<p>Of course those individual cases should be taken care of, but there is no need to automatically assume everyone in there is getting raped and to be able to get a warrant on that basis is even more unconstitutional, regardless of whether or not I think the State should go in there and take no prisoners(which I do, but emotion shouldn’t interfere with the law).</p>
<p>which they are already doing by the way ^</p>
<p>The reason they removed the children is because they often won’t answer questions honestly in the very environment they might have been abused in, surrounded by the very adults who may have hurt them</p>
<p>So, you need to remove the children, gain their trust, as very likely they have been taught to fear outsiders, having little contact with the outside world, been raised in a world of few males, except older men, where young men just seem to disappear because they had minor infractions as described above, who believe that their leader was a true prophet, and that God is the only law that matters</p>
<p>If you have no way of contacting the outside world as a child, through schooling, doctors, etc, how can they communicate if they are being abused by a group that already has shown, by the actions of their founder and messiah that they believe child marriage is just peachy and what god wants</p>
<p>WHat went on in Wacko before the raid was horrendous…and that environment was not unlike the environment here- isolation, fear, banishment, a cult in the very essence of the word</p>
<p>Can we please not call them TEXAS polygamists? They only arrived here a few years ago when they left Colorado City en masse after federal heat was turned up on Warren Jeffs and crew. They assumed they were finding safe haven because of the strong sentiment in Texas against the federal intervention in Waco. (That particular law enforcement action was a fiasco. My uncle is ATF and was there.)</p>
<p>Legal age to marry is 16 in the State of Texas; but zoos is right, in this case we are dealing with alleged statutory rape.</p>
<p>The stories I’ve seen say their are teenagers of the younger spectrum who have babies of their own - this has been pointed out as an issue they are dealing with in trying to keep families together as they make placements in foster care. So not only are they looking for placement for a 15-year old (or perhaps younger), that foster family will also need to be willing to take that 15-year old’s baby with her.</p>
<p>If there were even a dozen incidences of statutory rape (as evidenced by girls having babies), then I think the authorities had every right to question anyone living there who has any information. Remember, everyone of those people living there is now a potential witness to the crime. What’s even more disturbing, and hasn’t been mentioned in anything I’ve seen yet, is that some of the mothers of these teenagers could possibly be charged with not reporting a crime. Think of all the people in that compound, who obviously knew what was going on (statutory rape) and didn’t report it. It’s going to be interesting to see how this is handled.</p>
<p>I said Texas because this group was able to buy land, skirt local laws regarding building regulations, etc and it is partly because of the frontier mentality that allows these kinds of groups to thrive in Texas, Utah, Idaho, etc. Yes this happens in other states, but sad to say, seem to be able to thrive in Texas</p>
<p>For four years this group has been there, have</p>
<p>and I am sorry, but to think that girls living in this kind of environment have “consented” to sex with older men need to open their eyes and their hearts</p>
<p>If all you know is this world-with no visible options and you are 16, to call it consent is just sad indeed</p>
<p>razorsharp, I cannot believe that you seriously call this “exercising religious beliefs.” These women are born in this society which raises them coercively to believe that they must accept these abused and subservient roles in a polygamous society, and then say they “chose” it. Any community in which 133 women take the opportunity given by the government to escape their (more or less) captors is one that I cannot respect or condone, religion or otherwise.</p>
<p>I’m with cgm here. The women’s ability to give informed consent is similar to the ability of a blackout drunk woman to give consent - it doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>[MomLogic</a> - Mom of 13: “I Escaped Polygamy”](<a href=“Celebrity News | Entertainment News | Hollywood Gossip | TMZ”>http://www.momlogic.com/2008/04/woman_shares_story_of_escaping.php)</p>
