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Originally Posted by MavsX
I've been watching and reading about this story. I find it very interesting. It's crazy really. I agree with letting these people live on their own, and do their own thing. But if kids are getting abused, sexually or physically...then the state has got to step in.
It does seem to be quite a coincidence, that the two main guys in this church are sex offenders....hello~! that is what they are doing right now. (i am talking about that dude in Arizona. and the leader who is awaiting trial i believe in Utah?
get r done
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It is an interesting story. Touches on many issues, from the very specific to the very abstract, and strong points can be made from widely divergent points of view.
For example, 1) Sexual abuse. It seems like it's pretty easy for people to agree that it is appropriate for authorities to intervene when there is clear evidence of culturally-imposed, institutionally-supported, ritual sexual abuse of minors. You might even be led to ask why it's taken four year for authorities to act. Should they not have been able to acquire evidence sooner? They certainly seem to have had a plan in place to act quickly, and on a large-scale. Nominee for ironic image: The First Baptist Church van taking away a load of LDS women and children.
Which leads to: 2) The evidence in this case. A sixteen-year-old girl makes a call, or a series of calls to a Battered Women's Shelter, on a cellphone alleging sexual abuse, and on the basis of that, the authorities step in and take custody of....400 children? Okay, so surely they have some level of verification. Right? But they haven't located the caller yet, haven't even identified her yet. Do they know the cellphone number from which the call was placed? This point really hasn't been addressed. They do have a suspect, of whose status many people could've been aware. But on the one hand media accounts portray these women and children as being very sequestered from the outside world, and yet a young girl was able to get in touch with a Battered Women's Shelter hotline number? Something doesn't add up, or at least it doesn't add up easily. Bottom line: Until they are able to say with certainty that they have the person who placed the call, there is going to exist a question as to whether the call was legitimate, or whether someone opposed to the FLDS (for whatever reason) placed that call and perhaps made false charges, which undermines the whole basis for the raid. And this is where you start to get on (perhaps) very uncomfortable ground about government undertaking action against unpopular groups, and in particular against specific religious groups.
People who don't want to look at the bigger questions and the bigger threats (from government) will focus on the sexual abuse. For them, any instance or act of coerced sex is going to justify the police action. But you can also look at the sexual abuse that has gone on in the Catholic church, not just the acts of sexual abuse, but the institutional response of denial and cover-up and keeping things secret so as not to make the Church look bad. Did the government go into diocese headquarters and seize records? You can also "know" that within certain communities/neighborhoods, there is a lot of sexual activity going on between minors and adults, and yet you will NEVER see the government going in and seizing children, placing them in the custody of the state, and interviewing them to determine which adult males should be arrested...not on the scale that it was done in this case.
So we see that the government (at least in Texas) will intervene intrusively when there is (some) evidence of sexual abuse within a small, and let's be frank, unpopular religious community.
What about terrorism? Will we see the government raiding churches of faiths thought to be fomenting terrorism? Or supporting it at least?
What about churches that preach and teach hateful or oppressive beliefs against specific groups?
Random questions that occur to me:
Do the children in the FLDS communities receive Social Security numbers?
Do women and/or children receive any government benefits?
Do they receive medical care through Medicaid or other state-funded programs?
How do births happen---hospitals or midwives? What kind of pre-natal care is there for mothers? If there are 13, 14, 15 year olds being impregnated, what would a physician's responsibility be for reporting to authorities a large number of observed pregnancies within a community a specific population?
How are children in the FLDS communities educated?
Do they have to attend school? Or are they all home-schooled?
Would there not be any educational records that would help in the identification of these children?
What are the educational credentials of the people who are home-schooling these children? What is their responsibility to report evidence of abuse within the community? What are the implications for the larger home-school movement?
It's definitely a hairy question, with some profoundly unsettling implications. Most probably though, not much will come of it, but it is an ugly precedent from every angle. The state acted (possibly over-reacted), not just because it should, but because it could.