It is truly great news that the FLDS children will be returning to their parents! It is sad and angering that the parents were held hostage by their own government in order to get their children back. Sign an agreement to abrogate their own civil rights or don’t get their children back. Talk about choice…

After what the Sheriff claimed was 4 years of investigation with an inside informant, over 2 months of intense investigation after the raid, search, and confiscation of materials from the ranch, and after over 2 months of questioning of children, often without their parents or an appropriate legal guardian present, there is zero evidence of abuse of any kind for the vast majority of the families. In only 2 families is there any evidence of any kind of abuse and that evidence is shaky.

What we do have evidence of is a lot of lying by Texas authorities regarding what evidence they had, how many underage children were pregnant or had already born children, …

More later…

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http://www.sltrib.com/ci_9439383

According to a story here, the original request for a warrant was denied due to insufficient evidence. Some quick searching on Judge Johnny Griffin reveals that he has taken a moderate approach towards the FLDS even as his apparent friend, Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran, was getting antsy about them.

Only in Minnesota. Well, unfortunately not. Seems some local cops decided to do some celebrating with their service revolvers. It’s good to know we’re making some strong efforts to hire people with good character to be cops. These neighbors were far more charitable than I think I would have been.

http://www.startribune.com/local/19417229.html

A couple of years ago I met individually with a number of child welfare workers for some research. These are the people who decide if a child should be removed from a home, who write up recommendations for the court regarding the child’s future, who work with parents on creating a better home environment, and who inform courts if parents are fit to be parents or not. One thing that really struck me was the family life of these folks themselves. One very interesting thing that struck me was that those married with children were outnumbered by those single with children. Single because they were either divorced or had never even married the other parent. And these are the people telling others how to create a good home?

This was not even remotely scientific, but it would be interesting, if someone hasn’t already, to study this issue and find out just who we are relying on to determine who is fit to be a parent. Maybe next year.

As an old song says “If you can’t even run your own life, I’ll be damned if you’ll run mine.”

On a related note, just who is the state saying is or is not a fit parent? Apparently Texas’ CPS is OK with a polygynous relationship where some guy makes a baby with a teen girl and then runs off. There are some pretty reliable statistics to indicate that this kid is extremely likely to become a teen mom or dad themselves (and they are also likely to become a criminal). I can’t find any records of CPS raiding these homes, even though there are thousands more of them throughout the state. Even when CPS does get involved in these it’s rare that they remove children from the home. Yet, in a polygynous relationship where dad sticks around to help raise all of his kids and where evidence indicates that extremely few, if any, will turn out to be criminals, CPS deems it necessary to confiscate the kids.

I’ve found it rather interesting that the topic of polygyny has not been mentioned in any of the service plans or, to the best of my knowledge, in any of the custody hearings. There is certainly the possibility that CPS, given the vagueness of the service plans, intends to make it a part of each individual case. Perhaps as part of a ‘safe home environment’.

Another possibility though is that the State of Texas may be snake bit after their disagreement with Mr. Lawrence and his partner. Might they be thinking that going after the polygynists for polygyny in a legal court could wind up with a prohibition on polygyny being declared unconstitutional? Lawrence vs Texas certainly establishes a stage for that. In fact Justice Scalia, in his dissent made this point specifically. Stay tuned.

Recently I’ve been doing a good amount of flying, much of it back and forth across the Atlantic. As I checked in for a flight yesterday I was charged for excess baggage weight. I knew that I would be and for the most part I’m fine with it. It’s a reasonable charge. Extra weight causes a plane to burn extra fuel and reduces the amount of revenue they can earn carrying other packages. This is simply the cost for me of some of the extra stuff I’ve had to carry.

Checking in ahead of me was a woman who weighed at least 250 lbs and likely over 300. From the looks of it her luggage was right at the 50 lb max as well. She was not charged for any extra weight. I weigh 160 lbs and had a 62 lb bag. Even without her luggage she weighed considerably more than me and my luggage. While this has never seemed fair, I’ve had more pressing issues than to worry about it too much.

Guess who was sitting in the seat next to me on the flight? Guess who couldn’t fit in just her own seat but flowed over in to my space? This wasn’t the first time I’ve had someone flow over in to my seat and on most airlines the flight attendants are sympathetic and try to make arrangements that will be more comfortable for both. Unfortunately this was a completely full flight so there was nothing they could do though one did apologize to me. The good news was that it was only a 1 hour flight and not 9 hours.

I paid more to fly less weight than she did to fly more weight and I got considerably less seat room than she did as well.

A quick cursory look through some statutory rape cases in Texas seems to indicate a pattern of going only after racial or religious minorities. Prior to the potential charges of statutory rape against the men in the FLDS compound, the State of Texas appears to have previously concentrated on African Americans. Either the Texas Authorities have a prejudice problem or whites in Texas don’t commit statutory rape. If anyone has any better information on this issue, for or against, please stop by my office.

Also, for anyone not already concerned about the power of government intrusion I invite you to read a novel. “Custody of the State” is by Craig Parshall. Craig btw is the husband of Janet Parshall of Janet Parshall’s America radio program. They are both great people and I highly recommend Janet’s radio show.

The FLDS site now includes a chart of the gender and ages of those taken in the raid.

http://www.captivefldschildren.org/Counts.php

Since this represents all of the children (or supposed children) in the YFZ ranch it is interesting to note the relative numbers of males and females. In the younger generation there are slightly more males, but in the teens there is an abnormally low number of males to the number of females than can realistically be explained by natural childbirth. What happened to the males? More lost boys?