When Pregnancy Is Child Abuse
As the father of four Allisonettes, ages 16-23, I am disgusted by the latest CPS announcement that 31 out of 53 girls rounded up in the FLDS raid are either pregnant or have given birth (one, in fact, gave birth today). However, I remain skeptical. For one thing, the CPS is working overtime to justify its actions, and many of its leaks to the press have been as inaccurate as the original grounds for the search warrant. For another, as Scott Henson points out, its numbers either don’t add up or are deliberately jiggled. But there’s another point that goes to the heart of the matter, which I’ll address after the jump:
The state’s case — and public support for the state’s case — is based on my, your, our disgust. We, or at least I, can’t help but think of these girls as victims of brainwashing. However, the state is required to show a crime has been committed. (Forget for a moment that the original search warrant is perhaps fatally compromised.) My disgust is not enough to hold people against their will or even to intervene to protect those whom I believe may be seriously, dangerously wrong in their beliefs. Then there remains the question of the 1st Amendment. Is the FDLS a religion or a cult — and how does the law make a distinction? Do Catholics and Baptists brainwash their children by instilling in them tenets of how to conduct their lives, what to believe, how to reproduce? Common sense tells us no. But FDLS members would probably make the case for moral equivalence. I think I would easily be able to dismantle their case, but who’s to stop them from making it, or at least believing it? Is that the prerogative of the state?
These girls are scheduled for individual hearings before June 5. We will know more then, and we will know even more when their attorneys start filing federal habeas corpus motions. At that point, the CPS, having tried to make its case in the media, will have to make its case in court. If there is a crime, the state will be able to punish the individuals responsible. And let the rest of these poor, deluded people — pregnant or non-pregnant — go free.
18 Comments to “When Pregnancy Is Child Abuse”
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I can’t find your goalposts, Wick. They were right here a minute ago.
Do Catholics and Baptists brainwash their children?
Yes.
Common sense tells us YES. That’s the silver lining to a case like this: It exposes how equally ridiculous other, more widely accepted brainwashing cults are. Not that anyone will notice.
Disgusting or not. When is it legal to get underage girls pregnant? Maybe they go down to Mexico to do the deed?
Seriously…is everyone just forgetting that most of these teenage mothers were likely impregnated by men several decades their senior?
The case is not based on disgust but law, children (as young as 14) are being impregnated.
Wick,
Please — some clear thinking, here. Your argument gets weaker with each piece of information that comes out of this case.
“Brain-washing” — whatever that is — is not the issue. Neither is disgust.
These are children, by legal and probably by common-sense definition, forced to bed down and conceive with much older men. It is, indeed, the prerogative of the state to protect the rights of those unable to protect themselves.
A day late is better than never.
If these mothers or caretakers or whatever the hell they are, are working to get their children to provide false information, isn’t that tampering with an investigation? Isn’t that against the law?
Medical exams of these kids, now that they’re free of their pimps, I mean, mothers, find that a lot of the young ones have suffered a number of broken bones. Maybe they’re spinning, but I’ve raised three kids, all daredevils, and not one has broken a bone.
And the big one, pregnant teenagers. That is not right in any way, shape or form. Because they’re not getting pregnant by the school boy with whom they have a crush. It’s geezer sex.
This makes me crazy. But thanks for at least bringing it up today.
Word of the Day: Geezer Sex.
Awesome.
Wick, I salute you for simply asking the questions others won’t instead of the more mainstream lemming-like finger snaps of jumps-to-conclusion regarding actions by the State of Texas Attorney General and CPS. You remain a skeptic rather than a reactionary at a time when everyone else is ready to move on and rendezvous at Mi Cocina to talk about sports, money and shoes. Thanks.
wow Wick that is some tortured reasoning there. This has squat to do with the 1st Amendment. What does the state’s prohibition against raping minors have to do with making laws respecting or prohibiting the exercise of religion? I guess you feel that statutory rape is them “exercising” their religion? Is everything okay if you first create a religion that calls for it? If only I had known. I could have created an underage drinking religion when I was 18, and had a federal case over my MIP!
the reference to Catholics and Baptists is even more silly. Unless they’re doing something illegal, what do those religions have to do with these apparently illegal acts of FDLS in this context? What does brainwashing have to do with anything? The girls are too young to consent legally, brainwashed or not. Does brainwashing a minor and then having sex with her somehow create an okay act?
