mbeesley wrote:2) that, once in the compound, two or three dozen pregnant young teenaged girls constituted probable cause to suspect that statutory rape had gone on, and that a large number of girls were affected by it?
Is this a hypothetical, or an attempt at a statement of the actual facts, because as far as I know, there is no evidence that there were 24 to 36 pregnant teenagers.
Remember, we're not talking about what we know now, we're talking about what the CPS knew at the time they were searching the compound. What's the tally, something like 50 or 60 girls thought to be in the 14-15 year old range were seen either to be pregnant, or to have infant children already. It's true that some of these girls have subsequently turned out to be over 18, but, and this is important, with the FLDS members obfuscating, playing dumb, refusing to identify themselves, their parents, their children, where they lived, etc. this was the best information the CPS had to go on.
And just because some of the girls have now proven to be 18+ years old doesn't negate the fact that some of the pregnant girls or mothers are in fact in the suspected age range.
You say "there is no evidence..." Are you talking about now? Or at the time CPS was doing the searching? Because whether they acted rightly and in good faith depends on what they perceived at the time, not what they know now. And what evidence are you looking at which shows that all of the 50 or 60 pregnant girls/mothers thought to be 14 or 15 years old were actually 18+? I've seen stories saying only 20 or so of the girls proved to be adults. That leaves 30 or 40 more who aren't.
3) that, based on statements by people, including children, in the compound, that no age was too young for a girl to be married, it was clear that this was part of a pattern and practice that was widespread amongst the FLDS community?
Again, is this a hypothetical or an attempt at a statement of actual facts, because as far as I know, there is no evidence of a pattern and practie that was widespread. That seems to be more propoganda than actual fact.
You've got to be joking. Even if you knock 20 girls off the list of mid-teenaged mothers, you still could have 30 or 40 pregnant young teenagers. Out of a population of what, maybe a thousand, or at most two thousand people? How many pregnant teens do you need to have in a population of a thousand people to have a "widespread" practice? I'd dare say 30 pregnant teen girls out of 1000 people would probably represent several orders of magnitude higher rates of teenage/underage pregnancy than in the rest of the population of the US. That would be like every single girl in both the junior and senior classes, and probably most of the sophomores, of my high school already being mothers or pregnant the year I graduated.
Not to mention that, again, the CPS were in the compound, asking questions. There were lots of apparently young teenaged mothers/pregnant girls walking around, they had information that young girls were "married" off to older men, people were playing coy and not giving good information, entire groups of families living in a few giant dormitory-style buildings, etc. It appeared to the CPS workers on the scene as if this thing with teenaged pregnant girls "married" to older men was a common occurance, and so they acted.
It's not enough for you to come along and say "there is no evidence that blah blah blah". That's not what determines whether CPS was right to take the children. What determines whether they were right to do so was what evidence they had at the time they acted, and what were the reasonable explanations of that evidence. If CPS goes into a home and finds a child all covered in bruises, they're going to act on that, and are you going to come back two weeks later and complain that they still haven't proven, to your satisfaction, that an adult in the house beat the kid?