<p>[Former</a> polygamists tell of isolation and brainwashing](<a href=“http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy789.html]Former”>http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy789.html)</p>
<p>Former polygamists tell of isolation and brainwashing</p>
<p>Ft. Worth Star-Telegram/April 6, 2008</p>
<p>By Jack Douglas, Jr.</p>
<p>The young girls who have been taken from a polygamist compound in West Texas, their stares wide-eyed but blank as they pass the fields of TV cameras, come from an intolerant faith that turns women and their young daughters into “baby factories” ordered to obey the men who abuse them or suffer the wrath of God, former polygamists said Saturday.</p>
<p>The heavy law enforcement presence at the compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 45 miles south of San Angelo, is eerily reminiscent of what happened on July 26, 1953, when police staged a massive raid on the Arizona polygamist community of Short Creek, taking away more than 300 women and children.</p>
<p>“Here is a community dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children,” Arizona Gov. Howard Pyle said at the time.</p>
<p>Religious-rights defense</p>
<p>But authorities retreated then, and they may be at risk of retreating again, because polygamist groups have largely been successful in arguing that such intervention tramples their religious rights and breaks up their families, said John Llewellyn, a retired Salt Lake County sheriff’s lieutenant in Utah, where polygamists are most prominent.</p>
<p>“This is a good opportunity where maybe Texas will show the rest of the country what Utah should have done years ago,” said Llewellyn, 74, a former polygamist who has renounced the practice and is finishing his fifth book, tentatively titled //Mormon Polygamy, A Virus of the Mind//. (The mainstream Mormon church renounced polygamy more than a century ago.)</p>
<p>A real challenge, Llewellyn said, will be to convince the children and mothers taken from the West Texas compound that they have been abused by an unholy faith.</p>
<p>“They intentionally isolate themselves away from mainstream society so they can control information for their women and the children,” he said, adding: “They teach these young women and girls that they are living the holy cause” by sharing husbands and bearing children.</p>
<p>‘I wasn’t in love with him’</p>
<p>Rowenna Erickson said it took her 34 years as a “plural wife” to realize she had been lied to by a religion she once thought protected her.</p>
<p>Once a member of the Kingston polygamist group in Salt Lake City, Erickson said she was 20 – comparatively old for her clan – when she was ordered to marry a man who was already married to her older sister.</p>
<p>“So I just figured that was what I was supposed to do,” she said Saturday from her home in Taylorsville, Utah, 10 miles south of Salt Lake City. "I numbed myself out. I was obedient. I wasn’t in love with him.</p>
<p>“I had eight children.”</p>
<p>Erickson said she left the Kingston group in 1992, after realizing she did not want her two sons and six daughters raised by polygamists.</p>
<p>Once believing her role in their religion would “get me eternal salvation,” Erickson now says she believes she was brainwashed. She has since co-founded an organization, Tapestry Against Polygamy, which tries to help people like those taken from the West Texas ranch.</p>
<p>“I really feel bad for them, but I’m so glad they went in there and got them out,” Erickson said.</p>
<p>Threats for renunciation</p>
<p>The group in Texas is an offshoot of the one in Short Creek, the site of the 1953 police raid which has since been renamed Colorado City.</p>
<p>Rowena Mackert was born in Short Creek the year of the raid, then moved to Salt Lake City with her polygamist family when she was 6. Fleeing the sect in 1977, following years of abuse as a youth, she is now forced into hiding after receiving death threats for her public renunciation of polygamy.</p>
<p>Two of those threats, Mackert said, came from Warren Jeffs, the polygamist leader who was sent to prison last year for his role in arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to her 19-year-old cousin.</p>
<p>Mackert said she was an “old maid” at age 17 when she was ordered to marry a man. He never took on another wife and eventually left the group in 1976, she said.</p>
<p>Soon afterwards, Mackert was called into the office of Roy Johnson, the polygamist leader at the time.</p>
<p>“He wanted me to marry his brother who was also married to one of my sisters,” she recalled. “I told him I couldn’t, that I was traumatized by a lot of things. I told him that my father had been molesting me.”</p>
