Posted on 05/23/2008 1:25:06 PM PDT by Belasarius
SAN ANGELO, Texas - Tina Louise Steed had just one question for a judge who declared her an adult Thursday morning. "I'm wondering how come they wouldn't believe my ID in the first place?" she asked Judge Jay Weatherby. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services acknowledged that Tina Louise and three other "disputed minors" are actually adult women - admissions that came as the Third Court of Appeals in Austin ruled it never had sufficient evidence to remove any children from a polygamous sect. At least three more women were to be declared adults Thursday afternoon or Friday, but those hearings were canceled after word of the decision reached the Tom Green County Courthouse. And more are on the docket next week. The admissions by the state left a rapidly diminishing count of women in a disputed age category that is central to its claim of underage mothers found at the YFZ Ranch. The state alleged that 31 women ages 14 to 17 were pregnant, mothers or both, a count that included 26 mothers whose ages were disputed. As of noon Thursday, just eight mothers remained in the disputed category. And an attorney for one 14-year-old said Wednesday her client also is wrongly being listed among the 31 pregnant or mothering teenagers.
(Excerpt) Read more at sltrib.com ...
This issue is drifting back into the "States case is in trouble again" zone. By the time all these people sue they'll be able to buy their own FLDS professional sports franchise.
I'm for the law. Do it right or don't do it.
Are you seriously claiming that as long as an incest perp or statutory rapist puts enough minors in his household and keeps the abuse level below par compared to our culture, that a government should base its active response or sit-on-its-hands response by such a stupid statistic?
(Hypothetical: So as long as Hugh Hefner were to put just enough minors in his mansion and leave just enough of them alone, that's the basis of your compound vs. culture comment?)
It sounds like you WANT to believe the worst about these people, rather than approaching the accusations with an open mind. Could you fairly sit on a jury trying them? BTW....Mr. Hefner only like adult ladies, as far as has ever been publicized.
Where is Janet Reno and Bubba Clinton when you need them to engage in appropriate military action? They would know how to handle this compound of evil cultists. sarc
Yeah well the problem here is that the polygamists have found loopholes to circumvent the law. And all the while getting government welfare.
Our courts "interpret" law everyday to do things like allow gays to marry. Why can't they interpret the law now and find that these people are "common law" married couples, thus closing the loopholes these guys are using to get away with being polygamists.
Gee, could it be because you were one of the many women who'd given different names to interviewers at different times?
You know, really, that is the issue that is being completely ignored. They apparently were untruthful, but the state was supposed to be able to amass evidence without doing anything but asking them questions and then believing whatever they said.
Strange.
susie
This case is slipping away from the state of Texas. As it should. They overreached their authority and stepped in it.
What else has been “reported” that was a lie? It will be interesting to see the rest of the lies fall flat.
Give it time. Every-time the magic words of "cult" and "compound" are used the odds are it's bullchips.
How long have you been Mr. Hefner’s FReeper defender?
