NEON GODS

Justice in Texas

A Texas appeals court yesterday ruled that state child-protection officials lacked the evidence to seize children from the compound of a polygamist sect last month...

Well, that shouldn't have come as a big surprise to anyone.  The Texas Child Protective Services assumed the worst without any hard evidence, and has managed to make martyrs of a group that deserves little sympathy.  The CPS was just chomping at the bit for any excuse to invade the polygamous Mormon compound and all it took was a hoax call from an apparently disturbed individual hundreds of miles away to set them in motion.

It was obvious from the start that the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), with their reputation for plural marriages involving young girls and older men, was not welcome in Texas.  As soon as Texans learned of the sect's intentions to move to their state, they raised the minimum permissible age of marriage from 14 to 16.  For as long as anyone could remember it was legal for Texas girls to get married as young as 14, but they weren't about to extend that perversion to polygamous Mormons!

We're now beginning to see just what a disaster this has become.  So many of the horror stories the state used to justify the raid has turned out to be questionable or downright bogus.  For instance, according to the Associated Press, "Of the 31 people the state initially said were underage mothers, at least 15 were reclassified as adults before the hearings were suspended. One mother is 27." [emphasis added]  How the fark do you mistake a 27 year old woman for a 17 year old?

I'm glad the appeals court ruled the state's mass roundup of 460 children was illegal (and by unanimous vote no less).  Claiming infants were in danger just because they lived in the compound where men took more than one wife and allegedly forced very young girls into plural marriage is ludicrous!

Don't get the wrong idea, I have little sympathy for the FLDS and it irks me to have to defend them and cheer their victory.  They have a terrible reputation of abuse of women and young girls, and if what the group's critics claim is true, the government has an obligation to investigate and take action when they find specific evidence of abuse, but as the court pointed out, before children are seized, the government must show that they are in immediate danger.  The Texas Child Protective Services didn't do that.  Sadly, their actions will make it much harder for authorities in Utah, Arizona, Canada - and Texas! - to investigate allegations of child abuse and forced marriages in the future.
--Trakker

What About the Amish?

I just want to issue this warning to authorities, lawyers and pundits: before passing judgment on the FLDS philosophy and lifestyle, study the Amish first.  There many similarities between the two societies and it's conceivable that the attributes that we find repugnant in the FLDS communities might also exist in the Amish communities, a society widely admired in America.

I grew up around the Amish in northern Indiana.  The average person knows very little about  how the Amish raise their children or their  lifestyles. The one thing not present in the Amish community is the FLDS's forced marriages between young girls and older men. I've never seen any evidence of that, but it is possible that girls in Amish communities marry at a younger age than in the outside community.

The Amish are a closed society, they send their kids to their own schools that only prepare them for life in the Amish community.  Is this okay, or is it child abuse?  I've also been privy to stories of life in the local Amish community and, if true, it's possible the Amish could be at risk of facing some of the same criticisms the FLDS is facing.

The point here is, what we find reprehensible in the FLDS community might be present in a community of people we widely admire.  We need to make sure the decisions we make in the FLDS case aren't fueled by our disgust of their sexual practices.

NEW: I posted this post as a comment to an Orcinus post about the FLDS and received some interesting feedback:

Mrs Robinson -

Trakker, you raise a valid question, and one I may yet get to. I'm a direct descendant of a northern Indiana Amish great-grandmother -- and have a house festooned with her quilts -- so this one's close to home.

The difference is choice. Amish kids do graduate from high school. From there, they're encouraged to go out into the world for a few years and see how they like it. Some stay, but about two-thirds of them decide to come back and make their adult lives among their own kind.

The girls don't marry until they're of age, and have had this experience of the world. The boys get jobs that pay them a living wage -- nobody's dumped in town, or forced into slave labor. Young couples are encouraged to have their own homes and farms -- the clan patriarchs do not control who lives where, and do not have the power to evict people.

It's a closed society -- but being Pietist in their theology, they have retained a strong commitment to the sovereignty of individual choice. The FLDS does everything it can -- to a degree I find stunning -- to undermine people's ability to choose. And that, in my mind, has made all the difference.

Beezer -

Trakker, I don't know about the Indiana Amish communities, but in Pennsylvania they are Anabaptists meaning that they are not baptized in to the church until they are adults. As teenagers usually around 16 - 18 they are sent out to the experience the 'English world' during what is called Rumspringer. During this time they can take advantage of everything from phones, to driving cars, to TV, to the internet, and so on. If they decide to rejoin the community they are baptized then marry in the church.

