Polygamy Case Updates

Previous post here. First post here.
(scroll down for updates):

The children are no longer warehoused at Fort Concho:

Authorities had moved the children Monday from the Fort Concho historic site to larger facilities at the San Angelo Coliseum and the nearby Wells Fargo Pavilion. Mothers who had children under the age of 5 were allowed to stay with their children in San Angelo, but other women were returned to the compound.

Six women opted not to go back to the compound when given the chance, Meisner has said, and they were taken to "a safe place."

The decision to separate children 5 and older from their mothers was made carefully and with input from attorneys and therapists, Meisner said.

It was decided that the move was in the "children's best interest," she said, adding that children who are victims of abuse or neglect typically feel "safer" and are more truthful if their parents are not around.

However, she acknowledged, separating them was a "difficult thing to do."

"There was some sadness among the children; there were some tears. ... We were very sensitive to the issues involved with this," Meisner said. (Video: Watch her say many children are 'happy and smiling')

Rhonda Jeffs, a mother of two and a spokeswoman for the other women, has said that the authorities "didn't even let us say goodbye to our children."

But Meisner countered that, saying that, "to my knowledge, yes," the mothers were able to say goodbye to their children.

Reminder: Meisner was involved in the Branch Davidian travesty as well.

Grits for Breakfast, a law blog in Texas, is keeping up with this case. Here's an excerpt from the most recent post as of this writing:

...to judge by this story from ABC News, no one is considering any specific abuse allegations or the best interests of any individual kid. Rather,

One idea under discussion is to appoint one lawyer to speak at the hearing on behalf of each age group: children under 5, teenage girls and teenage boys, for example. If the state does retain custody, the children will be placed with relatives or in foster homes. Otherwise, they will go back to the ranch, perhaps under the supervision of a state monitor.

ABC News says Texas CPS will likely argue that the entire YFZ Ranch is a single "household," which seems like a stretch given its division into atomic families with their own domiciles. Such a ruling, to me, would be embarrassingly wrongheaded, but that would be par for this course.

GfB asks a few questions I have been asking as well:

Will Texas now handle every other underage pregnancy this way? Will CPS and their jack-booted partners storm neighborhoods in Dallas and Houston and seize the children of everyone who looks underage? ABC News reports that the state "will probably offer evidence that unmarried minors (children under 18) at the ranch are pregnant or have had children. That's a prima face case of statutory rape, which is a crime." How many other underage girls get pregnant every year in Texas? Will all of these kids be seized prospectively, just in case the pregnancy came from statutory rape, or only in those instances where we dislike the parent's religion?

Though CPS has a lower burden of proof for initially seizing kids, I still believe the original search warrant for the ranch that started all this will never hold up on appeal in any criminal prosecution of individual FLDS members. Based on the phone call from "Sarah," the judge issued a warrant allowing the search of every building on the compound. To pass constitutional muster, a search warrant must "particularly describ[e] the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." There was nothing particular about this warrant, it was as general as it gets. Indeed, King George's redcoats use of the same tactic first inspired the Fourth Amendment.

I believe that underaged girls are forced to have sex with adult men by that cult. But my believe is not evidence. Thus far, we haven't seen any evidence in this case. CPS claims that there are many underaged girls who are pregnant, but CPS is guessing about their ages because from what I can tell, nobody is telling the authorities much more than just their names. They may well be under-aged, and I believe that there are- but my belief is not proof of their guilt sufficient for a legal case.

Another blogger points out some other problems with this and other claims:

*CPS continues to claim that "several" teenage girls are pregnant, yet almost ten days have passed since the state abducted the children from the YFZ ranch and they still cannot provide an exact number or even a round estimate for that matter. The term "teenage girls" is itself ambiguous and could be used to decribe a 17-, 18-, or 19-year-old female as well as a 13- or 14-year-old.

Read the rest at the link. It's quite interesting- he points out that state reported, and the media jumped on it, that they'd confiscated a 'cyanide poisoning document' among other things. Turns out it was part of a first-aid manual.

So thus far what we have is the fact that several hundred state sanctioned jack boots went into private property and 416 children were forcibly removed from their homes on the basis of one anonymous phone call about one 16 y.o. who is not in evidence and can't be found and probably does not exist, and right now allegations of statutory rape are merely allegations.

At least one of those pregnant teens is said to be married to the teen father and they are legally of age to be married. There is no evidence either of them has committed a crime, and in fact, neither of them have been charged, yet they are being held against their will in state facilities, sequestered from each other, denied access to their families and each other.

And then we have the problem of a grotesque double standard- teen pregnancy is an issue across the country, and specifically in Texas:
"Texas teens lead the nation in having babies. Last month, the nonprofit group Child Trends conferred another No. 1 ranking on Texas. In the latest statistics available, 24 percent of the state's teen births in 2004 were not the girl's first delivery."

Does CPS often get involved there? Nope. Google Planned Parenthood Statutory Rape and see how often PP has actually broken the law (they are mandatory reporters of child abuse, but they don't bother), concealing the age of victims, encouraging them to lie about the age of their rapists in order to protect them- are they prosecuted? No, and unlike FLDS, they do this with government funding and the good will of the media.

The first comment to this post (which is accompanied by a moving picture) points out that statewide 1 in 40 Texas girls between the ages of 13 and 17 are pregnant by 16. Where is CPS's concern about that?

This double standard makes it clear that this really is about something other than the despicable practice of forced 'marriages' of old men to teenagers.