Dr. Judith Reisman received a U.S. Department of Justice $800,000 grant to research images of sexuality and children applied to children in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler magazines…this included cartoon images in these publications.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen references to this, but when the cartoon references alone are accumulated, it’s actually quite shocking that a mentality of pedophilia was so common in what became mainstream porn mags in the 1970s and 1980s:
Dr. Reisman is president of The Institute for Media Education, author of the U.S. Department of Justice, Juvenile Justice study, Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler, US Dep. Justice Grant No. 84-JN-AX-K007, 1986, 1989, 1990.…I brought eighty slides for my presentation as evidence supporting my findings of child pornography in Playboy and Penthouse…I was leaving for the London train when a Canadian psychologist took me quietly aside. Certainly, I was right, he said. Those images of children in Playboy/Penthouse would cause sexual acting out on children…I was appointed as a Full Research Professor at American University as the principal investigator of an $800,000 grant to investigate Kinsey's role in child sexual abuse and the link to children appearing in mainstream pornography, Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler. MASSACHUSETTS, 1989: Oakes v. Massachusetts. Massachusetts Attorney General, James Shannon cited Dr. Reisman's DoJ, Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention study in this successful brief and in oral appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Shannon wrote (1/8/90): I contacted Dr. Reisman in connection with an important child pornography case, Massachusetts v. Oakes…that I argued in the United States Supreme Court in January 1989…I had to convince the court that both nude and sexually explicit photographs of children were exploitive and harmful.To make the point, I quoted Dr. Reisman's study, "Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler Magazines," in which she showed that sexually exploitive photographs of children condone and promote a distorted view of sexuality, often by pairing...sexuality and violence, or depicting children as desiring sexual activity with adults…Susan Trento, Investigative Reporter, Author of The Power House: exposed Playboy's buying of legislative influence in Washington D.C. to discredit Reisman, whose cataloging of "children, crime and violence in pictures and cartoons found in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler...made the publishers of these and other magazines very nervous" (1992:194). http://www.drjudithreisman.com/about_dr_reisman.html
It sounds like you WANT to believe the worst about these people, rather than approaching the accusations with an open mind.
You know what? There’s been literally dozens and dozens of FReeper threads over the past several years of educators who have been arrested for statutory rape, sexual abuse by a person in a position of authority over minor students, molestation of students, inappropriate e-mails with students, and the like. If you could show me just one time where you’ve gone on any of those threads and issued the same “open mind…don’t believe the worst about these people” line, I’ll at least commend you for consistency.
There’s also been threads about abortion industry clinics, both its phone “counselors” and staff, telling potential clients and clients how to “sneak” around the law provision that would trigger the clinic from having to report incest or statutory rape. (Have you posted this same line at any of those threads, or even informally made a comment like you have to somebody in those cases?)
What about all the threads posted about the allegations of Roman Catholic priests re: abuse? Do you post on any of these to warn about "appoaching the accusations with an open mind?" (No? Why not?)
What about the pre-trial O.J. Simpson discussions you had with folks. Did you tell them to keep an “open mind…don’t believe the worst about O.J.?”
…approaching the accusations with an open mind.
It’s exactly because I’ve kept an open, learning mind about the fLDS that I’ve taken the time to study them, which hasn’t left me surprised about Eldorado or its criminal justice track record in other states. (What? Do you think a Utah sherriff in recent years had 80 search warrants for the Colorado City polygamists and just sat on them because they were just minor offenses like playing tiddlywinks too late at night?)
How open is your mind to the fLDS if you have or would have prê-teen and/or early teen daughters? Would you consider poster FastCoyote’s challenge?
Here’s a way to see whether or not you are full of it. If the fLDS are such great people, then surely you won’t mind them being around either your daughters, or the underage daughters of close friends. All you have to do to show us how sincere you are is to mail a letter with the addresses of those young ones to Warren Jeffs, care of the Nevada prison system, and tell him he should explain his innocense to them. You can mail the same letter to the Patriarchs at YFZ Ranch. Maybe we can set up tours for the younguns.
Part of the “open mind learning” I mentioned above also continued post eldorado. I wanted to see what the “scholarly” pro-polygamous folks were saying from their side…and Mormon historian Todd M. Compton is one of the leading experts on polygamy. In his Signature Books article online, he provided a link to such a fundamentalist group, which was made up doctorate level and other plural wives (one was no longer a “plural” wife because one of her husbands had died recently). While I can’t pretend to know all the motivations for these women to produce such a Web site and other material, one of the reasons they had was to put a better face on the practice of contemporary polygamy. They interviewed 100 plural wives in-depth for a book they published. Six of the women confessed to becoming married at age 15.
While that’s legal in Utah with parental consent, when even the pro-polygamists concede that 6% of their female population was willing to be up front about becoming wives at age 15, what does that say about the “hidden” minors in Bountiful, Canada, Montana, Arizona, Mexico, Texas and elsewhere?