Most do go back.  But the point is they make an effort and the kids are supposed to make an informed decision.

Of course, there have been problems, spousal abuse, child abuse, some famously, but that is true in any culture, closed or not.

They may face some of the same criticisms as the FLDS now that this has started. But they have lived side by side with modern culture for decades and are friendly and well respected in the area. It is also important to note they they do not wall themselves off in compounds.

NancyP -

Trakker, the other difference between Amish and FLDS is that the Amish allow their young adults to spend a year or two in the outside world before permanently settling down to the Amish lifestyle (being baptized and brought into the adult church community). If they want to leave the community and not come back from "rumspringa", that's up to them. The community has no desire to keep adults who prefer the English life.

And so on.

Evidently I didn't make it clear enough that I understand there are many differences between the two societies, that I am concerned about the similarities - that if we're not careful we could end up defining certain FLDS behavior as abusive only to have it used against the Amish, Hutterites and similar communities.

Here is how I responded:

A couple of comments about the Amish. In Indiana I was under the impression that Amish children's education ended at the eighth grade. Wikipedia confirms this.

Years ago, before the draft ended, males of draft age in Indiana were bussed to Indianapolis for a physical that determined our draft rating. The day I had to go there were about 40 guys on the bus from my home county. Four were Amish boys of about 18. They sat huddled in the back of the bus, obviously scared. After an hour or so some of us tried to strike up a conversation with them and make them feel more comfortable. They wouldn't speak to us. They wouldn't even look at us. They were petrified. It was almost as if they had been taught, like the FDLS children, that the outside world was to be feared.

If ALL Amish children are required to spend time in the non-Amish world to work and experience the modern world before they are baptized, I'm not aware of it. There would have been a lot of Amish kids working in the towns nearby and I never saw it. That doesn't mean it's not true, only that it was below my radar and went unremarked by the people I knew. My brother's wife grew up on a farm surrounded by Amish farms so she spent her childhood among Amish. We've had a number of conversations about the Amish that put them in a somewhat different light than the conventional wisdom, but she might be biased.

The bottom line is that some who didn't like the Amish, could misconstrue what I've observed as child abuse.

In my community there was a fair amount of animosity toward the Amish. Some resented anyone who was different, others resented the fact that the state bent their laws for the Amish but stirctly enforced it on non-Amish. Then there were the fundamentalist Christians who strongly criticized their beliefs and behavior.

When I started reading about all the complaintes people had about the FLDS, it brought to mind some similarities between the two, and I wondered if some fundamentalist Christians who strongly oppose the Amish might try to seize upon some of the aspects of the FLDS case and try to apply them to the Amish (but upon further contemplation, I might have it backwards. The FLDS might be able to use some of the exceptions federal and state governments have made for the Amish as setting a precedent for making exceptions for religious practices. That would really suck).

I am not anti-Amish. I admire their pacifist beliefs and their ideal of reliance on the community. I don't want to see them harmed by any blowback from the FLDS case.

--------

My wife's sister died suddenly Monday night so I will be offline a lot in the next few days.

--Trakker

Polygamy, Abuse, and How Do You Prove Either?

Sara, blogging at Orcinus has written two recent posts discussing the polygamous FLDS groups and providing additional information that relates to the events taking place in Eldorado.  These are must-read posts if you are interested in the background of this movement.

In 1878, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Reynolds v. The United States, ruled that religious duty was not a suitable defense to a criminal indictment, essentially blocking Mormons (or any other religious group) from using their religion as a way of getting around laws that prohibit polygamy.  In 1890 the Mormon church formally discontinued the practice of polygamy.  Since then there have been very few successful prosecutions of polygamy.  The most recent conviction was in Utah in 2001, and it was upheld by the Utah state Supreme Court (the case also involved child rape).

So if the FLDS openly practices polygamy (actually polygyny - men with multiple wives), why are there so few convictions.  In her most recent post Sara points out that one reason the FLDS has been able to continue and thrive as a polygamous society is that states are afraid to bring charges against those who practice polygamy because they fear the laws against polygamy will be overturned.

Sara disagrees and believes authorities should aggressively pursue and prosecute the FLDS polygamists. She believes the courts will convict and the higher courts will uphold those convictions.

