who wouldn't love to be a legislator....
you too could re-write laws to target groups you don't like.
Quote:
The Texas lawmaker who represents Eldorado, Representative Harvey Hilderbran, a Republican, said the authorities had been looking for a tool, if not a spark, to combat the particular form of polygamy that arrived here in 2003, when the group’s members came from Utah and Arizona.
Mr. Hilderbran led the push in 2005 to raise the marriage age in Texas to 16 from 14, a legislative process in which Mr. Shurtleff, the Utah prosecutor, came to testify in support of the change.
“We’ve been fighting this for awhile, trying to do something about it,” Mr. Hilderbran said. “But we needed a complaint. You can’t just say: ‘Golly, I can’t get into that ranch, I bet you lots of awful stuff is going on in there.’ ”
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Rep. Hilderbran is rather stark in his disregard for whether he may sound like a tyrant using the power of the state to explicitly target on religious sect.
First he gets a law changed so that he may more easily target his particular enemy -- that's kind of shady in my book, but it's not like it's the first time that laws have been written specifically with the idea of bagging on mormon fundies.
....and on that note, while there is no doubt a sizeable ick factor when it comes to 40 year old dudes gettin with a 16 year old girls, ick and illegal are two different things....most basically, you can call it polygamy, or you can call it child abuse (or statutory rape), but i don't think you can really call it both things....that is, it's not statutory rape to consummate a marriage, and if they're not married it's not polygamy.
but I digress...
the second thing here is the stark admission of the extent to which the authorities were waiting on a pre-text to enter the compound. i might have preferred to put a more delicate spin on things if I were bragging about my efforts to skirt the spirit of the law in order to bash a religious sect.