And when you consider that a lot of fundamentalist Mormon parents of 14 and 15 yo may be giving "consent" to their daughters being married, "consent" on part of a young teen in such sub-cultures where "placement marriages" (a euphemism for child rape) are practiced is a ridiculous consideration.
America's cities are filled with unwed mothers who practice polygamy with the village. Many of their children have no idea who are their fathers. Many of the women don't know who are the fathers of their children. These ghettos are filled with angry, confused men where as many as one quarter wind up in prison. These number in the millions. People live in fear in these ghettos.
Yet, the lesbians running child services chose to target a patriarchy cult and drag all the members through Hell using abusive power of the state. It really is a strange statistic where a non criminal patriarchy is punished while the criminal matriarchy goes unchecked.
In the meantime the fascists in state government get accustomed to getting away with abusive power and others are held unaccountable for a massive social failure. And, the scary part is the high number of Free Republic members who are outraged by the patriarchy.
Another allegation that has been shown to be patently false, btw.
L
“(Hypothetical: So as long as Hugh Hefner were to put just enough minors in his mansion and leave just enough of them alone, that’s the basis of your compound vs. culture comment?)”
So now we’re jumping from forced unions, mock weddings, statutory rape of young minors to already married men to women (not girls) who voluntarily (not forced) sleep with men?
Yet, the lesbians running child services chose to target a patriarchy cult and drag all the members through Hell using abusive power of the state. It really is a strange statistic where a non criminal patriarchy is punished while the criminal matriarchy goes unchecked.
Nonsequitor: Most of what you’re talking about is legal (as in l-e-g-a-l). For that which isn’t (pregnant or assaulted minors in the ghetto + an adult male...not just another minor), ya know somebody’s got to report something to even trigger it. And, yes, a problem exists there that it’s often “accepted.” But once the report is out, it needs to be followed up on.
I recall a Freeperette breathlessly informing us on an early thread that there were DOZENS of pregnant 12 & 13 year-old girls taken into custody.
Where are they being hidden?
Obviously in witness protection by CPS to insure their safety.
You'll all change your tune when CPS troops them into court!
Name a situation...
…of a school counselor hearing about a report of "abuse" and repetitive imminent threat from a student...
…of a pastor hearing about a similar report...
…where the CPS is simply suppose to sit on their hands about these reports?
Some of what you may perceive as “tolerance” is sometimes buried within the victim. Here’s an recent example. I just read (about 3 weeks ago) a case where a 51 yo educator was sentenced because for over 1 yr (or longer) he committed a series of crimes against a 17 yo student in the 1990s. She didn’t report it until recently. Therefore he couldn’t immediately be held accountable. Even if somebody back then had (correctly in hindsight) assumed they knew what was going on, if they didn’t have evidence, a false accusation back then could have ruined a perfectly good educator’s reputation.
What if, instead of all this being a Mormon compound it was a Roman Catholic summer camp or Roman Catholic boarding school with chapel? What if a Roman Catholic priest was ordering students to undergo private “weddings” to camp counselors or educators? I mean so what if half of such students or summer campers for whom this occurred in this hypothetical were 18? People forget that this wasn’t just a compound residence, but it was also a school, a summer camp, and a church? So what? You’d give a Roman Catholic priest a free pass if he was ordering 14 to 18 yo summer campers and boarding school students to get married to already married folks on campus? (Haven’t you ever heard about criminal investigations for a person abusing their position of authority?)
What I love about posters like you and LoneRangerMassachusetts…is that you can stare at a cult square on, hearing that they've…
…trafficked minors across state borders and even across Canada;
…sexually abused minors;
…coerced them into bedding an already married man after a mock wedding;
.."escorted" most of their teen boys out of their communities ("lost boys") to "weed out" competition;
…coached kids & wives to deceive authorities or just plain leave them in the dark as to issues like age, who their parents are, who their unionized husband is, etc.; etc, etc, etc...
