quote:Originally posted by katharina: So it is your position that the rights of American citizens don't apply to parents who are accused of encouraging illegal behavior?
No one has been arrested. No one has been convicted. There has not been due process. There was an accusation, and five hundred children were taken away and scattered across the state. That should send CHILLS down the spine of every American.
How can you object to, say, President Bush seeking illegal wiretaps but be fine with destroying families without even bothering with due process?
Perhaps there should be due process involved, but the problem is when it comes to children and abuse, it's a no-win situation, If the state doesn't step in and a child dies as a result then you get an outcry of "Something should have been done." The system needs to be changed, but any parent who allows their children to be abused whether it's a sect or a woman who won't leave her abusive boyfriend who is hurting her children doesnt' deserve to have parental rights.
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If you are suggesting I am anything but disgusted by the prospect of the underage marriages, then you are doing me a severe disservice and also not reading my posts.
I don't think it is necessary to advocate stripping away rights, denying due process, and encouraging streetwalking in order to show proper outrage here.
No one benefits by stopping one evil by committing another.
Would you advocate putting a clause in certain laws that say "If a citizen is accused of this crime, then constitutional rights are ignored."? If that sounds repugnant when made explicit, I don't understand why it is acceptable when it is not.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: No one benefits by stopping one evil by committing another.
This bears repeating. There are laws set up for things like this. The court has said that those laws weren't followed. That doesn't mean that the alternative was to do nothing and to let the abuse continue.
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To clarify, I believe that the standard for at least temporarily taking away parental rights is necessarily lower than the standard for taking away personal rights.
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Parental rights are personal rights. I think your distinguishing of them is disingenuous.
I'm also horrified by the idea that families only exist at the grace of the state, which is what breaking them up without due process would mean.
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I think there are different levels of parental rights, and they can be in conflict with each other. We discuss educational rights a lot. Religious rights should be pretty near unassailable, except where there is sexual predation occuring in the name of religion.
Why do the cultists deem it necessary for young women to enter marriage while still minors?
I never saw Catholics try to excuse sexual abuse by priests. I hope religious sympathy is not behind the tolerance I see from LDS individuals in this thread.
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No, they're different, because they give you rights for/over a person other than yourself. There is a line (though people set it in different places) where you would have the right to make such a decision for yourself but do not have the right to make it for your child.
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Are you expecting people to join the chorus of McCarthyists in order to prove they don't approve of underage marriages?
--
Saying that laws and rights that were put in place can be blithely tossed out on a whim is a dangerous, horrible precedent.
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quote:No one benefits by stopping one evil by committing another.
If the state oversteps their bounds in taking a child out of a place where they were going to get abused, I think the child still benefits.
Is it better for the child in that case if the state didn't step and left them to be sexually abused?
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pooka, Catholics get no points for how we (as a church) handle sexual abuse. We didn't/don't* try to excuse it so much as ignore it and hide it. And this at the very highest levels of the Church.
* though it is somewhat better now.
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That's not what I'm talking about. You made a pretty absolute statement:
quote:No one benefits by stopping one evil by committing another.
that doesn't seem realistic to me.
Stopping one evil by performing another obviously can benefit people. It's one thing to be upset about violations of due process and quite another to say that letting people - children in many cases - suffer is always better than committing an evil or unlawful act to stop it.
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It seems to me that the majority of the people on this thread who see this as a valid family being disrupted are LDS.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: If the state can prove that all 450 children were in immediate danger of being abused, that'd be great. They haven't.
If the danger is not immediate, then the removal was inappropriate and due process should occur.
I would say that they were in danger of being abused emotionally and in immediate danger of harmful indoctrination. But I'm not sure how one could setup a criteria for determining this, and thus a way for it to be proven.
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If the children are about to suffer, then removing them is not unlawful and is not evil.
If there is no evidence that the children are about to suffer and none can be found, then removing them is.
If the point is their religious beliefs are repugnant and therefore the members of that religion should lose rights even if there is proof that the individual has done anything illegal and the state can find no legal justification for it, then you've got the wrong country.
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quote:If the children are about to suffer, then removing them is not unlawful and is not evil.
That's not true.
quote:If there is no evidence that the children are about to suffer and none can be found, then removing them is.
No evidence or not enough evidence to satisfy the burden of proof? There was clearly some evidence that indicated that these children were being abused.
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I am not interested in conversing with you because you are insisting on finding something to nitpick and ignoring my larger point.
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If fewer crazy, abusive people had children in the first place, we wouldn't have this kind of problem.
