Posted on 04/06/2008 5:27:22 AM PDT by SkyPilot
Local and state officials entered the temple of a secretive polygamist sect late Saturday, said lawmen blockading the road to the YFZ Ranch near Eldorado.
The action comes hours after local prosecutors said officials were preparing for the worst because a group of FLDS members were resisting efforts to search the structure.
The Texas Department of Public Safety trooper and Schleicher County sheriff’s deputy confirmed that officials have entered the temple but said they had no word on whether anything occurred in the effort.
The incursion into the temple caps the three-day saga of the state’s Child Protective Services agency removing at least 183 women and children from the YFZ Ranch since Friday afternoon. Eighteen girls have been placed in state custody since a 16-year-old told authorities she was married to a 50-year-old man and had given birth to his child.
Saturday evening, ambulances were brought in, said Allison Palmer, who as first assistant 51st District attorney, would prosecute any felony crimes uncovered as part of the investigation inside the compound.
“In preparing for entry to the temple, law enforcement is preparing for the worst,” Palmer said Saturday evening. They want to have “medical personnel on hand in case this were to go in a way that no one wants.”
Apparently as a result of action Saturday night at the ranch, about 10:15 p.m. Saturday, a Schleicher County school bus unloaded another group of at least a dozen more women and children from the compound.
Although members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or FLDS, have provided varying degrees of cooperation to the sheriff’s deputies and Texas Rangers searching the compound, all cooperation stopped once authorities tried to search the gleaming white temple that towers over the West Texas scrub, Palmer said.
“There may be those who would oppose (entry) by placing themselves between law enforcement and the place of worship,” Palmer said Saturday afternoon. “If an agreement cannot be reached … law enforcement will have to — as gently and peaceably as possible — make entry into that place.”
Sect members consider the temple, dedicated by then-leader of the sect Warren Jeffs in January 2005 and finished many months later, off-limits to those who are not FLDS members, said Palmer, who prosecutes felony cases in Schleicher County.
Palmer said she didn’t know the size or makeup of the group inside the temple.
The earlier refusal to provide access was even more disconcerting because CPS investigators have yet to identify the 16-year-old girl or her roughly 8-month-old baby among the dozens removed from the compound, Palmer said.
“Anytime someone says, ‘Don’t look here,’” she said, “it makes you concerned that’s exactly where you need to look.”
The girl told authorities in two separate phone calls a day apart that she was married to a 50-year-old man, Dale Barlow, who had fathered her child, Palmer said.
The joint raid included the Texas Rangers, CPS, Schleicher County and Tom Green County sheriff’s deputies and game wardens from the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife.
Although CPS and Department of Public Safety officials have described the compound’s residents as cooperative, Palmer disagreed.
“Things have been a little tense, a little volatile,” she said.
Authorities removed 52 children Friday afternoon and 131 women and children overnight Friday. About 40 of the children are boys, said CPS spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner.
No further children have been taken into state custody since Friday, when 18 girls were judged to have been abused or be at imminent risk for abuse. CPS has found foster homes for the girls, Meisner said, and will place them after concluding its investigation.
Meisner declined to comment on the fate of the 119 other children and said authorities were still searching the ranch for others Saturday evening.
“They’re in the process of looking,” she said. “They’re literally about halfway through.”
I’m surprised that the lefties aren’t coming out of their closet to tell us that the government has no business regulating sexual relations of family matters.
I sincerely doubt that there was a legal marriage transacted. Most of the FLDS marry in the temple but do not marry under the law. This servers two purposes. One, their "spouses" and their children are eligible for food stamps and other federals programs. Two, a man can "marry" as many times as he wishes to girls of any age and not be considered as a bigamist.
Correct.
I lived in Waco during the Koresh situation. I believe the Texas authorities have acted to avoid giving this situation a chance to turn into another Waco.