…and your conclusion? Well, it's not the cultists that’s a "poisonous tree," why it's the government (what LoneRangerMassachusetts calls the fascists in state government) that has planted a "poisonous tree?"
Ahhh, you must be referring to "Chester the Molester".
One of my alltime favorite cartoons.
Let’s just do the math...
They KIDNAPPED 400 Children, LIED about it, and now at the end of it all, they MIGHT have 7 potential cases of young women under 18 being married and having given birth?
Ludicrous is too soft of a word for it.
I hope every child effected gets an attorney and sues the state of Texas 400 with individual cases.
Then I hope that if they suffer any “trauma” they come BACK before the statute of limitations run out and SUE The State AGAIN for the additional damages.
And if there was ANY leadership remotely conservative, they would file criminal charges against every member of the CPS from the file clerk to typed up the info to the Department Head.
And see to it that 100 CPS employees were driven to bankruptcy in legal fees both criminal and civil for the rest of their miserable lives.
And that’s just for starters!!
Most of what goes on in the ghetto is older men preying on younger women and older women preying on younger men. There is one important difference. The child born to polygamous patriarchy at least know who is his father. In the matriarchal village families of the ghetto, the child often has no idea who is his father. The social consequences are more ruinous to the latter as it creates a drifter out of the male. The difference in polygamy between the Texas case and the greater national problem is one where the former has paperwork for its marriages and the latter does not. To legally argue they are not alike, your non sequitur, is to support form over substance. It's a shallow view.
Since the last 3 pages reveal that you like to call other posters "a-*oles" (twice) and you like high-level campus vocab like "chicks*it" and "turd sewer" I was surprised you managed to get thru a post without reverting to your normal educational degree chatter.
(Oh, and if your discernment skills are sized up by this comment of yours: There is no such thing as "gay marriage", so one might as well "ban" unicorns. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2017186/posts post #4... then please do continue to disagree with me...I'd be in great wondermont about my own positions otherwise.
Snitching can get you busted up real bad, baby!
Its too bad Texas cant use their resources to round up illegals and send them home.
Unfortunately, looks like Texas hasnt been telling the whole story about the FLDS.
The FLDS should just claim to be “illegals” and this will all go away
What has happend to Texas....first its a pro-illegal/anti-american bigot governor who wants to open the state for every illegal and dope pusher....now you got the state judicial system conducting some witch-hunt persecution
It's not just that they haven't been telling the 'whole story', it's that they've been telling flat out lies about them.
First it was 'hundreds' of underage mothers. A lie.
Then it was 'dozens'.. also a lie.
Then it was 'they're all on welfare'. Another lie.
Before that we learned that the phone call that supposedly prompted this raid was a lie.
But hey, no worries. These people are child molesting perverts so why even bother with Grand Juries, Indictments, Trials with Juries, and all that old fashioned stuff.
And no one seems to have any problem with the fact that there hasn't been one single arrest of any male yet.
Not one.
Only allegations and leaks to the press. Not a single criminal charge has been filed.
This thing is a farce and the citizens of the State of Texas are going to pay through the nose for it.
The really, really sad thing is that there may very well have been some hideous illegalies occuring that now will never be able to be prosecuted because of the utter incompetence of the people running this joke of an investigation.
L
Twice i tried to point out to you there is a much greater problem facing America, the feminist driven social services. It's destroying large parts of our cities. Yet, you keep carping about the dinky problem in a remote area of Texas. The other problem is an unbridled government in the hands of the Marxists running social services. Each time they ignore due process and use force and get away with it, the rest of us become more the masses and less the people. It won't be long before they tell you what to do. I see a Nifong mentality in the Texas government that needs cleansing. I don't see saints saving the children.
If these hearings were cancelled where these women had an opportunity to prove their majority, are they still in state custody pending the appeal? Time to file for a writ of habeas corpus.