<p>Johnson accused her of lying, she said. "He told me that I was to follow the revelation that God had given him.</p>
<p>“And I told him to go to hell.”</p>
<p>Mackert, now 54, said she respects the 16-year-old girl in Texas who alerted authorities about being abused within the walls of the polygamists’ compound.</p>
<p>“I just can’t fathom the courage,” she said, noting that such disloyalty, however justified, can come at a heavy price.</p>
<p>"You’re told you can do all but kill a child for deliberate disobedience, " Mackert said, remembering one day in her youth. “I stole a candy bar when I was 13, and I had bruises and welts from my waist down to my knees.”</p>
<p>
If the age to consent is 16 in Texas, then we are not dealing with statutory rape for the one girl who called the authorities. She is 16 supposedly. There are likely many other girls there who are 16 and 17 and are lawfully capable of consent. </p>
<p>42, I could be wrong but I am willing to bet you believe a girl has the right to an abortion in the first trimester even if the girl is 14. If she can make an informed decision to kill her child, surely she is entitled to consent to sex when she is the lawful age of consent in Texas (either 16 or 17). Getting married requires a whole lot less thinking than getting an abortion. </p>
<p>How about you, CGM? I am pretty sure you are a big abortion rights supporter. Are you now willing to say a girl should not have the ability to consent to a medical procedure like an abortion? That would be the consistent thing to do.</p>
<p>The government should stay out of their (lawful) business.</p>
<p>razorsharp, you’re being purposefully obtuse and ignoring my point. Allow me to give you a hypothetical: if a man had a girl, raised her in a restrictive and isolated environment to believe that it was her duty to have sex with him, and then once she was of legal age to consent, she began having sex with him, would you consider her to have been capable of full consent? I wouldn’t. And that’s what this is about, despite your attempts to obfuscate this and make it some kind of issue about religious belief.</p>
<p>razorsharp - the point here is, any young person (boys included) who are raised in such an environment, aren’t capable of giving consent for anything. These sick people are using religion as a guise to fulfill their despicable pedophilia needs.</p>
<p>razorsharp, you’re being purposefully obtuse and ignoring my point. Allow me to give you a hypothetical: if a man had a girl, raised her in a restrictive and isolated environment to believe that it was her duty to have sex with him, and then once she was of legal age to consent, she began having sex with him, would you consider her to have been capable of full consent? I wouldn’t. And that’s what this is about, despite your attempts to obfuscate this and make it some kind of issue about religious belief.</p>
<p>It’s called “grooming”
The seattle school district has to pay $3 million dollars , $ 2.5 million to one girl who was “groomed” and abused by one teacher for many years</p>
<h2>“If the age to consent is 16 in Texas, then we are not dealing with statutory rape for the one girl who called the authorities. She is 16 supposedly. There are likely many other girls there who are 16 and 17 and are lawfully capable of consent.”</h2>
<p>She may be 16 now, but she allegedly gave birth at 15 and had a sexual relationship with a nonminor as early as 14. The crime occurred before age of consent. Nevertheless, when a complaint is made, law enforcement is required to investigate. If evidence of other crimes comes to light in the course of the investigation, law enforcement is required to investigate those as well.</p>
<p>Btw CGM…Frontier mentality aside, the FLDS bought land outside Eldorado by hiding their identity and pretending to be a corporation wishing to build a executive hunting retreat. Even in Texas, the FLDS would have had a hard time finding a seller if they had been transparent in the transaction. </p>
<p>Also, I don’t think these groups exactly ‘thrive’ in the State of Texas. Quite the contrary, the Branch-Davidian compound is a big scorch mark and looks like authorities have taken a large portion of the FLDS into custody. Any other Texas groups you had in mind?</p>
<p>
I am not ignoring your point, you are ignoring mine. I am not condoning any criminal behavior. If there are criminals prosecute them. But most of those people are not criminals. Becuase you believe their lifestyles are wierd, you think it is ok for the government to interfer with their behavior. </p>