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kat, You seem to falling into the same trap that it looks like the authorities in Texas did, believing that the righteousness of your larger cause excuses all the glaring mistakes you make in pursuing it.
The things you are saying are not true and, in some cases, pretty terrible.
If you're working from these poor positions and won't answer for them, I don't know that anyone trying to have an honest conversation on this is going to get very far with you.
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quote:If the point is their religious beliefs are repugnant and therefore the members of that religion should lose rights even if there is proof that the individual has done anything illegal and the state can find no legal justification for it, then you've got the wrong country.
I'm pretty sure the main point is the rape of children. You seem to not be considering this.
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Mr. Squicky, because of your deceitfulnesses in deliberately misrepresenting my feelings about the underage pregnancies, I have no interest in conversing with you.
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quote:Mr. Squicky, because of your deceitfulnesses in deliberately misrepresenting my feelings about the underage pregnancies, I have no interest in conversing with you.
What the crap are you talking about?
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I think that in cases of domestic abuse there is generally an enormous gray area between probably cause to remove children from harm and sufficient evidence to convict people of that abuse. This is especially true because the abused are often unwilling to provide evidence in their own behalf.
The state of Texas could have several motives for stepping in in this case. While I am not usually inclined to assume that the government has benevolent motives, it seems far more likely to me that the state stepped in to rescue children than to pick on people who have a different religion. I honestly don't think that the state would have involved themselves had children not be involved.
I find it a bit bizarre that this doesn't in general seem to be the more obvious motive.
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I think most people have good intentions when they ignore due process and violate rights. I have no doubt that the executive branch had good intentions when it ordered all those illegal wiretaps.The good intentions don't justify it.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: I think most people have good intentions when they ignore due process and violate rights. I have no doubt that the executive branch had good intentions when it ordered all those illegal wiretaps.The good intentions don't justify it.
Can't say I think these situations are analogous in quite the way you want them to be.
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quote:If the state oversteps their bounds in taking a child out of a place where they were going to get abused, I think the child still benefits.
ONE child may benefit. But what about the precedent that is set by the state if their illegal actions go unchallenged? This is the point I've been worried about all along.
Do we sacrifice liberty for security?
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quote:ONE child may benefit. But what about the precedent that is set by the state if their illegal actions go unchallenged? This is the point I've been worried about all along.
I'm not disputing that. I'm a big proponent of due process and the rule of law being enforced in nearly all cases.
I believe, in all but a few cases, the harm done by violating the law and promoting the idea that this is acceptible would outweigh the benefits. However, it's fundamentally untrue and a untenable starting point to say that the child does not benefit.
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In this particular case, they were raping children, raising their daughters to be raped, and raising their sons to think that it was good and righteous that they rape children. It looks like they way overstepped their bounds in trying to deal with this and I think some people have some very serious explaining to do in regards to this, but, while some people, kat especially, seem to want to cast this as the authorities picking on an innocent "weird" religious group, I think the much more likely explanation is that they were primarily motivated by a desire to stop this FLDS approved raping of children.
While I still may disagree that this justifies stepping outsides the bounds of their authority, the question of what would you do if you had very good evidence that this rape was happening but you weren't in a place to stop it through your authorized channels seems pretty relevant.
It's very easy to say "They broke the rules and that's always wrong." It's even easier if you postulate, as kat did, that no one ever benefits from something like this, but I think, in order to give a fair assesment, you've got to take into account the situation that they were taking these kids out of.
quote:Even if one views the FLDS belief system as creating a danger of sexual abuse by grooming boys to be perpetrators of sexual abuse and raising girls to be victims of sexual abuse ... there is no evidence that this danger is 'immediate' or 'urgent'," the court said.
"Evidence that children raised in this particular environment may someday have their physical health and safety threatened is not evidence that the danger is imminent enough to warrant invoking the extreme measure of immediate removal."
The court said the state failed to show that any more than five of the teenage girls were being sexually abused, and offered no evidence of sexual or physical abuse against the other children. Half the youngsters taken from the ranch were 5 or younger. Only a few dozen are teenage girls.
...
Of the 31 people the state initially said were underage mothers, 15 have been reclassified as adults, and one is 27.
I hope that the appropriate measures can be taken to make sure that teenage girls are safe, and I hope they do it better than the outrageously highhanded and unAmerican method used at first.
quote:In this particular case, they were raping children
CPS maintains that there is evidence showing that 5 of 31 girls have been/are being sexually abused. If I understand the latest statistics, 7 of 10 girls have been/are being sexually abused in the wider American society.
quote:raising their daughters to be raped, and raising their sons to think that it was good and righteous that they rape children.
