[Goober5000]

So after nearly two weeks of this, nobody has turned up any evidence of abuse, nobody has been charged with anything, and it turns out that the phone call that precipitated the whole incident was a hoax.

It's rather upsetting to read the previous comments in this thread.  Aren't you guys familiar with "innocent until proven guilty"?  What happened here is unconscionable: The U.S. government invaded a society on the flimsiest of pretexts and kidnapped all the children!

Stop congratulating yourself that you're "more civilized" than the FLDS church and look at this through unbiased eyes.  No matter what your opinion of them (and I don't particularly agree with them myself) you need to recognize that this was, and continues to be, a gross miscarriage of justice.

[Colonol Dekker]

Could be worse..............

Not sure how, I agree with Goob. But it doesn't directly affect me in any way and without sounding uncaring, i feel very little towards them.


Sympathy where sympathy's due though.

[Goober5000]

But it soesn't directly affect me in any way and without sounding uncaring, i feel very little towards them.

See, this is one of the problems.  (Not to single out the Colonol; it's a common sentiment.)  "First they came for the FLDS church, and I did not speak up because I [was not a member of / philosophically disagreed with] the FLDS church."

[TrashMan]

Stop congratulating yourself that you're "more civilized" than the FLDS church and look at this through unbiased eyes.  No matter what your opinion of them (and I don't particularly agree with them myself) you need to recognize that this was, and continues to be, a gross miscarriage of justice.

Is it? I wonder...
Note the marked word. Justice.

[NGTM-1R]

Stop congratulating yourself that you're "more civilized" than the FLDS church and look at this through unbiased eyes.  No matter what your opinion of them (and I don't particularly agree with them myself) you need to recognize that this was, and continues to be, a gross miscarriage of justice.

Would you prefer prevention, or cure?

[Nuclear1]

Stop congratulating yourself that you're "more civilized" than the FLDS church and look at this through unbiased eyes.  No matter what your opinion of them (and I don't particularly agree with them myself) you need to recognize that this was, and continues to be, a gross miscarriage of justice.

Is it? I wonder...
Note the marked word. Justice.

...and yet the only people victimized it turns out was the FLDS sect.  The US government acted right with the knowledge it had at the time, but the original casus belli with the FLDS sect turned out to be a hoax.

So in the end I both agree and disagree with Goober: had the US government simply acted to shut down the FLDS sect, then this would be a gross miscarriage of justice.  However, the US government acted to protect children it believed were being abused, according to the phone call.

In all, it turned out to be a hoax where neither the government nor the sect is to blame.  The anonymous tipster is truly the only one at fault.

[MP-Ryan]

So after nearly two weeks of this, nobody has turned up any evidence of abuse, nobody has been charged with anything, and it turns out that the phone call that precipitated the whole incident was a hoax.

It's rather upsetting to read the previous comments in this thread.  Aren't you guys familiar with "innocent until proven guilty"?  What happened here is unconscionable: The U.S. government invaded a society on the flimsiest of pretexts and kidnapped all the children!

Stop congratulating yourself that you're "more civilized" than the FLDS church and look at this through unbiased eyes.  No matter what your opinion of them (and I don't particularly agree with them myself) you need to recognize that this was, and continues to be, a gross miscarriage of justice.

Sorry Goober.

As it happens, I'm quite familiar with the FLDs through my law enforcement background and they are, to put it mildly, guilty as hell but playing the system.  Young women in the sect in canada are impregnated as young as 14 by men several times their age.  These women are often "imported," illegally, from the US.  When Immigration does eventually catch up to them, despite the fact that polygamist marriages are not recognized the women are often allowed to remain because they now have a Canadian child.

The families are patriarchal, often with a single "senior" wife, who regulates the sexual companionship for all the other "wives" in the family group.  A single man may have several dozen children, all through different mothers, many of whom he doesn't know.  The mothers are provided with a meagre stipend to support the children.  Young mean are often forced to leave the colonies to provide a suitable male/female ratio to support the polygamist lifestyle.

