Wheat wrote:OK, smart guy, you tell me why we shouldn’t do the same thing with LDS kids that Texas is doing with FLDS kids? And make sure you keep your explanation consistent with your other opinions about the dangers of Mormonism, or we’ll pronounce you a hypocrite.
The fact is that Texas has demonstrated that we don’t need any specific “crimes” in order to undertake a massive reprogramming project of this nature.
The Texas officials couldn't act without a complaint, or without probable cause to suspect that abuse was being committed. They received the infamous phone calls, which may or may not turn out to have been a hoax. Be that as it may, Texas was forced to take the calls seriously and go in and investigate. They did so, and while investigating were confronted with massive evidence that child sexual abuse in the form of statutory rape of young teenage girls by adult men was going on. For Pete's sake, man, they found young teenage girls walking around pregnant!
The abuse they saw direct evidence of while investigating the subject of the (possibly hoax) original calls gave them enough reason under law to take the children into custody. Their own parents, community, and leadership appeared to be subjecting girls to sexual abuse, and grooming boy children to grow up to be perpetrators themselves. They found evidence of this ongoing abuse at the ranch. This fact cannot be stressed enough, because it is the pregnant 13 year olds walking around the ranch, and whatever evidence they found there, which justified their taking the children away from the ranch.
It no longer matters whether the original calls were a hoax or not*. Texas officials acted on the information they received, whether it was ultimately true or not, and walked into tons of other evidence of real abuse. They cannot now turn a blind eye to the real abuse just because "Sarah Barlow" appears not really to have existed. It doesn't work that way.
I believe that LDS parents pass a mind virus on to their children, just like JW parents do, and EV parents do, etc. I don't like it, but there's not much I can do about it. However, there's a world of difference between people believing something I disagree with, and people committing illegal felony acts of abuse against their children.
There is no probable cause for the state to suspect that systematic child physical or sexual abuse is going on in the active LDS community. There's no probable cause for the state to suspect any other kind of illegal, systematic behavior in the LDS church. Hence, the state can't (and doesn't want to) touch the LDS. And they're right to leave the LDS alone.
*it matters to the extent that the perpetrator of the hoax has some explaining to do, if indeed it is a hoax, but it doesn't matter in terms of the children who were removed by the Texas CPS. They were not taken from the ranch because of the initial calls - they were taken away as a result of things discovered at the ranch during the investigation prompted by the original calls.