I'm not sure what they were teaching on that ranch. CPS maintains that they know-- as far as I know, they haven't been able to show actual evidence linking "doctrine" and action.
If what is being said about their doctrine is true, then it's abhorrent. But if they aren't acting on their doctrine there's very little the state should be able to do.
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I was thinking of the threads we've had on Hatrack where Hatrack parents had CPS come to their door because someone made an anonymous call. There was much sympathy for the parents, especially when it was suspected that the anonymous call was made for spurious reasons.
What if CPS could take children, at any time, for months at a time, 600 miles away, with impunity? Once that power is granted, does anyone really think it would never be abused? Even if you think it wasn't an abuse the first time it was done, it would quickly become so.
What if the call was made because the child was living with two gay men and the caller thought that was teaching something morally abhorrent?
I believe in the rule of law. If the laws don't allow for the removal children in danger safely, then the laws need to be changed. But state agencies with that kind of power over people's lives - children's lives - should be held to the strictest standard of acting within the law.
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Keeping adults in foster care after being shown a birth certificate? Granted, it's they said/she said right now, but her story certainly seems more credible. If you have a birth certificate proving you are an adult, that would be the first thing busted out if someone is trying to remove you from your home.
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quote:CPS maintains that there is evidence showing that 5 of 31 girls have been/are being sexually abused. If I understand the latest statistics, 7 of 10 girls have been/are being sexually abused in the wider American society.
I'm having trouble seeing a 70% sexual abuse rate in the general population and I'd quibble with the evidence of 5 out of 31 by saying that these are the cases where they have enough evidence to strongly establish this, but, leaving that aside, I'm not sure how this is relevant.
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quote:1 in 4 girls is sexually abused before the age of 18.
Not sure where I picked up that number; I guess I need to revisit my paranoias.
quote: I'd quibble with the evidence of 5 out of 31 by saying that these are the cases where they have enough evidence to strongly establish this
Then keep in mind that no adult has been arrested or charged.
quote:I'm not sure how this is relevant.
It may not be. What are you arguing for, here? My point was to show that the evidence we have right now reveals that the situation on the YFZ ranch doesn't seem to be as terrible as it is in wider American society. (That is-- 1 in 4 girls being abused in general American society; 1 in 6 girls being abused at YFZ ranch)
Given that the CPS in Texas doesn't seem to be given to raiding suburbs in order to rescue the 25% of girls being abused therein; given that I assume they follow due process in all their other cases; given that the appellate court ruled yesterday that CPS erroneously treated the whole ranch as a single household-- I maintain that a religious bias is an understandable motive in the raid.
EDIT: That is, I think that thinking that CPS had a religiously biased motive for raiding YFZ is not an illogical, or unsupported position.
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Scott, from the site you linked only 30-40% of that 1 in 4 are abused by a family member. It includes situations where the parents either don't know that anything untoward has happened or the parents are the ones who find out and report it. Since the allegations in the YFZ case are that the abuse is happening with full knowledge and collaboration of the parents, your numbers don't line up.
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Scott, I'm not getting the equivilence between a definied, isolated community that, alledgedly, had a culturally condoned system of child rape and the entirety of society. If I'm reading you right, you think that because DPS isn't raiding every house in Texas, they are likely acting on religious prejudice here?
That doesn't make any sense to me. I expect them to act in cases where they have credible evidence that abuse is occuring, as seems to be the case here. Do you have evidence that they have been inactive in cases where they had evidence of abuse?
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Look, I'm pretty sure that the CPS regarded the FLDS with a great deal more suspicion because the lived in an isolated, cult compound and believed in things like polgamy. In a case like that, I can see how, having found that they were raping children, people would be quick to decide that this systematic, culturally approved rape was more widespread than they had hard evidence for. So, I do believe that they likely were treated differently because of their "weird" beliefs and way of living. But I also believe that this different treatment was in the form of treating the child rape as more widespread and more of immediate threat than it was and not in the form of taking action in the case of evidence of them raping children.
I also think that this prejudice was formed more from the structure of the situation and not in its religious nature. A non-religious separatist compound set up in similarly "weird" way that practived polygamy and was also raping children in a culturally sanctioned way would have been treated similarly.
quote:Not sure where I picked up that number; I guess I need to revisit my paranoias.
It was concocted by NOW or another feminist organization that classified any number of relatively benign offenses, such as an unwelcome pat on the rear as "sexual abuse."
