I haven't been following this story at all, jim, so I'm glad to read your take on it. The insanity has been unleashed and rampages on. There are so many front lines it's hard to keep track of every battle. It does get wearying. I was glad to see your reference to what was done to the Native Americans.
i understand your concerns, and especially about the need for every one of these children and women to have personal advocates. and i don't doubt for a minute that the heavy-handedness is damaging to all.
but i cannot wrap my mind around child abuse and child rape being written off as a cultural or religious difference. girls of 14 or 15 are not developmentally ready to undertake marriage and child-rearing. and these girls essentially have no choice in the matter. i cannot imagine things are much better for the boys, who must either be cultivated to be one of the lucky holy few, or be driven off.
no good solutions to this one, in my opinion. i feel pretty strongly about not forcing young teen girls into marriage, and my feelings are not driven by another brand of fundamental religion, but by the belief that those children have basic human rights.
This is in reality a genuinely-believed-in religion, such that we and they have a complete cultural disconnect. We have had similar but lesser problems with other groups like the Amish and Mennonite who maltreat their children by depriving them of education and the possibility of what we regard as a better life. And while for liberal Americans the issue might be child marriages, for the government of the state of Texas it is, as far as I can tell from the rhetoric of officialdom, pure hatred and fear of the other.
But none of this is really the fundamental issue for me--try to step back and imagine yourself, for a moment, one of these children. Their families, and their community, are all that they have ever known. And they are being forcibly removed from all that they have ever known--how terrifying is that?
Losing your parents, if you are a child, especially if you are a small child, is the most dreadful thing that can happen to you. And we justify this by saying they will be better off as a result of this trauma--after they heal. But that's not actually a wound that heals.
Likewise, losing your children, if you are a parent, is a terrible thing. How do we justify the harm we do to these mothers?
The only assumption that could justify it is physical safety, which as far as I can see is not truly an issue here, or that their families do not love them, and they do not love their families. That might be true in instances of child abuse within our own culture, where such an assumption is likely to have made itself true by the dynamics of abuse itself. I haven't seen any evidence that it is true here.
So the harm we are doing them, even if for their own good, is real and terrible.
If we are really concerned about child welfare, then empathy alone is going to lead us to reject the solution arrived at by the State of Texas. As you say, there may not be a good solution, but I have a hard time imagining a worse one than this.
i hear you about the terror and pain of moms and their kids being pulled apart. i cannot see why removing kids older than 4 from their mothers makes any sense at all -- that is definitely adding trauma on top of trauma.
jim, i really see no good solution. it seemed at first like they were at least trying to care for the women and kids removed, respectfully. but preserving parent/child ties and giving everyone the right to counsel -- taking time with it, being respectful -- yes, that seems to have gone by the wayside.
Long term abuse of an entire gender in a closed community is not acceptable.
This isn't a 'religious' choice, it is a cult that has been harming women in so many ways. Not to mention harming young men they toss out with nothing b/c they need to keep the odds down for the men there.
Look at the dynamics:
--a group breaking a law as a standard for behavior (bigamy)
--charismatic leader now in prison over abuses
--women and children with no choice to live outside of the group. people that leave call it 'escaping' for a reason.
--all local law enforcement in the area is unwilling to even get involved in anything there - or are part of the cult. The cult has their own armed security force that patrols and removes anyone from even surrounding public property with guns.
--education is minimal and only like a big home ec class for girls.
These are all signs of a CULT that is harmful and abusing people.
I have no problem with people like the Amish who live in their own world, with their own schools, rules and religious. They are an insular community, not a cult. People can leave the Amish - it is voluntarily. The Amish abide by laws and respect law authority.
Michelle, perhaps you haven't been following the dismay of the social workers who are having to administer this unfortunate affair. As they have pointed out in a report the governor would love to suppress, the children seem to be well adjusted and happy, or at least they were until they were seized and taken away from their mothers.
There are three identifiable issues here:
One is the rule of law, which the state of Texas seems to be running roughshod over. At least one of the incarcerated "children" has turned out to be an adult. This in itself is a violation of due process, even though the state promptly released her after discovering it. It is not up to citizens to prove to the state that they are adults to avoid being incarcerated, it is up to the state to prove that seized individuals are children--before seizing them.
The second is freedom of religion. Texans, I am afraid, are particularly hysterical about "cults," as we saw a few years ago in Waco when local indignation at a deviant and secretive Seventh Day Adventist group set in motion (once again--how familiar this is) the destruction of a village in order to save it, in that case killing about 80 people, as I recall, most of them women and children. The adults (and many, probably most, of the plural wives are adults) in this current dreadful situation, btw, are not practicing polygamy, legally speaking, because they are not legally married--it is no more appropriate to use the power of the state to break up their unconventional families than it is to arrest people in New York City living in polyamorous relationships which, if we exclude the issue of underage "wives" would be legally indentical.
Third, is the issue of underage marriage. I'll note in passing that we did not kill many hundreds of Mormons in the 19th century because they had teenage wives, simply because most of the standard Americans doing the killing also had teenage wives. Standard Americans have changed their customs, and in my opinion, for the better, but a little bit of perspective would be in order here--we are dealing with a different culture, not a bunch of criminals. And once we define people as "criminals" of course, our monstrous American punitiveness rolls into action, crushing all in its path. We already have more people in prison than any country on the planet--why not imprison a few more, says the State of Texas, which itself imprisons more people than most civilized countries?
Yes, some of the men, those who have underage "wives," are breaking the law (not the law against bigamy, btw, as far as I can tell.) And I think the power of the state can, and should, be used to prevent sectarian Mormon men from having sex with underage girls, and ultimately, and as a last resort, send the specific _men_ who are violating the law, to jail, if that should prove necessary.
But imprisoning the children, ripping them away from their mothers--that's heartless and a misuse of power. The destruction of whole families, the idea that the women must be reeducated, the children must be sent off to redneck Baptist foster homes, is an extraordinarily unwise and cruel idea.
Commenting by HaloScan
