Breaking news:

Court: Texas had no right to remove FLDS children - CNN.com

"The state of Texas should not have removed the more than 460 children it took from a polygamist sect's ranch, an appeals court ruled Thursday."

I wonder what will happen next?

I just dont' get this. It seems every time something big like this happens and the government is acting to protect someone, it backfires on them. Watch, they'll send all those kids back to that ranch and then a few years from now one or more of those kids will grow up and sue the state for not protecting them and then the state will allow that lawsuit to go forward. What those people are doing is wrong and the government is going to block the efforts being made to try to save those young girls. Having sex with underage girls is illegal. Polygamy is illegal. And they are allowing it to happen.

Lisa

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"It's not having what you want,
It's wanting what you've got"

What in the world? I can't believe that!

Shocked but not entirely surprised.

This church has been around since 1935 (give or take) and practicing polygamy since it's inception. The group broke away from the LDS church in the 1890's when the LDS church renounced polygamy.

1953, same religious group FLDS, but in Colorado City, AZ, which was the former church headquarters before they moved to TX in 2004: Short Creek raid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I agree with Cuthie. I am not surprised. am saddened

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Proud to say I haven't shopped at a Wal-Mart since Sept 2003

I have very mixed feelings about this.

I am not for polygamy in any way shape or form, but it's occurred to me that it those people looked much more 'with it' than they do - say, they were rock stars or something - many people wouldn't bat an eye at the multiple partners thing. They'd be written up in people magazine and saying things like, "It's my life and if I wanna marry the same guy as my best friend and he's cool with it and she's cool with it, it's nobody else's business!" A lot of us might find it disturbing but wouldn't necessarily see legal grounds to make them *not* live together. Their 'marriage' wouldn't be a legal one, so technically they are live-in's swapping partners.

If they started having kids, or their kids started having promiscuous sex and having babies, well... it happens.

I'm not saying it's acceptable, but I'm saying that we don't pursue, legally, very many people who impregnate 14 - 15 year old kids, or even 16 year old kids, even though if a young girl is pregnant then at the very last, statutory rape occurred, even if it was consensual.

The way of life for families in which there have been several generations of kids born out of wedlock to young mothers, often fathered by different men, generations of welfare use and seeming to 'milk the system' because it just feeds itself and each new girl born into the family is shown the example that sex at a young age is just part of what people do...

The behaviors aren't all that different than what happened in the compound. We can say that they have indoctrinated young girls into a world where they have sex way too young... and that's wrong ... but it happens very day on the outside of that compound, and our response is to give them food stamps and a babysitting program at school, rather than to go after the parents who probably contributed to the cycle that resulted in their teen being a mother at a young age.

The difference with this cult is that they seem very backwards to us, societally, so when they try to explain why they do things, we don't 'get it.' We want to punish them in a way we seem to think we don't have a *right* to punish people on the 'outside' who essentially perpetrate the same mindset - that underage sex is good, etc..

Please don't think I'm defending them. I just don't know that there was evidence of eminent danger to any specific child at the time they went in there. Because they have a *culture* in which men have sex with multiple women and have babies by multiple women in what otherwise seems a rather Puritanical situation, they seem odd and freakazoidal to us. But their *behavior* is one that on the outside world, we say is bad behavior but not criminal, and we pray the dad will pay child support for all his various 'families'.

There were hundreds of kids in the compound, and they found evidence that four (if I heard correctly) would've been pregnant prior to the age of 16. Obviously, that's four too many, but there are that many in my son's school system, so their percentage of underage pregnancy isn't greater than that on the outside. The question then becomes whether the girls were raped or if it was consensual, and what the ages of the fathers is. If the girls aren't willing to tell - which isn't uncommon on the *outside*, either - then the police don't have any grounds on which to hold any of them.

We can say it's a culture that encourages certain things, and while we'd be correct... it's also every bit as correct to say that *our* culture seems to turn a blind eye, or at the very least be dubbed 'judgmental' - if we express a negative view of someone who is from three generations of out-of-wedlock teen mothers, pregnant again by a different man, and ... well... if the people in the compound dressed a little hipper, we might not be as alarmed.

Which is sad... because the behavior *is* alarming.

This perspective is accurate, although creepy. It is easy to look at them as "extremely" different because of their look, yet we have so many with equally troubling problems (perpetuating the *babies having babies* and *statutory rape* issues) that blend into our society more easily, and that we judge less harshly.

Yup.

To pull a celebrity out of the hat, look at Jamie Lynn Spears (did I even spell that right? lol) Very young girl, brought up in a family that perpetrated the notion that it's perfectly normal to be sexually active at a young age. We are assuming that the girls in the compound were terrorized by the men they had sex with. To those girls,it may have been as anticipated thing as much as a Jamie Lynn type anticipated getting some 'hot guy' to notice her.

The result is the same in the end. A young girl with a baby.

And while I find both situations equally alarming and destructive, but I'd wager that the kids in the compound will probably grow up with a lesser chance of a Britney-esque existence. They probably have a skill set and a lot of focus. They probably feel generally at peace in their world.

Don't mistake what I'm saying for support of them. I just think 'we' want them pursued hotly because they are religious and backwards-looking. Non-religious, hip-looking people perpetuate behaviors that land their kids in such situations all the time and we just throw our hands up and say we shouldn't judge. There is a double standard. And a weird factor in this situation is their religion. The whole "separation of church and state" argument was meant to keep the government from interfering with people of a religious faith having to conform to something that is against their faith. It's not just irresponsibility and lust driving these behaviors - for many of them, it is truly a issue of *faith*.

So... I don't know what you do with that.

I do know that I'm entirely creeped out by their situation!

I couldn't care less how many people live together/marry one another if they are adults and consenting and everyone is there of their own free will.

But I have a big problem w/girls AND boys being raped and molested and abused. Every single woman and man who 'escaped' from that society and spoke out about it, that I have seen, has described exactly that - every single one has said they were raped/abused/molested. Some as teens, some as younger kids, some as toddlers. And they broke a bone and were denied medical treatment, or their baby was held underwater by their 'leader' when it cried, or the leader gave their baby away to be raised by someone else when it was born, etc etc. And those who tried to leave the compound were not allowed to leave of their own volition.

I agree Jamie L and other teens having babies, that's not ok either...but Jamie had sex w/her teen boyfriend. She didn't marry a man in his 50s in an arranged marriage because she was told she had to do that, to get into heaven. It's not ok imo but I don't think she was brainwashed or forced either and she isn't a 'prisoner' in a compound.

Sick group. Pedophilia is not a religion so I am not buying the freedom of religion stuff.

I agree with you - I really do. They just didn't have evidence to show that all 400+ kids were in danger when they went in and took all 400 kids based on a single phone call that from what we're now hearing came from someone in Colorado who has a history of calling and reporting random things just to see what will happen.