I also don't see the polygamy laws being overturned, but I also understand why authorities are so reluctant to press charges.  As I see it, the problem isn't the polygamy laws.  Those laws merely prevents a person from legally taking a second spouse.  The real problem is how to define polygamy in the absence of a second marriage certificate and prove that the three or more adults in a household are in a polygamous relationship.  If a man is legally married to a woman and takes a second wife, and moves her into his house, how do you prove this is a polygamous relationship?  Certainly an adult male living with two females can't automatically be considered a polygamous relationship, there are too many legal, non-polygamous possibilities to allow authorities to jump to that conclusion.

If you read Sara's earlier post, you will understand why she feels so strongly about this, however.  She has read extensively about how badly women in FLDS societies are treated:

Almost every feature of these women's lives is determined by someone else. They do not choose what they wear, whom they live with, when and whom they marry, or when and with whom they have sex. From the day they're born, they can be reassigned at a moment's notice to another father or husband, another household, or another community. Most will have no educational choices (FLDS kids are taught in church-run schools, usually only through about tenth grade -- by which point they girls are usually married and pregnant). Everything they produce goes into a trust controlled by the patriarch: they do not even own their own labor. If they object to any of this, they're subject to losing access to the resources they need to raise their kids: they can be moved to a trailer with no heat, and given less food than more compliant wives, until they learn to "keep sweet."

Sara even reports that the ultimate punishment - death - has been used to keep women under control by the FLDS (there is at least one known case). 

All of this is very disturbing and even reprehensible.  However... what does this have to do with polygamy?  Some FLDS relationships are monogamous, yet the women suffer from the same abuse.  But if you want to start by charging those in polygamous "marriages," how do you prove someone is in a polygamous relationship unless they confess?  Do you automatically assume that any household with three adults are assumed to be polygamous?  Does intercourse have to be involved?  If so, then how does the state prove that one man (or woman) is having intercourse with the other two?  And does it (or should it) really matter to society if three or more consenting adults in a household are screwing each other?  I'm not advocating for polygamy, just pointing out how hard it is to prove.

The real issue here is the abuse.  It appears from the anecdotal evidence presented by Sara above that women and children in FLDS households or compounds suffer what we consider abuse.  Some of the women are even treated like slaves.  That is what the authorities need to be concerned with, and even this is going to be hard to prosecute.  It is not against the law to voluntarily let someone make all your decisions for you (what you wear, whom you live with and marry, and whom you have sex with).  The key is to determine if these women are submitting to all of this voluntarily - and if they assure officials their participation in the abusive relationship is purely voluntary, is it possible they have been brainwashed into preferring abuse to life in the real world?  If so, how does one prove it?

The children are another matter.  In Texas girls cannot get married before the age of 16.  If the FLDS marries them in "spiritual" marriages to adult men and the marriage is consummated, that is against the law and all involved can be punished.  There are also state laws governing children's education that the FLDS must obey.  I'm not sure if it is illegal, or officially abusive, to take a child from one set of parents and force them to become a child of another family.  It would seem so.

All in all, Texas has a tough row to hoe and I suspect the legal arguments we're going to hear from both sides are going to be quite creative.  For the children's sake, I hope the cases move along quickly and their fates get decided pronto.

--Trakker

Can We Trust What We've Been Told About the FLDS?

First I want to clear up something I wrote earlier.  I was under the impression from earlier news reports that the Texas authorities went into the FLDS compound outside Eldorado, Texas, and took the children without first visiting the compound and trying to locate "Sarah," the caller who said she was pregnant and abused.  In fact the authorities did visit the compound first looking for "Sarah." When they didn't find her they assumed the FLDS leaders had hid her. That's when they decided to raid the compound. Evidently it never occurred to them that Sarah's call might have been a hoax.

Here is a website with some excellent recent aerial photos of the Eldorado compound.

It might be a good idea to forget all the horror stories we were first told about the polygamous FLDS sect.  We were told a young girl named "Sarah" had called a crisis center and told them she was 16 and pregnant, that she had her first child when she was 15 and that her 50 year old husband beat her.  We were told that girls as young as 13 and 14 were forced into "Spiritual" marriages to 40 and 50 year old men and that there were beds in the Temple where those marriages were consummated.  We were told that young children were often moved from one family to another if they made their fathers angry.

We now know the call that triggered the raid was probably a hoax, and now comes a Mormon scholar who is a FLDS historian, William John Walsh, telling us that he seriously doubts the beds in the Temple were used to consummate marriages:

[Mormon Temples] typically have beds available in case people doing temple work - marriage ceremonies, baptisms for the dead - become faint or feel ill. It is common for members to fast before entering...and temple sessions often last several hours.