All these children are now unavailable to be used as pawns as were the Branch Davidian children, and while I'm sure this is a traumatizing event for them, it beats the heck out of being burned alive, or fed poison-laced KoolAid. If CPS had done their job at Waco and removed those kids much earlier things might have been different.
There will be outraged cries at the "defilement" of the FLDS temple, but it cannot now be used as a fortress filled with children during a siege, and there can be a "cleansing" of the building later.
If Utah and Arizona authorities had been doing their jobs during the past 50 years, this cancer would not have been able to spread into Texas in the first place.
There are whole neighborhoods in major cities across the US where the police won’t go at all - even if they know a suspect is in that neighborhood. The reasons for that are several. So yes, you have a valid point. Not all crime is being actively persued with the same zeal.
Thank you for the link. The article has much more information about the case, and I feel less skeptical toward it.
Where’s Mitt?
Just because people in the OT were polygamous does not mean God condoned it.
Jesus clearly taught that marriage is between one man and one woman.
Now people are free to pick and choose and interpret scripture however they choose.
That doesn't mean they are right.
That doesn't mean that whenever a man sees a pretty young girl and sprouts a woody that it is God's will for him to have that girl.
So spare me the BS about polygamy being OK with God. Show me the scripture where God suspends the Ten Commandments and says that adultery is now o.k.
Are you serious?
What is wrong with using those buses?
Who was offended?
The FLDS? If so, who cares?
The question was not multiple wives, it was age. Multiple wives is not even mentioned in the article. What you are saying is pure speculation.
Also, this is interesting...
The earlier refusal to provide access was even more disconcerting because CPS investigators have yet to identify the 16-year-old girl …
Apparently the LEO can not name the witness and they are operating on nothing more than an assumption. Pretty shaky ground for a warrant.
There seems to be a lot missing from this so far. The witness has got to have a name and the story is that she called 911 two different times. She must have give them her name so why can't she be identified? When someone is taken into "custody" the LEO does not ask their name?
Assuming that the article is accurate, there are a lot of problems here.
Just to clarify, these nutjobs are living polygamy as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young instructed.
Lets not whitewash this.
*****
Keep walking down that road you so smugly are on and keep distorting the Lord’s annoited servants with the others, but “Don’t be surpised someday if you are still on that road you could witness just like in Numbers the road opening up and swallow backbiters and murmurers!
Numbers 14
36 And the men, which Moses sent to search the land, who returned, and made all the congregation to murmur against him, by bringing up a slander upon the land,
37 Even those men that did bring up the evil report upon the land, died by the plague before the Lord
Numbers 16
30 But if the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth, and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the Lord.
31 ¶ And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them:
32 And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.
33 They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation
I have asked you before to not post anything to me.
That still stands.
Dude... she had a baby at 16 which means she was impregnated when she was around 15. Remember math is your friend...
They can’t invade now, it’s not April 19th yet. Leave it to the government to mess things up.
“So spare me the BS about polygamy being OK with God. Show me the scripture where God suspends the Ten Commandments...”
While you’re looking at the Ten Commandments, flip to the next chapter for a sec, where God is setting down ordinances. Exodus 21 is a pretty interesting chapter. Among other verses, check out 10: “If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.” Wouldn’t it have been so much easier just to say, “He shall not take him another wife?”
Really than stop distorting my faith, viper!
“And just to clarify further that the “God” of the Old Testament also condoned polygamy.”
Ever heard of the Ten Commandments, how about the New Testament? Yeah, there’s a lot more to the story. You ought to check it out before you become a theologian. No where in the Bible does God condone polygamy.
TLI - where did you get that “14 years” version? The version online at http://tlo2.tlc.state.tx.us/statutes/docs/FA/content/htm/fa.001.00.000002.00.htm#2.102.00 shows 16 years as the minimum age.
The fire was on the 19th. Still a few days left.
Seriously, I doubt that will happen here.
The feds aren’t involved in this one.
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