Letters to the Editor
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@Xanthro
Gee, Xanthro, I find your defense of this to be truly creepy. Are you a closet FLDS, or just someone who enjoys the fantasy of having 5 pre-teen wives to service you? Or does your support of gay marriage make you determined to support EVERY deviation from traditional marriage possible?
Regardless of how you feel about FLDS or polygamy, the fact is that polygamy is still illegal in every US State. As such, parents (men and women) who force teenage girls into polygamous marriages are committing crimes and have to be prosecuted. I think it's absurd to say that "they had no just cause to intervene" -- they had as much cause as they would in any other criminal case. The fact that the girl who reported the incident can't be found only suggests she's been "disappeared" or killed. In any case, the group was under investigation for a long time before her testimony.
I have several friends who are social workers, and they tell me that in regular cases (where no religious fanaticism is relevant), if there is a claim of abuse, then they MUST BY LAW remove ALL the children from the home. A typical example would be a single mom with three kids, her boyfriend abuses her oldest teenage girl -- CPS has to remove all three children, even though the youngest might be a toddler and unharmed. THIS IS THE LAW, I am pretty certain in all fifty states.
If anything, the authorities have bent over backwards to try and keep mothers with their kids in this case, partly because of the overwhelming numbers, but you have to understand that the mothers are in many cases BOTH VICTIMS THEMSELVES and ABUSERS. That makes it very complicated. As stated above, most of the children are babies and toddlers, often as many as four children having a mother only 16, thereby proving that girls as young as 12 were being forcibly "married" and raped.
There is also the welfare fraud to be considered, and the fact that most of the children are girls, as boys over 12 are kicked out of such compounds left to fend for themselves, so the old geezers can have the pick of the young girls.
Anyone who can defend this as just "a different religion", as Xanthro does, has no idea what they are talking about. This is institutionalized abuse, given the name of religion. The authentic LDS Church completely disavows these fanatical, perverted groups.
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shelter not clean?
The mothers complained bitterly about their shelter arrangements after being removed, but their complaint was that the shelter was "dirty".
My, what hard working little housekeeping androids they must be. See their dresses? They'd make June Cleaver look like a slob.
Every man's dream, maybe. But I noticed, in spite of spotless ironed dresses and their (surely) spotless housekeeping standards, they all looked damned haggard and twice the age they probably were.
Well. Fuck them. Throw these women in jail along with their "husbands", every single one of them over the age of consent. They are a menace to any children they might have in the future.
Some people are trying to recast this as some kind of alternative lifestyle issue--it's not when there are children involved who cannot choose.
Not to mention the systemic welfare fraud, or does raping children while living off the sinners' tax dollars just not bother anyone besides me?
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ksherb
Is there really only 57 mothers for 416 children? That would mean, like, more than 7 per woman. There must be more mothers, surely?
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@Tina
I believe there were more women, while a number of the older women remained on the YFZ Ranch.
But have you ever heard of the "quiverfull" movement? Or the Duggars? They're not FLDS, but they're something like a 16-poster-child family for "be fruitful and multiply."
I believe FLDS values large families of children too, so it's not impossible.
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@ Tina
At least one 16 year old had four children already, so it is not at all difficult to imagine that a girl first raped at 13 who is now 30 would have more than 7 children. I am presuming a reasonable percentage of the mothers had been with the cult for quite some time, dropping sprog as often as her "husband" could make her. (Since their whole, ostensible reason for polygamy is to increase baby-making.)
And Xanthro, you are getting progressively more creepy. As I said, there had been *allegations* of rape, which means CPS is legally obligated to intervene. If the state can't meet its burden, the children will be released (and if any of the minors are demonstrated to be mothers, that's automatically rape of the statutory variety). It's not as if the seizure is final, no trial, end of story. And why is it so obvious to you that the call was fake? Odds are extremely high the girl was either 'disappeared' for her transgression or she is too afraid to talk now for fear of reprisal against herself/children/mother/siblings. These people have *no* qualms about tossing out juveniles (ALSO a crime, mind you) and she has nowhere to go as a teenage mother several times over with no education and no family.
Yeah, I'm SHOCKED she's a little reticent to speak up.
Not to mention, that call would have been taped for legal reasons.
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Human history
If we study human culture,and not just european culture of the last few centuries, we see that polygamy is rather normal and just one of a wide range of cultural family models that various groups have tried over the ages. It's surprising how little negative effects any of them seem to have on children. Many pay no regard to age specifically but tend to have over-riding social concerns for the person's well-being, so where a 12 year old might be married-off, if that 12 year old is too immature, the consumation might be postponed or if it appears to be abusive, families and/or other social structures come into play. Every culture sees its future in being able to sustain its practices without undue cruelty, despite what european missionaries may think on seeing cultures with different practices. I wish our laws were not so tied-up with our eurocentric ideas on morality and sex. People have been taking care of it without the benefit of victorian standards for a long long time and if you think that the problems with our society is that we don't observe them enough, well, I suggest you could stand to study some cultures without the benefit of the christian/european perspective that is so prevasive in all the laws dealing with morality, sex and marriage.
I don't know if it's considered liberal or conservative, but I do feel that what we have now is a product of a particular kind of obsession which came to dominate our western laws and morality standards sometime after that famous mysoginist had his pre-frontal epileptic seizure on the way to Damascus 2,000 years ago, and it's been plagueing all of us ever since.