<p>Muslims believe Mohammad will one day return on a flying horse. Christians believe in Adam and Eve. I fail to see why this group of mormons should be degraded by members of this forum and the rest of the world simply because they believe God wants them to live an isolated life with polygamy. Parents should be allowed to raise their children as they see fit within the law and teach those children in their religious beliefs. The rest of you do it, why can’t they do it as well.</p>
<p>42, under your hypothetical and your view, when that girl becomes 40 she would still not be giving consent. Can a 13 year old girl give “full consent” as you define it to having a medical procedure on her body called an abortion? Answer that one will you?</p>
<p>I confess that I have some sympathy for what razorsharp is saying here, because this is an extremely slippery slope. These people DO have a religious belief in the virtues of polygamy, and I don’t find it easy at all to draw the line where the government should come in and disrupt what they are doing. I guess it’s the age of consent. But, look, anybody who lives in a separatist religious group could be subject to this kind of interference if outsiders think they are not raising their kids properly. I’m thinking of the Amish, of Hasidic Jews, and others who have ideas about education, child labor, and family life that are out of the mainstream. I think you have to tread very carefully, and I do have to wonder whether taking 400 kids away in one fell swoop is treading carefully enough.</p>
<p>Hunt, I’m sympathetic, as well. We have a large Hasidic community here that is treated with courtesy and respect. Hubby is a garbageman and the department’s hours are different for the Hasidic neighborhoods during the year – the only neighborhoods in the city for which that concession is made. It’s completely appropriate and I support that. What I don’t support is using underage girls for sex toys and brood mares. I think the safety and well being of minor children trumps absolutely everything else and if even one girl is being abused, we need to stop it. Someone earlier referred to the practice as “grooming” and I think that’s probably right as for the Barlow guy based on his history and record. Religious liberty shouldn’t be a cover for pedophilia. I have absolutely no sympathy for grown men raising little girls for sex, none at all, and if the sexual abuse of children is part of one’s “religious” practice, then shut it down. If consenting adults want to live in family configurations outside the norm, that’s just fine with me. I’m on record as being supportive of gay marriage, but those girls are human beings with rights and aspirations of their own. They do not exist to serve the perversions of old men.</p>
<p>*Parents should be allowed to raise their children as they see fit within the law and teach those children in their religious beliefs. The rest of you do it, why can’t they do it as well.
…Muslims believe Mohammad will one day return on a flying horse. Christians believe in Adam and Eve. *
And Mormons believe God lives on planet Kolob- or it might be a star, there is some diasagreement about that</p>
<p>Are we allowed to raise slaves if we call it a religion?</p>
<p>[RELIGION</a> AND CHILD ABUSE NEWS](<a href=“http://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/]RELIGION”>http://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/)</p>
<p>Controlling and abusing children in the name of religion, doesn’t make it moral or legal.</p>
<p>[Mormon</a> Sect’s Power Struggle Splits BC Town](<a href=“http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0012694]Mormon”>http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0012694)</p>
<p>[American</a> lawbreaking: Illegal immigration. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine](<a href=“http://www.slate.com/id/2175730/entry/2175741/]American”>What Is a Criminal?)</p>
<p>The Amish–great comparison. They insist that their young men and women leave the community for the wider world for a period of time in order to understand what their choices are, so that when they come back home, if they do, it will be a choice. They are not shielded from knowledge or experience.</p>
<p>It’s really the opposite of brainwashing.</p>
<p>
You ignored my words “within the law” in my sentence, “Parents should be allowed to raise their children as they see fit within the law and teach those children in their religious beliefs.” Slavery became illegal a long time ago. No one is suggesting that calling something a religion allows you to circumvent the law.</p>
<p>Well, we’ve heard assertions of a pattern of statutory rape, abandonment of children, and child abuse. At what point do you take precautionary actions while investigating?</p>