Texas may lose their fight over FLDS children, and it will be an expensive loss.

I've in the past been quite critical of some of the aspects of the FLDS church, in particular their practices of forcing teenage girls into marriage (such as I blogged on here) and kicking out teenage boys (as I blogged on here.)

I've also made it clear that my problems with them have to do with child abuse in particular, not polygamy in general (what sexual relations consenting adults have with each other, and in what numbers, is not a matter which interests me, nor is it a matter which should warrant the interest of the state.)

However, following the recent raid in Texas, I wrote a post in which I expressed concern about civil rights violations by the state of Texas in their decision to remove hundreds of children from the FLDS compound, with no specific evidence that any of them in particular had been abused. The determining factor, in fact, was their religious identity and nothing other than that. It is true that several of the teenage girls were pregnant, but without being too blunt about it I suspect that if you go to any community in America you will find that a significant number of teenage girls are pregnant. My eldest daughter was pregnant when she was fifteen. I'm not suggesting that this is a good thing, but it's not grounds to remove a child from their home in the absence of any specific evidence of rape, incest or another crime causing the pregnancy (and as noted, they had none about specific children who they removed.)

Since then, Texas' case has been unraveling and they have been embarrassed by a steady stream of bad news about their case. The first came when it turned out that the phone calls that Texas authorities had received, claiming to be from an abused teenager named, 'Sarah' inside the compound, actually turned out to be a hoax after they were traced to a woman named Rozita Swinton in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her motivation was apparently a progressive, but misplaced mindset. These phone calls had provided the original justification for the raid and the warrant to go in, in the first place. What is especially troubling is that it is not all that hard to reverse trace a phone call and verify the caller's location (in fact this was obviously done but the information was apparently not examined until after the raid.) This leads to two scenarios, both troubling: either that Texas authorities were looking for a pretext for a raid and jumped so fast that they didn't bother to check a basic fact like this, or even more troubling that they knew the calls were phony and went ahead anyway.

Texas authorities then claimed that they had reason to believe that a man named Dale Evans Barlow had abused some of the children at the ranch. Only problem is that there is no evidence that Dale Evans Barlow was ever at the ranch. In fact during the time period in question, Dale Evans Barlow was checking in weekly with his Utah probation officer. It is conceivable but a bit far fetched to suppose that every week he met his probation officer, drove for about 36 hours to the Texas compound, stayed there a couple of days to abuse some girls, then drove 36 hours back to Utah and met with his probation officer, and then repeated this pattern every week. Texas Rangers did travel to interview Dale Barlow on April 12, but left without making an arrest, and they have no evidence at all that he ever did travel to Texas during the time when he is alleged to have committed the crime (though no one can even name who made the allegation in the first place, unless perhaps it was made by Rozita Swinton while she was pretending to be 'Sarah.')

Then we have the case of Pamela Jessop. Pamela Jessop was a pregnant teenager who was removed from the compound. She maintains that at the time told them that she is eighteen (legally an adult) and showed them her birth certificate to prove it. Records seized at the scene by the Texas authorities confirmed that her age was eighteen, so they knew how old she was. They forcibly kept her in custody anyway so that when she gave birth they were in a position to give her a choice of either returning to the compound without her newborn child (she also has a one year old) or to stay there with the newborn. Jessop has hired some attorneys and they are considering filing a Federal lawsuit against the state of Texas.

Which leads us to what happened earlier this week. State authorities returned to the compound, claiming that they believed there were more children inside. They were denied admittance despite having a search warrant.

Understandably after what happened last month, the FLDS at the ranch are not very welcoming of another search warrant. More to the point though this feels a lot like a 'CYA' situation. When a case starts to fall apart, and especially if it is a case that could result in expensive lawsuits, sometimes authorities will dig in and desperately start trying to find any evidence they can, no matter how flimsy, in order to manufacture a case when the original charges don't pan out.

So then today the Texas Court of Appeals ruled that the mass removal of the children of 38 mothers was wrong because the state failed to prove that the children were in 'imminent danger.' Though the court stopped short of ordering all of the children returned immediately (allowing Texas to maintain them in foster care until they decide whether to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court,) the Court of Appeals made it very clear that the raid and continuing detention of the children is, in the opinion of the court, not justified by facts or evidence and may be a gross violation of civil rights occurring on a massive scale.

What Texas did earlier this week, apparently realizing that the Appeals Court cas was likely to go against them in trying to launch a second raid was an act of desperation. They realize now that they overreached in seizing hundreds of children with no specific evidence that any one of them is in danger, and now they are starting to realize that Pamela Jessop's likely lawsuit is only the first of hundreds that could be filed-- likely costing the state of Texas hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars. So this is likely to be a very expensive and painful lesson for Texas to learn about respecting civil rights.

