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Old 04-24-2008, 02:18 PM   #90
alexamenos
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mcsluggo
....in this case lots of you are quick to alledge not only that CPS moved in a situation where they should've stood down but thtat they ALSO moved for politically motivated religious persecution reasons.... I'll wait for some of the dust to settle, and facts to emerge (other than blogosphere "facts") before I make a judgement on this particular case.
Most importantly, I don't think public relations concerns trump the 4th amendment, so whatever pubic outcry the CPS may have faced is neither here nor there.

And to clarify, it's not so much that I argue that the CPS shouldn't respond to pleas for help, even if the pleas later to turn out to be bogus. Rather, it is beyond dispute that the State of Texas had long been looking for a pretext to raid those people and furthermore the State has re-written laws with the express purpose of catching these folks in a trap. That is, inasmuch as the State of Texas has targeted these people and laid legal traps for these people, it is certainly quite prudent to seriously question the process where the State's probable cause was established with a lie. You say that:

Quote:
the fact is that they are a (probably) understaffed group (meaning the folks actually hitting the street investigating this sorta crud) tasked with doing a damn delicate job with wispy and amorphous information...
This is not a fact at all -- they had been investigating this group for four years and they went in with SWAT teams, helicopters, automatic weapons, and armored personnel carriers. This was not something done on the fly nor on the cheap -- this was a tactical plan and an end goal waiting on a pretext. That they had waited this long for any good reason to go in, and that the best the State had after that long of a wait was something which is not real, ought to give us pause to reflect on why we should fear more a Type I error with regard to this bunch as compared to any other bunch.

The Type I error type reasoning, in my view, begins with a pre-judgment of these folks based on their religion. Now, I won't go so far as to say that it is entirely unreasonable to pre-judge these people based on their religion. But I will say that it is very unreasonable and most annoying to simultaneously pre-judge these people on the basis of their religion and to say this isn't about their religion.

But anyway....even if we imagine the State of Texas was operating in good faith and within the spirit of the law (a big leap of imagination, imo), we still must take note that an the basis of an allegation about one girl, the state has taken 437 (100%) of the kids at YFZ. This leap from 1 to 100% must be accounted for. I cannot imagine that there are more than a couple of ways in which the CPS makes this leap:

1) after the CPS entered the compound and requested to speak with one girl who does not exist, the fundamentalist mormons there promptly paraded hundreds of bruised and battered children from 100% of the families at YFZ before the CPS. This voluntary parade of the systemically abused demonstrated probable cause that 100% of the parents at YFZ were abusing their children; or

2) the CPS saw a couple of girls who looked young and were carrying babies, and knowing that the sect practices (or reserves the right to practice?) polygamy they took this as prima facie evidence of abuse by 100% of the adherents of this religion (at any rate, they did not regard this as evidence of teens having sex or of young women being legally married, neither of these being abuse). That is, they judged them collectivly as a group rather than affording each of the parents (and their children) rights inherent to individual citizens.

Inasmuch as the State practically brags that #2 above is the case, I'd say it's far past too early to say that the facts have emerged and the state is prosecuting (and persecuting) a religious group based on their religious beliefs....(fwiw, I don't necessarily call this a politically motivated persecution, rather it's more a matter of the hubris of incessant do-goodism coupled with a disdain for those who fall outside the mainstream)

Moreover, it is a fait accompli that the State has taken custody of these children. Either the parents have custody of their children or they don't. Either the state has custody or it doesn't. There is no "temporary" qualifier to be had nor found.

The State has taken their children, and it has done so because of their beliefs as FLDS. These facts have well emerged and it is none too early to judge them.
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