I suspect a lot of the ID documents they’re providing aren’t particularly reliable. Remember, they controlled the government in the two counties in Utah and Arizona where their original communities are located. Nearly all the babies are born at home or in a church-controlled clinic, attended only by members of the church. They’ve been in the business of actively concealing the ages of their girls since at least the 1950s, and I imagine they’ve got a lot of tricks perfected.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are ID documents being traded around and even flat-out falsified. Given that they’ve continued marrying off 14 year old girls in Utah after the legal age was raised to 16, it may well have become standard practice to arrange ID documents for those girls that inflate their age by at least 2 years. In the absence of state-issued birth certificates, all it takes to get a driver’s license is a court determination that your identity/age/place of birth are such-and-such, which a court will issue based on affidavits from relatives and other members of the applicable community. When the court is controlled by the cult leaders, the judge will accept any affidavit that has the leaders’ support, even if the judge knows for a fact that the information is false. I imagine this is one of the reasons that the Texas authorities weren’t just taking ID documents issued in Arizona or Utah at face value. That and the fact that in many cases the documents would have given just one or two or three or names that the presenting woman had given to authorities over the first few days after the children were removed.
You seem to have made up your mind about this, despite the recent admission that many of the "minors" who were lying about their ages were in fact telling the truth and are adults. Can't you spot the pattern of CPS failing to see the truth when it is in front of them and accusing the women of lying when they have been telling the truth?
The CPS owes you an explanation, since the basis for their original claim of people lying about their ages is proven to be, at least partially, FALSE. Yet you persist in the claim that the women were lying, knowing that the CPS was completely wrong in many cases.
So, instead of finding that some of the women accused of lying about their ages are in fact adults, we have to add forgery of official documents to the list of crimes committed?
Did the CPS suggest that forged documents were being used to the judge? It's pretty easy to check, since the document can be compared quickly to the recorded copy in the jurisdiction which issued it.
It isn't a "loophole" since their polygamous marriages are not legally recognized. You do see then that your argument is therefore an argument in favor of legalizing polygamous marriage, right?
“The admissions by the state left a rapidly diminishing count of women in a disputed age category that is central to its claim of underage mothers found at the YFZ Ranch.”
In other words, the State of Texas was holding adult women against their will.
Repeating my husband’s theory: He thinks someone wants the FLDS ranch property really bad. The FLDS paid $700,000 for it and now it’s worth millions after the FLDS made many improvements.
“It sounds like you WANT to believe the worst about these people, rather than approaching the accusations with an open mind.”
Thank you for saying that. These threads are very interesting. Normally, FReepers are pro Constitution, anti big brother government . . . until it comes to the FLDS. Then they mysteriously become anti Constitution, pro big brother government. Go figure.
I keep reminding everyone that the raid was initiated on a false report. If someone accused you of something, and it was a lie, and the authorities raided your property on the basis of a lie, and took your children away from you, dumped them first in a coliseum and then foster homes hither and yon, how would you feel? But when it comes to the FLDS, it’s like they are non human. Why is it OK to treat the FLDS like that? I don’t get it.
“Where is Janet Reno and Bubba Clinton when you need them to engage in appropriate military action? “
This raid made Reno and Bubba look like pikers. Those poor little kids. Their worst nightmares come true. I am sure they will be suffering from PTSD for the rest of their lives.
You better be careful. You’re making too much sense. When it comes to FLDS, you are not allowed to make sense, nor are you allowed to call upon the Constitution. Nice try, though.
More evidence against the state? It won’t matter to most of the lynch mob around here.. they have their petty little agendas to further no matter how wrong this whole raid was.. some people just can’t get it through their tiny little minds that the only ones hurting children here is the state of Texas. Some people will never admit they were wrong.. and now with the state trying to seize the ranch, it becomes crystal clear why this was done.. if they had been watching the situation for as long as they said, and didn’t take the children earlier, it proves the state cares less about the children and more about seizing property.
you hit the nail on the head..