You want an eyeopener, do a little research on a place called Bountiful in british Columbia.  Arguably, it has the most written about the sect due to repeated law enforcement and media inquiries, but remains largely mysterious.  The few women that have escaped the sect are generally threatened into silence or refuse to testify for fear of the sect's leaders.  Warren Jeffs, the most significant, is now behind bars but several of his lesser cronies are just as bad as he is.

So you can say we're juding without evidence all you like, but the fact of the matter is that this is a sect where the slavery and subjugation of women is practised as a daily phenomenon and allowed to continue through the propagation of fear and violence.  Larger society has completely failed the women in the FLD sect and continues to do so.  Law enforcement is largely helpless without witnesses willing to testify, which are rare.  It took decades to finally convict Jeffs, and that was all due to one brave girl who stood up.

The only miscarriage of justice is the continuing failure of Western legal systems to protect women and children from systematic subjugation and abuse perpetrated under the protection of freedom of religion.  Sorry, but I have no problem condeming this sect whether or not this particular batch of allegations have been found to be true.

[Herra Tohtori]

Indeed this is a difficult matter and we're sailing on murky waters here...

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Even though I don't agree with many of the other things this particular gentleman wrote, this quote hits the nail on head. Unfortunately. Good and evil do not always translate directly to right and wrong...

If legislation offers loopholes for deviant sects to exploit, it's not really acceptable for a government to work against their own laws. If that's the case, change the legislation so there's no more loopholes. It might be difficult, though.


Personally, I don't see what the problem is in not getting this Super Adventure Club out of commission. What is it exactly that makes it non-punisheable for these people to marry and have sex with 13-year-olds, or underage girls in general, and abandon the required 2/3rd of boys so that every man can have at least the required three wives? It can't be a matter of not being able to prove it. So is it unwillingness to gather the evidence then?

Another fundamental question arises: Should the decisions of a brainwashed, legally adult cult member be respected or should they be, so to speak, "saven from themselves"? It's pretty probable that many in the cult really see nothing wrong in the daily life, but if they are of age, it's not really anyone else's business as long as there's no crimes committed, no matter how twisted the ideology may seem to normal people. So it seems the actual question is, should children be allowed to be brainwashed?

That in turn is even more tricky question, because it translates to who has the right to be a parent, and what kind of belief systems are correct for a child to grow in.

It would seem that to solve this problem, a law would be needed that disallows people who have strong ideological commitment to ideas that contain illegal elements, from raising children.

It's of course obvious that this kind of legislation would never really work out and it would either simply not be enforced, or it would be really easily misused and it would turn the country into child concentration camps where the Right Ideology, Ethics and Morals would be taught to children, away from their deviant, communist, terrorist, fundamentalist parents.


Being obvious that this kind of approach doesn't really work no matter how much people in mainstream society would just want to help, what other choices are there? One thing that comes to mind is making it more difficult fot cult organizations to survive. Divida et conquera, as they say. Revoking the tax exempt status from all religions that don't really contribute to general community would be a brilliant step to right direction in my opinion. It would make it that much more difficult for all cult leaders to operate - of course, for cults such as FLDS it would have much less of an impact than it would have on, say, Church of $cientology, but it would affect them too, I'm quite sure.

Aside from that... I've got pretty much nothing. Oh, I know. Enforcing children to go to actual schools and tightening the parametres of acceptable homeschooling (ie. you need some pretty good criteria for being allowed to be homeschooled). If you make the children have normal contact with normal people and learn normal social and academic skills, they not only might have an option to leave the cult without ending up as hobos and castaways in mainstream society, but they also might have the incentive to do so.

These might be a good way to, so to speak, enturbulate the cult leaders in their comfy little lifes filled with schemes.

[Goober5000]

That's an excellent Mencken quote, HT, I hadn't heard it before.

And it applies very well to this situation.  Whatever your opinion of the FLDS church in general, or Warren Jeffs or any of his cronies in particular, doesn't excuse the wrongs the government is perpetrating upon them.  They're collecting DNA samples from all these people against their will; they're violating due process in taking away their kids; they invaded the compound on absolutely no solid evidence.