Salt Lake Tribune writer, Brooke Adams, adds:

As for underage marriage, Walsh told 51st District Judge Barbara Walther that the FLDS is a conservative sect that teaches that men are the heads of families in much the same manner that Catholics and Baptists do.

He said actual practice varies from family to family - especially regarding the appropriate age for girls to marry. "There is nothing in scripture about when marriage should occur."

That age appeared to have fallen [during] the reign of FLDS President Warren S. Jeffs, he said, but it would be a "major distortion" to say the FLDS teach that girls should become sexually active as adolescents.

Some may have become wives when they were younger than 18.

Contrary to state allegations, he said that girls and their parents would jointly make decisions about when she was ready to marry. "Basically they are into matchmaking," he said.

The bottom line is, we just don't know what the truth is at this point.  Much of what we were told earlier came from a former member of the FLDS and we can't ignore the fact that ex-members of cults often have their own agenda.  It's important to forget all the horror stories we've been told and wait for testimony from all parties involved.  It is too easy to assume the worst of people and groups that we don't like, and that tendency may have resulted in 416 children being prematurely removed from their parents.

--Trakker

The Original Call Appears to Have Been a Hoax

It now appears that the massive raid of the FLDS compound in Eldorado, Texas, and the seizure of their children by the state, was precipitated by a hoax call from a woman in Colorado who has a long history of making calls to child welfare agencies pretending to be a young girl in trouble.

Texas officials acted after a crisis hotline got a call from a girl who said her name was "Sarah" and claimed she was 16 and pregnant by a much older FLDS male who also beat her sometimes.  According to the Salt Lake Tribune, here is what the caller told the crisis center,

...the girl talked of becoming the seventh wife of a 50-year-old man named "Dale" and conceiving her first child when she was 15, according to affidavits used to get the first search warrant. In a later call, she seemed to indicate he had three other wives living at the ranch.

She described being beaten by her husband, once so badly she needed treatment at a hospital for broken ribs.

The question is, did the Texas authorities overreact by raiding the compound and seizing all the children?  When you get a call like this you have to act, but what kind of action should you take?  Nothing in the call indicated the girl's life was in imminent danger.

The girl said she was pregnant and wanted to leave the ranch but had been warned of the dangers of the outside world and threatened with being locked up.

Nothing in these exchanges would seem to justify such a massive raid and seizure.  I think a more logical response would have been to get a search warrant and send in a team to search the compound for "Sarah."

Granted, the authorities had no immediate reason to believe the call was a hoax.  They knew that the people who lived in the compound practiced polygamy and their leader had just been convicted of helping to arrange a marriage between a 14 year old girl and an older man, so much of "Sarah's" story rang true.  They also knew that if they searched for "Sarah" and didn't find her, she could be "locked up."  However, I think the courts will rule that the chance of failure to find "Sarah" and her being punished was not sufficient to justify a massive raid of the compound and taking ALL the compound's children away from their parents. 

An excellent article in today's Salt Lake Tribune echos many of my concerns in yesterday's post.

The armchair analysis of the Texas custody case began immediately after [Judge] Walther issued her decision [to allow Texas to keep custody of all the FDLS children]...

While none argue that abuse should go unchecked, some experts said Walther's sweeping ruling may have handed fundamentalist Mormons who believe in plural marriage a case capable of testing the ban on polygamy at the U.S. Supreme Court level.

“This is Loving v. Virginia meets Lawrence v. Texas meets Reynolds v. U.S.,” said [Ed] Firmage [emeritus law professor at the University of Utah]. Those cases, all heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, set precedents for government regulation of adult relationships.

Loving dealt with interracial marriage, Lawrence with homosexual relationships and Reynolds banned polygamy. The last case, heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890, has never been directly challenged.

For that reason, attorneys general in Utah and Arizona have resisted prosecutions of consenting adults who have polygamous relationships.

But the Texas raid removed children whose parents said they were adults when they entered plural marriages, as well as monogamous parents who consider plural marriage a religious tenet.

Michael Quinn, a historian and Mormon scholar, said social hysteria and Protestant revulsion against polygamy provide the backdrop for the Texas raid.

“It is very clear this attack is on plural marriage as a way of living,” Quinn said. The children's removal was a “blanket punishment of an entire group for alleged crimes of an individual. That is clearly something that could be appealed up the court system.”

