Texas still fighting to keep kids away from their mothers -- despite no evidence of harm

I can see Texas taxpayers being hit with a huge damages bill at the end of this. Just watch the lawyers start talking about pain and suffering, for a start. Then multiply that by the big number of people victimized by the official goons. Texas is in such a deep hole now that they will probably have to go to the Supreme Court in a desperate attempt to escape what's coming for their illegal actions -- but that will just cost the taxpayers even more in the end

The Texas Supreme Court ruled today that the removal of 468 children from a polygamist sect on grounds they were at risk of abuse was unwarranted. The ruling upholds a Texas appeals court decision on May 22 that state authorities had had no right to remove the children from the sect because it had not proven they were in imminent danger. It was not immediately clear if the children would soon be returned to their parents. Observers said the case could make its way to the US Supreme Court before it is resolved.

Officials raided the sprawling compound of the reclusive sect on April 3 and took more than 450 girls and boys into state custody amid allegations of systemic sexual and physical abuse. Officials said girls were being "groomed" to accept sex with their middle-aged "spiritual husbands" as soon as they hit puberty and boys were being indoctrinated to perpetuate the cycle of abuse, at the ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) near Eldorado, Texas.

But the Texas Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas Department of Protective Services overstepped its authority by removing children who were not in "immediate" danger of harm. The state high court today upheld that decision, denying an appeal by Texas authorities who said they needed to remove the children from the ranch to ensure their safety. "On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted," the ruling said.

It said Texas child protection authorities took possession of "all 468 children at the Ranch without a court order". "The Family Code gives the district court broad authority to protect children short of separating them from their parents and placing them in foster care," the high court said. It suggested Texas authorities had at their disposal other methods to ensure the safety of the children, including "restraining a party" from taking a child outside a certain area and "the removal of an alleged perpetrator from the child's home". "While the district court must vacate the current temporary custody orders by the court of appeals," it added, "it need not do so without granting other appropriate relief to protect the children".

The FLDS split from the mainstream Mormon church when polygamy was banned. The group holds that plural marriage is a way to get to heaven. Mainstream Mormons now excommunicate members who engage in polygamy and reject any connection with the FLDS. The ranch was purchased in 2003 and built by Warren Jeffs, the leader of the group, who was convicted last year by a Utah court on two counts of being an accomplice to rape, relating to the forced marriage of a schoolgirl to a cousin.

Original report here





What did CPS think it was doing?

Comment by David Friedman

The FLDS case is not yet over; the Child Protective Service has appealed the court decision to the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, I think it's worth looking back at the history of the case in order to figure out what CPS thought it was doing and why it thought it could get away with actions that a court has now found to be totally without legal justification. Two possibilities occur to me.

The first is that the CPS knew its actions were unjustified but was relying on the prejudice of the population and the court system to get away with them. On this reading the real objective was to drive the FLDS out of Texas and/or to destroy it. That is consistent with at least some of the evidence. It seems clear that, about three years ago, a local legislator introduced a package of bills to the legislature, some of which passed, intended to target the FLDS. They included an increase in the legal age of marriage with parental consent from fourteen to sixteen and raising polygamy to a felony. It is even possible, on this reading, that the CPS expected to eventually lose in the courts but believed, perhaps correctly, that they could impose large enough costs on the FLDS families in the process to persuade them to go somewhere else.

It is worth noting that the only justification offered by the CPS for seizing male children was that they were being brought up to be child abusers—which is to say, being brought up in their parents' religion. It sounds from some news stories as though the implicit deal being offered to parents was that if they would accept suitable psychological counseling, they would eventually get their children back. Combine those two and it looks as though the idea was to force people to renounce their religion, holding their children hostage until they did.

The alternative interpretation is that the CPS believed its own story. Based on the picture of the FLDS painted by anti-polygamy activists, primarily ex-members, they may have expected to find lots of pregnant minors, some of them thirteen or fourteen, and lots more minors with children. Having found them, they would then have sufficient legal justification for a good deal of what they wanted to do and sufficient public support for all of it. And if the story they believed was true, they were in fact doing their job, protecting minors from abuse, even if they were stretching the law a little to do it.

When they actually got control over the children, they discovered that the data were strikingly inconsistent with the theory. Apparently none of the minors were pregnant and only five had had children--a rate not far from the average teen pregnancy rate for the state. The CPS officials were reluctant to either recognize that they had made a mistake or admit it, so tried in various ways to fudge up evidence to support their actions. So far as public opinion was concerned, they mostly succeeded, with the help of major media too biased to do a competent job of looking at and reporting the facts.

In their defense, they were not the only people to believe the story. I believed it too. While I might have suspected some exaggeration, I assumed that the account given by defectors from the sect was substantially accurate. If I had been asked to predict the number of pregnant minors on the ranch, my guess would have been substantially above zero.

The evidence now available suggests that the story was not true, or at least not true of this community of the FLDS. Either things have changed over time, or the Texas FLDS community was different from the Colorado City community, or the FLDS defectors were giving a false and biased report from the beginning.

All of those alternatives are possible. What is not possible is that, in a community functioning as the FLDS was said to be functioning, where girls just past puberty were routinely married to much older men and forced to have sex with them and bear their children, no minor was pregnant and fewer than a fifth of the minor women aged 14-17 had ever had children. Yet those, apparently, are the facts of the Texas case.

Original report here



(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)