They Shouldn't Have Moved to Texas

In retrospect, it was obviously a false move by the FLDS church to move its headquarters to Texas to get away from supposed persecution by Utah and Arizona authorities. In Utah, at least, there's a bit of sympathy for polygamy and an embarrassment as well that leads to inaction by the authorities.

I'm no fan of polygamy, and the practices of the FLDS church were mirrored in early Mormon history as well. Joseph Smith himself married the 14 year old daughter of his best friend and councilor, Heber Kimball. I'm sure that the FLDS point to their founding prophet and say they are just following his example, although their current church seems to lack any leadership and as a result abuse and coercion are rampant.

Personally, I think polygamy should be legal, so long as it takes place between consenting adults. Groups of polyamorous people live together without calling it marriage and the state would never step in. The same would go for other non-traditional relationships and sexual pairings. If you legalized polygamy, you could crack down with impunity on underage relationships and probably drive them close to extinct. You would also make it easier for women to leave these cults, not just because they would be older before they got married and had children, but because the churches wouldn't be so secretive if their behavior became legal.

I'm dubious about how this whole operation took place. The state received a call, allegedly from a girl trapped inside the compound who wanted to leave. This part doesn't seem too suspicious, although they haven't found the girl, so it could have been anyone. The upshot, however, is that 416 people were hauled off, with no charges levied, and children torn away from their mothers. They disappeared in buses owned by a local baptist church and will be placed in foster care, no doubt among many of these same baptist families.

Now you tell me, if you took a two block area in a rough area of an inner city, wouldn't you find that the children living in that area would probably be suffering all sorts of abuse, addictions, and neglect? Yet you couldn't simply take them away en masse and distribute them to foster care. You'd have to make this decision on a case by case basis and the mass raid itself would be illegal. How is that different than this case?

Again, I'm not arguing whether or not these children were being abused. I'm sure some were. Others, probably not. But to snatch them all away, not just from their fathers, but from their mothers as well strikes me as evangelical zeal. I'm guessing they're not just concerned about physical abuse, they think these children are being spiritually abused as well. Poor kids, growing up in a crazy Mormon cult. They deserve the chance to be taken by good Christian families and given the chance to be saved.