Texas is in uncharted legal territory, said Douglas Laycock, a University of Michigan law professor who is an expert in religious liberty.

If there is abuse, religion is not a defense, he said. But, “It is an astonishing decision if it was based on what parents teach their children and how it may affect them years later,” he said. “That is very problematic. I don't think the state can just draw inferences from religious beliefs.”

While most of us find the FLDS lifestyle and beliefs to be repugnent and loony, the important thing is to realize that many, possibly most, Americans have at least some beliefs or engage in some activities that are not held by "mainstream" America.  We have all taught our children things that others might not agree with.  I believe children are more vulnerable than adults and society must be vigilant for real physical and mental abuse, but children should not be granted more rights than adults.  Parents should be given plenty of latitude to teach their children what they believe is true.  The question before us is where do we draw the line between acceptable teachings and abusive teachings?  If the FLDS taught their children that the outside world is extremely dangerous and that forced marriage and sexual intercourse - especially at a very young age, I believe they crossed that line.  But I want to hear some pretty convincing testimony in support of it.

--Trakker

Privacy, Polygamy, and Overreaction

I'm at the cabin this week.  I've been looking forward to spring for so long, hoping to finally get out on the trails and take some pictures, but instead I've spent all morning trying to get my laptop to recognize my wi-fi setup out here.  Grrrr.

It's official. I'm finally totally fed up with the Democratic primary race. It's getting ugly.  It's sad to watch the Clintons self-destruct. Reminds me of how Willy Mays, at the end of his Hall of Fame career, just couldn't accept the fact that his body was betraying him as he tried to keep going.  Hillary and Bill just can't accept the fact that there is a Democrat who is more exciting and more popular (ahem! and more in touch with Americans) than them.  I still love Willy Mays, I doubt I will ever again love Bill and Hillary.  Chelsea, on the other hand, still impresses.

My attention lately has been drawn to the story of the breakaway Mormon sect down in Texas (the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints - FLDS) and the mess the Texas authorities have gotten themselves into.  This is going to turn out to be one of the biggest stories of the year (unless or until, Bush bombs Iran).  This story contains so many interesting clashes between government obligations, rule of law, and individual rights.

Unfortunately there are two main issues here, polygamy and child abuse, and Texas is being forced to deal with both at the same time.  Adding to the mix is the secrecy and lack of cooperation from the members of the sect.  This is making it very hard for authorities to know what the facts are.

What I want to know is: are all the people in the FLDS compound there voluntarily?  Can individuals leave the group without threat of retaliation any time they want?  Those answers make all the difference in the world to how I view these issues.

If every adult living in the compound is there voluntarily, and the compound is closed to the public, and every adult in the compound agrees with the concept that inside the compound men can have more than one wife (leaving aside the age of the wife for the moment), and they freely acknowledge that those marriages are not legally binding or recognized by the state, how much right should the state have to intervene and force them to give up their private practice of polygamy?

But then there is the issue of the "spiritual" marriages of adult men to young girls.  Private polygamy between consenting adults is one thing, but what about a private relationship between an adult male and a minor?  Texas already allows marriage between adults and minors - as long as the minor is over 16.  What is the rational for choosing 16?  Why not 15? Why not 17?  Why not 14?  Back in the early 18th century girls as young as 14 did marry.  I'm not arguing in favor of this, I'm merely pointing out some of the arguments the state of Texas is going to have to deal with to justify invading the privacy of a group and seizing their children.

At this point I think Texas hugely overreacted to the phone call that reputedly came from an abused and pregnant 16 year old that no one has since been able to find.  No one disputes that the state had to investigate this report of child abuse, but how can they possibly justify invading the private compound and removing over 400 children - some far too young to be in any real danger of sexual abuse?  I suspect authorities in Texas have been just itching to harass and possibly rid themselves of the polygamous FLDS group who had the gall to set up a polygamous society under their noses.  State authorities have a certain obligation to enforce their laws, but that enforcement must be balanced by a consideration of individual rights, the question of who is being harmed, by avoiding the chance they may be acting on hearsay or lies, and just plain old common sense.

Texas may have just trapped themselves in a no-win situation that is going turn out to be enormously embarrassing for them.  On the other hand, I believe this could result in a very necessary public discussion in court of religious rights, privacy rights, sexual rights, children's right, and how they all fit together.  I'm really looking forward to seeing how this plays out, especially in a state like Texas.

--Trakker