I'd also like to point out how the 'hang 'em high, cowboy' attitude of Texas contrasts to the strategy that is being employed cooperatively by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard (a Democrat) and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff (a Republican.) Goddard and Shurtleff have cooperated to seize and place the assets of the FLDS Church under the direction of an outside board of directors where they will be used for the benefit of the community and all its members, have put FLDS leader Warren Jeffs behind bars and recently held a joint meeting in St. George in which polygamists from Colorado City and Hildale were able to openly discuss their concerns and the concerns in their community. By focusing on enforcing the law against the leaders who pushed their flock into violating it but not punishing the members of the church, Goddard and Shurtleff have created an atmosphere of at least limited communication and understanding that it is safe to say after this episode law enforcement officials in Texas will never have. And with today's court decision, it doesn't look like they will have anything else to work with either.

Texas FLDS still deserve the right to individual hearings and presentation of evidence.

As regular readers of this blog are aware, I've been quite critical of the FLDS over the issue of child abuse. Some of the things which they do, ranging from forcing thirteen year old girls into 'marriages' in which they are raped by sixty year old men, to abandoning thirteen year old boys off on the side of the road with no education beyond rudimentary construction skills, are frankly appalling to any sense of decency.

So it may come as a surprise that after waiting for a couple of weeks to digest the news of the raids in Texas, I've reached the conclusion that there are some issues here in which I have to defend the FLDS.

To begin with, what happened in Texas should demontrate conclusively that Warren Jeffs is no prophet. He picked the site of the ranch himself, and didn't trouble himself with the detail that Texas has more latitude in taking state custody of children than virtually any other state in the country. So he made a terrible decision if his basis was providing for the security, if you could call it that, of his followers.

That said, I am concerned that all the children were swept up, apparently only because of their religious identity. There were a number of traditional families (one man, one woman, raising their own biological kids) in the compound as well as the polygamous families, and the state made no distinction between them.

If this blanket seizure of kids and blanket custody decision is allowed to stand, then consider what it could lead to (all of these are prevented only by societal perceptions, which can as we know change):

Could the state someday seize all Jewish boys as soon as they are born in order to protect them from circumcision (which some people define as child abuse, even today?)

Could the state someday seize all children belonging to families whose religions practice any kind of non-traditional medicine (be it prayer, tribal ceremonies or other kinds of medicine that don't involve doctors or prescription drugs?)

Could the state someday seize all the children of families who may not make enough money to feed them?

Could the state someday seize all the children of single-parent families, citing statistics that indicate the kids could be at risk?

Could the state someday seize all the children of convicted felons, citing the need to put them in an environment in which they may be protected from 'criminal influence'?

I know, I know. Some people are saying I'm overreacting and that this would never happen. But it was only a couple of weeks ago, I thought that the state would take your children only if there was evidence that you yourself were praciticing a lifestyle which was a danger to them, not swoop down on a community and blanket-confiscate all the kids there (that's the kind of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes, not in America.) And today you'd be right, none of the above is likely to happen. But as I said earlier, societal perceptions can change. It is the law and legal precedent which protect us from them when they do.

More thoughts on the Jeffs verdict, polygamy and child abuse.

I would like to clarify something regarding the last post I put up regarding the conviction of Warren Jeffs as an accessory to rape, as well as several others (notably the post I did on the Lost Boys of Colorado City and Hildale) in which I've been quite critical of Jeffs and the FLDS Church (which I will again mention has nothing at all to do with and has been completely disavowed by the mainline LDS Church, of which I am a member and which banned polygamy over a century ago.)

One of the jurors who served on the Jeffs jury (identified in today's Arizona Republic as Jerry Munk) summed it up best when asked about the defense argument that the victim, Elissa Walls, never cried rape or talked to her family members about her experience or feelings about it while it was happening.

"She was fourteen," Munk said. "She didn't have to say anything for a rape to occur."

Exactly. And I will even say that I think that Utah's law, which grants a three year near-age exemption in the case of underage children makes a heck of a lot of sense, especially when compared, for example, to the Georgia law that is responsible for Genarlow Wilson continuing to sit in prison and rot and then register as a sex offender for having consensual teenage sex with another student at the high school he went to.

I've always said that I don't care what goes on between consenting adults. My problem with FLDS is that they are responsible for a great deal of evil in the lives of their own children, forcing teenage girls to be raped and abandoning teenage boys to make their way in the world with practically no preparation or knowledge about how to survive in it.

Polygamists, including FLDS are free to practice their religion. But they can let their children wait until adulthood to be able to make adult decisions. To be honest, I've never thought that polygamy itself should be a crime (especially since it leads to many grey areas, with the worsening economy making it more and more common for more than two unrelated adults to live together, with or without any of them having a formal marriage; are they going to make it a crime only if some of them are having more than a monogamous relationship within the household? And how do they determine that?) For that matter, many people, including muslims (1/5 of the world's population) belong to religions which allow the practice of polygamy. If a muslim man with three wives were to come to America from someplace else, are his wives no longer married to him? According to our own laws, they can't all be, but likely he has a valid marriage certificate for each of them from whatever country they were married in.

