Keep up with the Indian news via BBC for a while. These are the same folks who hold a major riot in the street because an isthmus the government wants to tunnel through is, in reality, a bridge built by Hanuman, the Monkey God, and who proclaim a baby girl born with two faces is an incarnation of an Indian god instead of a disfigured victim of poverty.

Vedanta is nauseating. Far from being this great life-altering philosophy, it's mostly a kind of anti-intellectual fundamentalism that makes Calvin and Falwell look like the voices of reason.

Read your own columns.

I understand the tendency among older feminists to be heavily pro-Clinton, but I'm afraid you can't even begin to claim neutrality in this race.

I feel that I staked a claim to be feminist by voting the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in 84 despite the evidence, apparent even at that time, that Ferraro was, shall we say, ethically challenged. Your columns lambasting those of us who have chosen to support the campaign of a charismatic, articulate, educated candidate of color and rejecting the campaign of a candidate who seems determined to prove that women too can lie cheat and belly up to the bar just like their morally bankrupt husbands have been anything but neutral. Want me to vote for a woman? GREAT. Show me a woman who rejects an unjust war begun with the sole aim of enriching the big oil companies, and that has proven successful beyond the dreams of avarice of the most spoiled Exxon exec. Show me a woman who refuses to manipulate the public opinion by remarks about bombing Iran made the day of a highly competitive primary. Show me a woman who distances herself from the racist remarks of her ex-president husband.

I highly resent the insinuation that because I feel that this particular woman is unfit to be elected dog-catcher, that I'm somehow sexist. As for your much vaunted working class background, I'm from a white-trash redneck family in the reddest part of one of the reddest states, from a congressional district known for electing John Bircher's to the congress.

It's all too possible to be anti-Clinton and feminist.

Having an agenda, that's one thing. Presenting yourself as neutral while pursuing that agenda is another, so just admit your bias and let's get on with TRYING to rebuild the party.

I'm an ex CPS caseworker in one of the southeast states, and way back in the 1980's my agency actually initiated and carried out a smaller but similar raid on a fundamentalist children's home. Upon entering the home, my co-workers discovered young girls who were considered incorrigable by their parents chained to their beds, physically and mentally abused. No polygamy was involved, but the numbers, while less by about 75 percent, were large enough to give anyone involved some insight into just what a logistical nightmare Texas is facing. No one has the excess capacity in their emergency care system to accomodate this sort of group, simply finding beds and clothing, feeding and providing medical care for all these people is just about impossible given the kind of budgets these agencies work with.

Seperating the women and children, while it seems cruel and problematical, may be the only way to get any sort of straight testimony out of these kids. These women have undergone long-term conditioning not much different from what McCain went through in the POW camp, they've been raised from childhood specifically to be sexual toys for the handful of mostly older men who make up the core of the cult. Leaving the children with the mothers pretty much guarantees that you will get no cooperation, no real insight into what was actually going on inside the cult, and that no long term change will occur. The only hope for a legal end to this morass is to keep up the pressure on the women. And, practically, withholding the children is the only way to put pressure on these women. Left to their own impulses, they'll step right back into the arms of the waiting cult, to be met by legal representatives advising them that if they say nothing all will be "well". It's just a fact that all of those of us who have worked with abused women discover pretty early in our careers that the women will actually oppose efforts to improve their situation. Change comes with glacial speed.

My agency removed close to 100 girls from the abusive home and arrested the personnel in charge, placed the girls into temporary homes, then arranged for bus tickets and returned each girl to their home. The personnel supervising the home were arrested, and we thought the situation was under control.

What happened? The "minister" who ran the home was bailed out, packed all the facility's property up and moved one state to the west. The home was open in a new location in a couple of weeks. Most of the girls were returned to the home by their parents, to be abused again. The legal case went nowhere because of the lack of a way to compel testimony. The state where they relocated was a 10 Commandments state, God fearing and not sparing the rod, and the net result was nothing changing.

Texas has an opportunity to radically improve the lives of these women and children. I only hope they can maneuver through this legal morass and manage to bring about some real change in this situation. Realistically, I think they most likely will change nothing, the cult will move to Arizona or New Mexico and it will be business as usual.