your daily polygamy
update, and it's kind of delicious today...
Recall my earlier comments, to wit:
"This looks to me like exactly what the mormon fundies say it is --state sponsored persecution of a religious sect"
Quote:
Texas says FLDS beliefs turn girls into sex victims
By Brooke Adams and Kristen Moulton
SAN ANGELO, Texas - A child abuse investigator who led the initial foray into a polygamous sect's west Texas ranch said Thursday that children are not safe there because their parents have a belief system that "turns boys into perpetrators and girls into sexual assault victims."
Angie Voss, a supervisor with Texas Child Protective Services, spent six hours in an unprecedented custody hearing testifying about why the state took 416 children two weeks ago from the YFZ Ranch, owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Voss said one minor is pregnant and four have children. "There are young girls who feel the pinnacle of their existence is to get married whenever they are told and have as many children as they can have," she said. Even infants and children in monogamous homes are not safe on the ranch, she said. "It's not about religion. It's about child abuse," Voss said, drawing laughter from many of the 100 or so FLDS members in the audience.
A phalanx of attorneys from across Texas questioned how Voss could justify keeping the kids when she acknowledges they are healthy, loved and likely to be traumatized by the continuing separation.
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let's note carefully -
- Angie Voss ,the lead investigator at the YFZ, is explicitly stating that the children are not safe because of the [religious] beliefs of their parents;
- Voss has quite apparently offered testimony that the children are by and large healthy and loved.
and moreover we read here that 1 minor is pregnant and 4 other minors have children. Bearing in mind that there must be at least about 100 mothers of those 416 children, then this means that 5 mothers (at most) have young daughters who--if we assume the worst*--have been diddled by the old dudes, and 95 mothers who have healthy and much loved children who, to the best of our knowledge, exhibit no signs of abuse.
And, the state has confiscated these healthy and much loved children not on the basis of anything that that has been done to these children, but instead because their parents hold the wrong beliefs.
like I said earlier, "the state ought [not] to confiscate children who aren't being abused from mothers and fathers (father?) for no reason other than the transparently obvious and odious reason that these people belong to the same religious sect. This is almost certainly happening, and it sucks."
and I note, in passing, where Ms. Voss says: "It's not about religion. It's about child abuse." And this is true according to Ms. Voss despite the fact that the she explicitly states that the danger here lies in the parents beliefs and that barely 1% of the children there exhibit any potential signs of abuse.
(I wonder, if we went through a trailer park might we find as many as 1% of the children there exhibit some indication of what may be child abuse?)
anyhoo.....I'm reminded of uncensored footage of the final assault at Waco -- as tanks were ramming into the Branch Davidian's church and as the FBI was shooting tear gas inside, a voice over a loudspeaker repeated again and again and again, "this is not an attack, this is not an attack".
That is, it's not altogether unheard of for agents of the State to declare "two plus two does not equal four."
(*the assumption that all of these girls were diddled by older dudes requres that we assume none went off into the woods with one of the young boys on the compound, like that never happens...)
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addendum, from another
article:
Quote:
Hennington, hired to represent some of the fathers, pointed out that babies would not become sexually active for years and that the agency, in essence, is taking action on what could happen 10 to 12 years down the road.
"So based on the supposition that this may happen one day in the future, 400 children should not be with their families?"
Voss replied, "Yes ma'am."
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It is quite evident that the alleged abuse here is not a fact, but rather a supposition as to what might happen to the children in the future given the religious beliefs of the FLDS.....hence, the State is making itself arbiter of what religious beliefs are acceptable, and what values parents may acceptably pass to their children.