This case is not, however, about freedom of religion. It's about a crime involving children. There are already legitimate examples of where laws do limit what churches can do. For example, if a church believed in human sacrifice the person who carried it out and those who helped them could still be held liable for murder (for example, Sara Maria Aldrete, who was the high priestess of a bizarre cult located in Matamoros, Mexico and who is known to have murdered several people in ritual sacrifices including a University of Texas student named Mark Kilroy who was kidnapped for the purpose.

However, I know of no doctrine within polygamous religions which mandate that children younger than eighteen must be married. They can wait until eighteen. At that, I would point out that eighteen is indeed an arbitrary number-- I've certainly known some fourteen year olds who probably knew more about sex and its consequences than a lot of older adults, and I've also known thirty year olds who are remarkably ignorant about it (likely that group also includes many FLDS-raised men, who were cast out as Lost Boys in order to unbalance the gender ratio for the benefit of polygamists, years ago with no social skills at all, having never been permitted to talk to a female other than their mothers and still survive just on the edges of society). But since there is no test for maturity, we as a society have set eighteen years old as the age at which we consider a person to be an adult. So at the very least, I hope that the FLDS realizes from yesterday's verdict that children at least must be protected and nurtured, and with that perhaps even educated so that they can make their own decisions or survive in the world outside of the confines of the border straddling community.

One can hope that, anyway. Though knowing what I do about FLDS (which is more than many people know) my belief is that they will consider it an act of persecution by the outside world and maybe even a step towards the apocalypse.

Warren Jeffs convicted.

Breaking news: The jury up in St. George has convicted FLDS leader Warren Jeffs of being an accessory to rape. Justice has been served in the case of Elissa Walls, who at the age of fourteen was forced into a marriage with her nineteen year old cousin by Warren Jeffs.

I don't expect that despite the conviction the FLDS will just disband and go away, and we have to keep in mind that it remains as it always has been, a very closed and tight-knit community. However, this is nevertheless a victory for justice, and it sends a clear message that whatever the polygamists do (and I've said many times that I don't care what kind of relationship consenting adults have, including polygamous ones), that children should be left alone and allowed to make their own decisions.

Warren Jeffs Trial

I wrote last year upon the occasion of the arrest of Warren Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS polygamist cult,

So Warren Jeffs has presided over a community in which 13 year old girls are raped, and 13 year old boys are dumped on the street with nothing and told not to come back....

Over the past three years, under the leadership of Arizona authorities, primarily Attorney General Terry Goddard, along with authorities in Utah, progress has been made in gaining control over the group. The resources of the church (which includes all the polygamist homes-- none of the people who live in them actually own their building) have been ordered by a judge to be controlled by a group of outside trustees for the benefit of the community and individuals within it. Where crimes are discovered, they have been prosecuted, and in particular Jeffs will now be prosecuted.

And that will hopefully be the beginning of the end for this nightmare of what amounts to sexual slavery, or of exile, for the children of Colorado City and Hildale.

As I've said many times, I don't care what any consenting adult does with any other consenting adult, but in this case, there is much justice that needs to, and I hope will, be served in our court system.

Jeffs is specifically being tried in St. George for his role in forcing a then-fourteen year old girl to marry her cousin. Today his defense got their turn and tried to undermine the testimony of the victim (who is now 21 and has fled the church) by getting her to say she never cried 'rape.' In fact, her case is somewhat unusual in that she was actually her cousin's first wife, and her cousin was 19 at the time, while some young girls have had to marry men as old as in their sixties and become plural wives.

WHAT?! That's supposed to be a defense? How likely is it that a fourteen year old, who has been told by someone who she believes is a prophet of God (Jeffs) that she will be eternally damned if she does not go along with it, will scream 'rape' when she is being ravaged by someone who as far as she knows is her lawful husband? I'd like to ask whether any female children growing up in Colorado City or Hildale were ever advised to scream, 'rape' if they were married against their will.

Warren Jeffs is simply put a man who has done a great deal of harm to the young people in his community. Two years ago, I blogged on The Real Lost Boys: And it's Usually Not a Happy Ending about the young teenage men of Colorado City and Hildale who are dumped out into the world possessing rudimentary construction skills, zero social skills and in many cases have never read any book other than the Bible or the Book of Mormon. Many of them end up in prison, on drugs or dead, while others live on the fringes of society in small groups all over southern Utah looking for whatever work they can find.

And the Lost Boys continue to be an overlooked issue (though last year Jeffs and his associates settled a civil suit filed by six of them). However this trial is focused on what happened to the girls.

And that is just as ugly, if not uglier than what he has done to the boys. Young girls forced to marry, often to men old enough to be their father (and then being their fourth or fifth wife at that.) They are raped, and forced to obey, with the knowledge that they will be beaten if they do not (and with the always present admonition from Jeffs that damnation awaits them if they don't obey.) Then later they have to raise their own daughters to a similar fate, and pray that their sons are among the lucky few who get to stay.

I hope that this prosecution is successful. Deconstructing the web of lies, bondage and misery that is at the core of FLDS will take time, but a successful prosecution of Warren Jeffs will be a giant step in that direction.