A Texas-Sized Kidnapping

This Texas compound issue gets worse and worse by the day. Texas Child Protective Services has admitted to taking adult women against their will while rounding up the children from the Texas Morman compound several weeks ago. Among the 450+ children were several adults over the age of 18 that were seized and taken into state custody. There are 27 claims of adults being held against their will amongst the children.

One particular case, a 23 year-old woman presented authorities a valid drivers license. Her parents provided her birth certificate. They still took custody of the woman and her child and placed both of them in a foster home. They insisted that she was only 16.

This case is one of the greatest travesties and miscarriage of justice that you will ever hear about in our country. If you haven't been following; several weeks ago Texas authorities receive a phone call from someone claiming to be an abused 16 year-old girl married to a known sex offender more than twice her age. The phone call caused Texas authorities to raid the compound that the girl claimed she was being held.

After extensive interview of the women and the girls, authorities were unsucessful. Although their sweep failed to locate and identify the "victim" in question, authorities were convinced that they could produce one from among the 450+ children at the 1,700 acre ranch. So, they decided to take all of the children at the compound. In buses, they took the now terrified kids away. Officials separated sons and daughters from their mothers while police held their fathers at bay, unable to protect their families.

Constitutional due-process requirements and 4th amendment considerations aside, government officials arrogantly felt that as long as the kids were now under their control, their lives would be improved. However, these kids are now suffering from diarrhea and other digestional problems from the change from their organic diet. They are also being subject to forced immunization. Of course Texas CPS doesn't have the infrastructure to take on 450 new cases. So, now these kids are being scattered across the state separated from their parents and other siblings.

Now, I'm all in favor of shots for kids and would by no means ever condone any abuse to a child. Any person guilty of such an unspeakable crime should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. A closed society is no protection from our country's laws.

But, we know today that the phone call was bogus, so of course they never found the girl. The sex offender in question hasn't been in Texas in two decades. The caller has been arrested for making bogus claims. However, these parents are still in courts trying to regain custody of their children. They are being subject to hearings en masse and being forced to defend themselves against a claim known to have been faked. Of course they come from a closed self-sufficient society, so they don't have the resources to secure quality legal representation.

Again, if grown men were abusing young girls, they need the book thrown at them. But it is the government's responsibility to produce evidence of a crime, charge a specific individual for that crime and give Americans due process as they dispute the charges brought against them. I don't see any of that happening in this case.

Unfortunately the seriousness of the charges may be causing some civil libertarians to turn a blind eye to this case. It also doesn't help that they make their own clothes, live completely outside of society and in lifestyles that would be considered unacceptable to many Americans. However, these people are no less worthy of individual justice and constitutional rights.

Who gets to decide what level of weirdness is good enough to deny you of your family? If the sight of pregnant teenagers is justification alone to take away communities of children, then there would be several projects and trailer parks childless with their parents subjected to mass hearings.