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An unwelcome pat on the rear may not be sexual abuse, but it is decidedly sexual assault. And when you're 12 and don't understand what's going on, it is definately not benign.
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No kidding. That kind of liberty taken is not harmless - it's demeaning and it's meant to take advantage. That it isn't a big advantage doesn't mean it's meaningless.
quote:The court went on to reject the two central arguments proffered by the state: that evidence of a handful of pregnant minors was enough to prove that all the children were endangered, since they lived under a single "umbrella of belief," and that all the children reside in an abusive "household" because the entire ranch constitutes a single home. Nope, said the court. The raid swept too broadly in seizing prepubescent children who were in no imminent danger. Minors residing in different households faced no immediate physical danger, either. In the end, most of the 400-plus children were grabbed merely because they shared a "pervasive belief system," and in the eyes of the appeals court, that simply doesn't rise to any kind of imminent physical danger. Some of these children may well face harm someday, but that wasn't reason enough to grab all of them on April 3.
You may well be horrified by the prospect of hundreds of children being returned to a compound in which a girl's highest aspiration is to be married, at age 15, to a guy born when Harry Truman was president (a guy whose other wives are old enough to be your grandmother and—in some cases—may even be your grandmother). But what the Texas appeals court found today was that your horror alone, or the horror of the incredibly well-meaning folks at Child Protective Services, does not rise to the legal standard of imminent physical danger to that child. There are formal legal steps to be taken before removing a child from her home and family, and you don't get to cut corners in the interest of grand symbolic gestures, even when the grand symbolic gesture is that incest, abuse, and polygamy have no place in America.
A long history of eliding detailed legal rules and procedures is the reason we've yet to see a single trial end in a conviction at Guantanamo Bay. Let's hope it will not now prove the reason we don't see a single conviction at the Yearning for Zion Ranch.
quote:Originally posted by dkw: Scott, from the site you linked only 30-40% of that 1 in 4 are abused by a family member. It includes situations where the parents either don't know that anything untoward has happened or the parents are the ones who find out and report it. Since the allegations in the YFZ case are that the abuse is happening with full knowledge and collaboration of the parents, your numbers don't line up.
Good point. It makes a difference who is abusing the children when it comes to custody cases. Thanks, dkw.
quote:having found that they were raping children, people would be quick to decide that this systematic, culturally approved rape was more widespread than they had hard evidence for.
But that's the problem, and that's what the appellate court called them down for-- they *didn't* find widespread rape of children. CPS didn't show that there was evidence of immediate danger of sexual abuse.
I mean, at this point, Squicky, saying that the FLDS at the YFZ Ranch were raping children systematically is just a flat out mistake. Sure it's possible that they were, but as far as I can tell, there's no evidence for the systematic abuse they're accused of.
Are you maintaining that CPS was correct in removing all the children based on the evidence they had?
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Nope. You're absolutely right, Scott. They should have left them there to be raped. Or somehow otherwise magically pregnant at fifteen. If that is how their parents want it, hey, who are we to care about what happens to those girls. The only possible reason we would want that stopped is so that we can persecute people with "weird" religious beliefs.
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quote:Originally posted by ElJay: An unwelcome pat on the rear may not be sexual abuse, but it is decidedly sexual assault. And when you're 12 and don't understand what's going on, it is definately not benign.
Note that I used the qualifier "relatively". Unless you believe forced penatrative sex is similar in effect to a swat on the bottom, I think this response, implying that I consider *any* unwelcome sexual behavior to be benign, is a bit unfair.
It's a whole different level than fondling or rape, which is what the terms "abuse" and "assault" tend to evoke in the imagination. In any case that was just an example off the top of my had. Other abusive behaviors included inappopriate comments and leering. If one person, at some time in your youth, called you a dirty name or glanced at your chest, you'd qualify as a victim of sexual abuse by the criteria they used.
EDIT: I'm referring to the 70% number above, not the 1-in-4.
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kmboots, I understand that you are outraged by the situation, but are you saying that because of the culture, the laws do not apply? That the state should be able to ignore due process if someone is outraged enough by the "umbrella of belief."
What if the "umbrella of belief" in the home that the CPS objected to was that homosexual activity is perfectly okay? Texas is conservative and religious - it's not an outrageous suppostion. I doubt you'd be so supportive of ignoring due process then.
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Considering CPS doesn't have proof, all that would be needed would be an anonymous phone alleging that they did. The "umbrella of belief" that homosexual sex is okay would be enough to support snatching the children away without bothering with, you know, due process.
So you're supportive of bureaucrats tossing out laws when it suits them?
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