was has been happening to these families is wrong.”
In the decision, the Court ruled that CPS failed to provide any evidence that the children were in imminent danger and acted hastily in removing them from their families. According to the Court, “The existence of the FLDS belief system as described by the Department’s witnesses, by itself, does not put children of FLDS parents in physical danger.”
TRLA will be holding a press conference in front of the courthouse in San Angelo Thursday at 1:30 p.m.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:09 pm
What happened to the culture of systematic and fraudulent theft of government cheese which was reported early on? Depending on the bias of your news sources, which I leave for Xephyr to self-report here, all that actual crime stuff takes a back seat to the clarion call of protectionism. CPS may not be the right agency to have acted as point, and certainly their tactics are fucked up, but, if there’s evidence that this whole crew was conspiring to collect welfare checks by misrepresenting the nature of their family structure and culture, then they had to be raided and taken into custody by Feds of one stripe or another while that is sorted out. Is there a government agency we would have rather performed this maneuver? Say, one with less training and sensitivity? Maybe FEMA should handle the next Wacky Enclave Raid. Do we imagine that when the FBI takes a community into custody, they let the families stay together? This situation was fucked up top to bottom but there’s more to it than is hitting the popular press.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
It turned out that only a few old and disabled people were collecting welfare of any sort and the ranch on the whole paid all taxes it was due. They weren’t even using the school system that they were paying so much money into. The welfare fraud rumors were all discredited pretty early on.
As far as whether there could have been a less adequate federal response, I agree that the situation has certainly worked out better than it could have been if ATF or ICE hotheads had been involved. All the same, it would have been a more adequate state response, if there had been real crime, to dispatch real law enforcement authorities to follow due process to arrest and prosecute said crime.
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:37 pm
All the same, it would have been a more adequate state response, if there had been real crime, to dispatch real law enforcement authorities to follow due process to arrest and prosecute said crime.
Agreed!
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:28 pm
At least one person disagrees with your conclusions here, which seem rather pat to me as well.
http://contentlove.livejournal.com/1099738.html?thread=7342810#t7342810
I think at least one of you ought to point at some sources; it suits your agenda to dismiss this angle I think, so, with respect, I’ll not accept so easily your redirection. Discredited by whom? Let’s sprinkle a few facts in with the rhetoric, just for flavor, shall we?
There seem to be a few here, but it may be no more than merely a more substantial sounding set of opinions:
http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy5.html
also
http://www.swc-cfc.gc.ca/pubs/pubspr/0662420683/200511_0662420683-4_7_e.html
in particular the section marked Social Assistance
and
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=281915
local (to us) news
Bottom line: it was an inelegant snafu to separate children from mothers. But this is a community which has conspired together to defraud the government, stealing YOUR money and MINE using a religious justification. I’d love to see you draw up a plan for prosecuting that did not involve DNA testing and (at least temporary) isolation of kids in order to interview them away from parental and non-parental cues…
May 24th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Sorry for the delayed response. I blame work.
If you type ‘flds welfare fraud’ into Google, Rick Ross’s site is the first thing that comes up. I also found a natty bit in Slate that keenly summarized the primary rumors. I can’t wait until Google has a ’sort by bullshit’ filter.
This AP wire article from May 15 quotes the Judge of the county proclaiming that the YFZ ranch had paid its taxes on time. On April 28th, the Stateman published this rebuttal of the welfare fraud rumors. They determined by simply calling county officials that there was, in fact, hardly any welfare money going into the ranch.
I don’t think anyone needed to draw up any plans to do anything to those people. I haven’t seen any evidence that they’ve been mean to their kids or taken any of my money before the state decided to prosecute them. According to this breakdown, we’ve already flushed $7.5 million away in a state that already does next to nothing for the poor, sick, or disabled.
