I have problems with the logic here. Why should anyone be upset that in this commune that maternity might be questioned? Freedom of religion and by inference lifestyle is celebrated in America. The reason for the Puritans that immigrated was that they wanted to live the way their religion instructed. That is a lifestyle. In many inner cities communities and among blacks illegitimacy is 70%. Many children do not know who is their father and it could be several different males. So questionable paternity is accepted by society and CPS does not involve themselves in those cases. Also underage pregnancy is not uncommon. Why else have school pushed for allowing dispensation of condoms to middle and some elementary schools?
So we have a communal lifestyle and in this lifestyle women make up the family unit and share child raising duties. Certainly seems to be a method for ensuring that children get good care from loving adults. Since the women share child raising there is a question on the maternity of the children. If society does not care about paternity, why should it care about maternity? The whole emphasis is that the children get a strong family unit and have caring adults. If people here are upset with that idea, then are they upset with 2 gay men raising a child, or 2 gay women raising a child? It is conceivable that among gay women that the maternity may not be told to the offspring. The children could even be adopted or from donor eggs so there is no biological maternity. Society has already agreed that that is acceptable. Why not in this case?
The main offense is the assumed underage age sex of teenagers to older men. This violates age of consent and is statutory rape. How many teenagers that are under 16 get pregnant by a male over 21 in this country? So we prosecute every one? I doubt it. Generally the only time this becomes an issue is when the girl cries forcible rape.
Now for the real issue, this is a cult. They like to live separate. The limit outside influences and they abide to very old tenets of male dominance and female submission. For Christ sakes look at the outfits!! They are very modest and the style is exact. No individuality, It is all conformist. They are old fashion. The women certainly seem to like it and the rest of humanity recoils because we don’t like conformity, or female submission or the idea that women can be happier living with this lifestyle. They are different and it offends our sense of normality. So it must be condemned.
Our country was founded on the idea that people can live different ways if they want. But the people who scream for the law and prison to be thrown at these people seem to missing that our society has allowed isolationists cults from the beginning. The Amish has been here since the colonies started and they live in similar styles. Now they do have distinct parents and the do not marry before the age of consent. But all the girls are married. There are no or little illegitimacy. They dress all the same with conformity. They limit outside modernity. They have a more old fashion gender roles.
I read the CPS testimony and I was struck on how CPS seemed to think it was abuse that girls are taught to get married and have lots of children. They encourage child bearing at younger ages when the girls are more fertile and capable of child bearing. I do not think CPS has the authority to break up families because they do not like the religious lifestyle on encouraging youthful marriages and multiple children.
Also if CPS suspected abuse why did they come in at 9 pm instead of morning when more children would be up? This smack of SWAT like tactics. If you read the testimony the CPS supervisor said that they left at 3 am after waking up lots of families after being there 6 hrs. There was no suspicion of imminent death or torture to justify a late raid.
If CPS was making a reasonable investigation, they should have made arrangements to meet the commune and arrange to speak with the young mothers and try to determine the ages at marriage and whether their male partners were old enough to claim statutory rape. Ask those women if they were forced into marriage with old men? If they objected to be expected to bed old men?
I got the impression after reading the CPS supervisor testimony, that she was horrified at this conformist lifestyle and the women who married young and had lots of children, unlike what modern society teaches. Their ideas and lifestyle offended her personal sense of what is normal, so she yanked all the children, since children should never be brought up to a paternalistic doctrine. This was so anti feminist.
I have a real problem with someone who uses or abuses their authority of law to destroy families, tear nursing babies from the breast, just because she thinks it is wrong and violates her feminists’ beliefs. I do not believe that justice is served when the government subjects children to abuse like separating nursing infants and toddlers from their mothers in order to save the child from nonexistent abuse. There was no evidence of physical abuse to these young children according to her testimony. The broken bones were normal childhood injuries. This is the classic throwing the baby out with the bathwater in order to save the baby from drowning.
The false call that caused the destruction of hundreds of families is problematical. They had a duty to investigate but they went overboard.
Texas law when this commune started had marriage at 14 allowed with parental consent and 16 without consent. There are many states with those laws. Texas law has changed to 16 for marriage with or without consent, I believe a few years back. So for mothers who had married at 14, the fathers would not be liable for statutory rape a few years ago.
Now these marriages may be irregular since there were not civilly recorded but they still may be legal. Common law marriage is still on the books.
I do not like this commune or their beliefs systems, but what I like or not is immaterial. The question is did CPS abuse their authority or overstep their authority? If the criminal behavior is statutory rape, then why does not CPS investigate every case of teenage pregnancy to see if the father was old enough to be statutory rape? There are enough girls in the cities that qualify.
I predict that there will be a few convictions of the older males and a lot of civil rights cases that Texas will pay damages.
Apogee,
Per your post 38. I agree that some sort of mechanism to allow members who wish to would be needed. I do not know enough about the cult to know if the excess male population can communicate and create an escape mechanism. This cult probably will have to have some sort of court order to prevent the statutory rape to be doctrinal and that the cult will have to develop a relief mechanism for members to choose to leave or stay. The Amish did have to sort that out on various court decisions in the past.
My main point was that CPS seemed to more bothered by the thinking of the females that they liked it that way. Our system of dysfunctional families and female liberalism may not be the best way for our civilization a hundred years from now. I certainly would revolt in the FLDS system and my son has been a rebel from the time he was a year old is similar. Some personality types would naturally revolt even if they were female.
I am grateful that the cult decided against resisting the raid with force. This way the cult will probably survive and eventually the mothers will get their children. I expect that the excesses of CPS may bring some reforms and FLDS women on abridgment of rights will win suits. Eventually a system of visits to ensure the lack of coercion on young females and the ability to resist the expectation they have to bed old men will happen. I may not like this cult but a diversity of systems is what America is about.
However I have been dismayed at the viscous tone of some commenters that all these people are horrible and deserve the worst. I have tried to show worse events happen in the cities with the prevalence of young unwed motherhood and the multiple fathers that is common. The young females in inner cities are also victims of statutory rape with their own connivance. Young females are pushing to achieve adult sexuality at younger and younger ages and often want to get pregnant even if there is no support structure from the father or family. This cult certainly provided the support structure.
The foster care system is rife with abuse. The percentage of children that suffer sexual abuse is very high. I sometimes think that some children would be better off with original families than in the foster system. Of course there are always those few horrible examples of parents killing their children. This cult did not seem to have evidence of physical just a social pressure to marry and have children young.
This cult may be weird but if the people want to live that way and bring their children up with those beliefs that is their right. But any CPS raid that takes over 400 children is wrong. That simply goes against our system of justice. I am afraid that CPS will attempt to brainwash these children with the trauma of being separated from their parents and being isolated in a strange homes and strange ways in order to get the children to testify. Similar to past sexual abuse scandals that Janet Reno did in Florida and happened in Washington or Oregon state where half the town was jailed and the sheriff held one girl in a insane e ward and had her drugged to elicit testimony.