As GfB pointed out:

Finally, the root of the argument that these girls are abused is that they've been "brainwashed" by their religion. But don't all religions "brainwash" their children? Isn't every religion absurd to a non-believer?

Which is why I say if this is enough, then we are all at risk. And sure, the girls are probably brainwashed. So are the boys. Isn't it interesting that nobody much comments on that? And where is the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable for parents to teach their children? Aren't there some things the state just can't fix without doing the very thing it's condemning?

These people are nearly all the descendants, children and grandchildren, of the families of the Short Creek raids in the fifties. There the government swooped in, grabbed over 200 children and many women, incarcerated them and held them in custody for two years. Psychologists and social workers swooped in to 'reprogram' or 'deprogram' them. The state worked hard to implant its own counter message. And at the end of the two years, most of them went right back to the FLDS lifestyle, only in response to the government intrusion, the group became more restrictive, more reclusive and secretive, more controlling.

Law enforcement officials in Utah and Arizona, where the same FLDS groups have ties, are also concerned that this may do more harm than good, especially if it is proven the initial phone call came from an anti-polygamy activist, as I suspect. They have worked hard to gain the trust of the communities and of the girls so that the child-brides, or those about to be forced into 'marriage' know they will be protected. This article has one of them explaining why the FLDS communities are drawing back and closing in again.

Here's a recent news report on the case. The children have been denied individual representation and the chance for their attorneys to present their cases individually, and the first witness wants the medical records of just three teens admitted:

The state then called its first witness to the stand - an attorney who is the custodian of medical evidence gathered from FLDS children initially taken to a temporary shelter at Fort Concho. The state asked Walther to admit into evidence the medical records of three teenage girls, prompting the judge to order a recess to give all attorneys time to view the records at issue.

(that story is gone, but you can find more of Pfluger's tender mercies towards her neighbors here and here).

Here's an example of how much of what is being reported is actually hearsay and assumptions based on some preconceived ideas:

When Texas authorities this month seized 416 children from the FLDS Yearning for Zion compound in Eldorado, there were similar signs of indoctrination, said Helen Pfluger, whose Baptist church in nearby San Angelo volunteered to help feed and clothe the children and their mothers.

"They were very quiet and didn't want to look us in the eye," she said. "We never knew for sure which child belonged to which mother. It was very communal."

They refused to play board games. Clothes had to be cotton and plain -- no patterns and no red, "the color of the devil," Pfluger said. The children shunned processed food, white bread and sodas, and essentially subsisted on yogurt, fruit and lots of almonds, she said.

"Another San Angelo church had brought some coloring pages and crayons," she said. "They didn't know what to do with them, and their mothers didn't either."

Doesn't it seem that Pfluger thinks there's something wrong with eating yogurt, fruit, and almonds? I'm impressed that the children shunned white bread and sodas- that's no sort of diet for children at any time. As for the color red- Pfluger is projecting her own assumptions onto the community. IT is true they don't wear red, but Pfluger was making up her own reason why. Carolyn Jessop, a former member of the community writes:

By 1996, life was changing, and not in good ways. Uncle Roy had died and a new prophet, Rulon Jeffs, had succeeded him.

'Uncle Rulon' and his son Warren were exerting more control on the community. We were prohibited from going to the cinema. Television and the internet were off-limits, except for business purposes.

Even our clothes changed. Long underwear, which had been optional, became mandatory. Large prints and plaids for outerwear were banned.

One Sunday in church, Warren announced that it was no longer appropriate to wear red because it was the colour reserved for our Saviour. That evening I watched the sunset – a blaze of orange and red. If God wanted red preserved for Jesus Christ alone, why did he spread it across the sky?

Carolyn Jessop (once the 'wife' of YfZ Ranch leader Merrill Jessop, she escaped with her 8 children and retained legal custody of them) says that most things in the FLDS cult got worse when Warren Jeffs took over
She also says that underaged marriages were very rare before Warren Jeffs took charge, and usually those that occurred were between young men and women of a similar age.

Why they don't wear the color red is fairly minor (although it's interesting that it's exactly the opposite reason people are reporting). But it's indicative of a larger issue. These people are odd, strange, peculiar, weird, and that is a large part of the reason the state can get away with raiding a home on the basis of an anonymous phone call and sweep away 416 children without evidence that every one of them is at risk, without charging anybody with a crime, and hold them sequestered, confiscating their mother's cell phones, with no other reason than because it doesn't like their religious beliefs. I don't like their religious beliefs, either. But that makes it easier for the rest of us to believe all manner of things against them without any evidence- and that attitude makes us all vulnerable.

This blogger suspects Flora Jessop, a former FLDS member and now activist against FLDS, and sheriff DOran conspired together, and that Flora herself made the phone calls posing as the abused 16 y.o. in order to prompt the midnight raid and seizing of the 416 children in Eldorado.

You remember Flora Jessop? She was mentioned in this post, where we learn that she was behind the similar call in Arizona:

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said Flora Jessop of the Child Protection Project in Phoenix contacted a member of his staff about a young girl who needed help.

The call was sketchy on details, and when investigated, there was no house or person in Colorado City who matched the caller's information.

She's also quoted in connection with the Texas case, where 'Sarah,' the alleged 16 y.o. girl whose phone calls, lasting upwards of an hour, to a hotline center that surely such a protected, sheltered, hidden girl wouldn't even have known about, prompted the raid, but now cannot be found:

Two women who have worked with teens leaving the FLDS sect - Joni Holm of Utah and Flora Jessop of Arizona - say Sarah is real.

In both stories, Flora refused to talk to reporters any further.