I think clear crimes have (probably) been committed, but Wick’s ruminations on the role of disgust are perfectly germaine. Only by hiding behind the smokescreen of popular disgust can they even begin to get away with such a shoddily conducted raid/investigation.
A clear case of shoot first, ask questions later (if metaphorically). Everyone knows drug users, cult members and brown-skinned Middle Eastern men with scary-sounding names are so viscerally repugnant they should be dealt with as a kind of insect infestation. Right?
Catholic and Baptist comment is ridiculous. Are you trying to make a point because the Catholic religion emphasizes in abstaining from birth control? Although the religion teaches it, it’s hardly brainwashed into the congregation. That’s an incredibly inaccurate and uneducated comment. Especially considering I have grown up in a Catholic environment my entire life and I know very few that even follow that long-standing Catholic tradition. It’s a choice that one can make - and the freedom to make it. And unfortunately, the young girls in FLDS don’t have either!
And unfortunately, the young Catholic boys didn’t have either!
Right.
I’m a little confused. I thought the removal of a child from a home was a civil proceeding. The agency received a report (albeit now disputed) that sexual abuse was occurring to minor girls at the YFZ Ranch. The agency went to investigate (branded a raid by the histrionic media), as CPS is required to do with any claim of sexual abuse, and found young girls who are clearly minors pregnant or with children of their own. All children were, as a result, removed.
Had they gone in and not found anything to substantiate the claim of the caller, the case would have been over. No?
Why are we getting distracted by claims of Fourth and First Amendment rights?
If, instead, the police were looking for the Daddy Johns to arrest them for criminal conduct, the Fourth Amendment would be implicated - probable cause, search and seizure, and all that good stuff. Here, it just doesn’t apply. CPS didn’t go in looking to arrest someone. They went in to make sure children weren’t being sexually abused.
As for the First Amendment, every right we have has limits, and the First Amendment rights are no different. And our laws, including civil and criminal codes, as upheld by the courts when challenged, define those limits. Texas law says that no person can have sex with a person under 17 - no matter the reason. Even if the minor thinks its okay, it doesn’t matter. We as Texans just don’t think minors have the capacity to make that kind of decision - that whatever someone else has fed them on the subject to convince them that it IS okay IS brainwashing. And that’s a legitimate limit to any other persons rights, whether claimed through freedom of religion or freedom of whatever else.
It’s never easy when talking about the separation of children from their parents, but when their parents are allowing their children to be sexually violated and abused, then it’s required. I don’t care what you claimed religion teaches. And I don’t know of any religion that can legitimately claim to teach it.
If the Catholic boys’ parents were handing them over to the clergymen with the expectation or even suspicion that abuse would take place and everyone in the church and the neighborhood KNEW it was happening and nobody blew the whistle because they believed that it’s a tenet of Catholicism… THEN you might have a legitimate comparison. As it is, you don’t.
I also wish the D bloggers who have posted on this issue would do some actual research (Jon Krakauer, Daphne Bramham, etc.) on the FLDS instead of taking their PR’s word for it after the fact.
We have a fairly clear idea that several underage girls in this group are having babies. If that’s not enough reason to examine how children are treated in this group, here’s one more. It looks like a lot of boys have gone missing. After about age 11, they are few in number. Why is that? There are plenty of baby boys, but not many male adolescents. Do they leave voluntarily? Are they banished? It seems to me that several male children remain unaccounted for.