And don't say that it's okay because there "might have been" abuse.  That's a dangerous ends-justify-the-means argument that opens up far too many cans of worms.  One could just as easily say that Unit 731 was justified because the end result was a better understanding of anatomy and physiology.

Suppose the government invaded a Muslim compound because the parents were teaching their kids that they could marry up to four wives.  Or a Hindu compound because they were teaching their kids it's okay to worship more than one god.  Or an atheist compound because the parents were teaching their kids that the public-school-approved intelligent design curriculum was hogwash?

[MP-Ryan]

Suppose the government invaded a Muslim compound because the parents were teaching their kids that they could marry up to four wives.  Or a Hindu compound because they were teaching their kids it's okay to worship more than one god.  Or an atheist compound because the parents were teaching their kids that the public-school-approved intelligent design curriculum was hogwash?

This problem with this sect is not what parents are teaching their kids.  It's parents allowing priviledged men to take their barely pubescent daughters into relationships of subjugation and slavery and then keep them there by impregnating them literally as often as biologically possible.  These young women become nothing more than breeding machines - their sole purpose in life being to produce offspring for their husband.

My problem isn't teaching that polygamy is OK.  For that matter, I think if knowing adults willingly consent to polygamous relationships then they can go for it.  My problem is that these children have no legal right to consent to such relationships, and over and above that frequently are forced into it with no say at all.  There is coercion, violence, and fear at the heart of the entire system.

The "slippery slope" argument does not apply here because this is not censorship of belief so much as a censure of actions.  These things are happening, and we are doing nothing.  The laws protect the abusers and the powerful.  The victims are voiceless and born directly into a system which they can literally do nothing to change.  If anything, the persistence of the FLD sect and its abuses towards young women is a sad commentary on how governments and law enforcement have failed to decisively act, mainly because they fear a legal challenge against polygamy laws on the basis of freedom of religion.  The price of that fear is the domination of an entire gender in a small religious sect.  The problem isn't polygamy - the problem is one of powerlessness and the powerful.  Guess who's winning.

Like I said, read up on the FLDs.  They're something else.

[Stealth]

just goes to show... when it comes down to it, it doesn't matter what laws, 'rights', etc. the government's set in place... they mean pretty much nothing.

they're just there to let people have a false sense of security

[Sphynx]

This is a complex situation.

Clearly, there are years' worth of evidence that underage girls were being forced (or at the very least, given no choice) about marrying much older men and carrying on sexual relations with them. This has not been kept secret at all by the FLDS Church. Anyone who has lived near one of their communities or done business with one of their communities can testify to this (heck, I've seen it personally... well, not them having sex, but pregnant young girls who have been spiritually married to older men). This is in conjunction with a large number of young boys being abandoned (and essentially left to fend totally on our own, if others had not taken in The Lost Boys, as they are known), and several other practices that are alarming. So, it is probably past time for someone to really look in to what is going on there and not turn a blind eye to some of the more worrisome dynamics.

On the other hand, the reason stated for the raid does seem to be pretty flimsy, so Goob has got some points there. Even though what is going on in FLDS communities clearly is (and has been) in violation of law for decades, the reasons stated for the State of Texas acting in the way it did are indeed questionable by the standard of the law itself.

This may be a case of the right sort of thing (I am not sure how I feel about all the details yet, but some action being taken is probably called for) happening, but for the wrong reasons and following a questionable process.

[Scuddie]

This may be a case of the right sort of thing (I am not sure how I feel about all the details yet, but some action being taken is probably called for) happening, but for the wrong reasons and following a questionable process.

Does that mean it shouldn't be done?  I sure as hell hope not.

[Sphynx]

Well, I see it more this way. It is probably past time for something to be done. There have been plenty of times where there has been legitimate cause, and nothing has been done. Does something need to be done? Yes, I would say. It is just a pity that when something has finally been done, it has been done in this particular way, with the compelling action being cited as the reason being so difficult to verify.