It's a similar reason to why ATF prefers to arrest gun store owners for paperwork violations rather than raiding a Crips hangout -- they want their arrest quotas with minimum risk of getting shot, or being blamed for starting a riot. The FLDS doesn't have mobs of supporters who will burn the city down
I seriously doubth Reno and Bubba give it a second thought. These killers are cold-blooded and without remorse.
And you persist to close your eyes about this. Look, here's an excerpt from the Mormon-owned Deseret News newspaper published May 23, 2008:
During grueling questioning on the witness stand, Louisa Jessop answered, "I don't know" to many questions CPS lawyers posed to her, including where she lived before, how she came to be there, and who lived in the home with her. Testimony revealed she lived most recently in a home with YFZ Ranch leader Merrill Jessop and his son Dan, who is her husband. But Jessop struggled to name anyone else who lived in the home, aside from Merrill Jessop's wife Barbara and her own husband, Dan, and her children...Asked if she would allow her 3-year-old daughter to marry at age 14, Jessop replied, "No. Not right now.” http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,700228606,00.html
I think you’ve hit it on the nose.
susie
Actually, in your scenario, false report, feds raid, THEY SEE EVIDENCE OF ABUSE, and took children, that makes the story just a little different, but it was what really happened here. Why do you continue to leave that little tidbit out?
susie
Really? Pikers? Hmmmm how many of the kids were roasted alive or sent off to Cuba?
susie
Albert Hawkins, the state's [Texas] executive commissioner for health and human services, said it was unclear whether members of the sect have private insurance. He also said that officials have found no evidence that anyone from the sect is receiving any sort of public assistance.
What would you do in the situation you imagine she is in? Do your suspicions justify the outrage of holding adult women against their will while denying the validity of identification which is now recognized to be legitimate?
Evasive testimony, if that's what it was, is something she has chosen to do. Supporting the illegal acts of the CPS is something YOU have chosen to do.
In her case, any suspicion leads you to believe the worst. In the case of the CPS, proof of outrageous denial of human rights gets a shrug. You continue to believe that CPS is simply incompetent and not evil.
What will your opinion be if, at the end of this incident, all that can be claimed is that several people have been proven to be living in unofficial polygamous relationships, but there is no proof of rape, sexual abuse, non-consensual marriage, or illegal underage marriage? Will it be sufficient that this supposed "polygamous sect" is in fact a polygamous sect?
Will all the outrageous justifications for action be just fine with you? What do you expect that life will be like for the rest of us when that becomes the standard for the authorities; that unsubstantiated accusations of any kind can be used to examine every aspect of a person's life?
Why did you challenge me, then, if you’re going to come around and partially agree with me? What you say here is what I said (in part). If you want to use the word “evasive” instead of the phrase “deceive authorities or just plain leave them in the dark” that’s fine with me. How is ”evasive” any different than “just plain leaving them in the dark?”
The only difference we’re talking about it your reference above is to one person under testimony, and my reference was to CPS interviews of dozens not under oath. (And due to potential charges of perjury, which venue is more likely to receive a more forthright response to a question?)
The difference we are talking about is due process. It is a violation of due process to hold a 27 year old woman with official identification as a minor.
The judge in this case has evidently allowed a photo of Jeffs' to get into circulation. If I understand correctly, the photo shows Jeffs kissing the girl who was a victim of rape and for which crime Jeffs is serving time.
One can only wonder, where are the other photos of the other many brides? If those existed, wouldn't they be more illustrative of the law-breaking that has been described? Or do you expect to see more people charged with the rape for which Jeffs was convicted?
Prosecutors & the CPS are going to save photo evidence pertaining to others; they're not going to "show their hand" for a witness who has no pertinent testimony pertaining to those other folks.
The difference we are talking about is due process. It is a violation of due process to hold a 27 year old woman with official identification as a minor.
As I've said on other threads, it's not all that unusual, for example, for even a juvenile to be temporarily held in an adult custody facility when the arrested person has no ID. This can happen, for example, when several illegal aliens are picked up.
Upon discovery, the error is fixed. (And I don't see posters like you screaming about the plight of such folks at risk)
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