I don’t even want to get into trying to find links for all of the horror stories about those poor kids in the incompetent clutches of CPS. It was a horrible culture shock to them that will probably turn them into a generation of FLDS true believers (if they weren’t already). Whatever the state had hoped it would accomplish to eliminate this group has only succeeded in making it much, much stronger. So if you already didn’t like their theology, just wait until they control the western half of the state.
May 24th, 2008 at 11:35 am
As the author of a political blog, you should be careful what you wish for.
I spent 40 minutes reading as many different pages on the Rick Ross site as I could, about half of them on subjects I have some experience with, and half of them on “cults” that I don’t know squat about. I come away from that reading impressed with the integrity and commitment to unbiased news aggregation used by the editors of the Rick Ross staff. I’m mystified why you call bullshit– unless it’s because there’s no evidence in support of your unshakeable defense of the FLDS crew? I understand your view of Government’s ideal societal role as being starkly different than mine, so I tentatively conclude that you are actually in support of using welfare to re-distribute wealth without undue scrutiny. Though I disagree strongly with this stance, I confess that many many people bring this particular belief with them to the polls and if they’re in the majority, then, we end up with a cultural status quo that is soft on welfare abuse. There’s no absolute judgement to be had here; we may have to just agree to disagree.
The other articles you cite are similarly inconclusive. My point about welfare fraud is not at all mediated by the AP wire article you reference, the Statesmen “rebuttal” was weak and un-authoritative, and while the cost of the bungled CPS raid was excessive, it shouldn’t be used to distract from the real possibility that this community has conspired to criminally defraud the government– and by extension every citizen who pays taxes. DO you feel that as a society we should only conduct criminal investigations that aren’t expensive? I’ll agree that the Slate piece was sensational and weak, good job with that link anyway.
I want to reiterate that I think you and I are in essential agreement regarding how poorly this investigation was conducted, how much unnecessary trauma was prosecuted on these families, how inappropriate it is to make moral judgements about alternative child-rearing or marriage models (providing they are self-sustainable anyway.) It seems like you’re focused on one part of this problem, and don’t want to let it go. I have wondered on several occasions what your reaction would be if your daughter entered a spiritual community where she was directed by the guru to get pregnant as wife number nine, but I’ll admit that line of inquiry is highly speculative and probably without bearing on the FLDS case.
I like matching minds with you, you’re respectful and more reasoned than most, and you always spur me to do real research and careful thinking. I’m sorry that job of yours kept you from examining Rick Ross’ work more closely. I admit I let several things slide today in order to give this thread due diligence and the fact I could get away with that gives me an unfair advantage in an exchange of this sort. Much love to you brother.
edit
Oh, and though I don’t share the FLDS theology, it doesn’t seem any nuttier than anybody elses, and at least they have a “social experiment” that seems to work– and thrive– within a certain context, compared to others which are perhaps closer to home. They can control as much of whichever states our representative democracy allows them to get away with, and it’s all the same to me. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work with politics in America?
May 24th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
We seem to agree that the situation is atrocious and yet we bicker over Buddha’s shoe size. I, too, enjoy these discussions, and appreciate the clarity of your writing of late. It may seem that I’m some kind of apologist for these folks, but I haven’t had to apologize for their marriage practices or their cultural preferences or their theological prejudices. These people have so much bad press that by simply countering the most heinous stuff I bet I sound like an evangelist.
I’m really neutral over the FLDS. Your last graph perfectly encapsulates my feelings towards them. The excessive state actions against them inspired me to look very critically at the state’s rationalizations. At face value, the state’s argument is ludicrous: even with a festive dose of gullibility and a dash of innuendo it’s difficult to see any real crime going on. Most of the arguments I’ve seen against the FLDS start with accusations that could curl your hair but have turned out to have no validity whatsoever. It’s difficult to get worked up about the rumor de jour when so many have turned out to be gossamer fantasies.
I wanted to briefly address your concern regarding my attitudes towards welfare, but I don’t know what this ‘brevity’ thing is. As such, and since it actually has no bearing on this matter, it will instead become the topic of a whole ‘nuther thread.