As I said, there have been so many reasons. When Lost Boys started showing up, abandoned and hungry, something probably should have been done. When women have left and told stories about being forced to have polygamous marriages and sexual relationships with significanlty older men while they were underaged (by law, statuatory rape plain and simple), something should have been done. The testimonies and please of each of these individuals shoul dhave been enough... but nothing was done. They were there, they were verifiable, but nothing was done. I lived close to some of these communities. I met some of these people. They begged for action to be taken, but nothing happened. There have been more than enough reasons for decades now to look into what is going on there in a serious way. Now when they finally move, it is because of a source that no one can verify. That is hard irony at the very least.

I don't know if I have clarified my point of view or muddied the waters.

[TrashMan]

Sometimes justice needs a push.

I don't care if his time the grounds for action were shaky - fry the bastards!

[MP-Ryan]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/28/polygamist.retreat.ap/index.html?eref=rss_latest

I'd suggest that anyone opposing the State's actions in this case take a good long read of that article.

[Goober5000]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/28/polygamist.retreat.ap/index.html?eref=rss_latest

I'd suggest that anyone opposing the State's actions in this case take a good long read of that article.

Let's use your own logic then.  If half of the teenage girls were not pregnant and were not abused, then what rationale can be claimed for removing that half from their home, their parents, and their livelihood without due process of law?

Heck, even with the half that they say are being abused, nobody's following due process.  They're just ordering people around.  "Detain them all and then figure out who's breaking the law" is exactly the wrong approach.  Never mind that these are still allegations; nobody has been charged.  This is the same overreach that gets everybody upset about Guantanamo.

[Sphynx]

These are both points I was making. They have made little to no effort to hide this. I myself have witnessed these pregnant young FLDS girls in public, where anyone could see them. Like I said, there is, in mind, definitely reason for intervention. I have no qualms about that. It is the way in which the state of Texas has mounted operations in a sloppy manner that arguably runs afowl of some consitututional issues that gives me pause.

I am in favor of intervention, but somewhat unsettled with how it has been done, especially because it means that any of the good that may have come from this could potentially be undone due to legal reasons. I believe that the rule of law is essential to civilization, and that for too long a blind eye was turned. But when action is taken, it needs to follow the rule of law, as well. I hope I have made that point clear on where I stand. Something needed to be done, I just think it was done somewhat poorly.

[Kazan]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/28/polygamist.retreat.ap/index.html?eref=rss_latest

I'd suggest that anyone opposing the State's actions in this case take a good long read of that article.

Let's use your own logic then.  If half of the teenage girls were not pregnant and were not abused, then what rationale can be claimed for removing that half from their home, their parents, and their livelihood without due process of law?

A) Not being/previously pregnant is not evidence against abuse
B) it is standard operating policy for every state to remove all potential victims from the presence of suspected abusers

[Sphynx]

Let's use your own logic then.  If half of the teenage girls were not pregnant and were not abused, then what rationale can be claimed for removing that half from their home, their parents, and their livelihood without due process of law?

Heck, even with the half that they say are being abused, nobody's following due process.  They're just ordering people around.  "Detain them all and then figure out who's breaking the law" is exactly the wrong approach.  Never mind that these are still allegations; nobody has been charged.  This is the same overreach that gets everybody upset about Guantanamo.

Once again, I agree with the due process issue. Although I find it intersting that at the same time, removing men from their homes, wives, children, and livelihood without due process of law has been a common event among the FLDS in recent years. Once again, this goes to support the argument that something needed to be done (and would have been a legitimate cause for an investiation on those grounds alone, but once again nothing was done for years). At the same time, it is also somewhat distressing that the way it is being done by the state of Texas mirrors some of the troublesome dynamics that have been occuring within the FLDS sect. That's a sort of isomorphism that I am uncomfortable with.

Kazan is correct, though. It is standard operating procedure to remove children when there is reason to believe they are in a situation where they could be the target of abuse, including statuatory rape.