Posted on 04/17/2008 6:55:49 PM PDT by claudiustg
In the sad case of the children caught up in the maelstrom of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) alleged child abuse matter, I tend to fall onto the church side in the separation of church and state.
The state is ill-equipped to deal with 400-plus youngsters it has torn from the bosoms of their mothers in the guise of protecting them from alleged abuses.
In considering this case it's important to keep in mind some rather unpleasant facts:
In America, there are over 500,000 children in foster care;
Approximately 300,000 kids are taken out of their homes every year because of neglect and abuse, and put in foster care;
Some 73 percent of the children put in foster care end up on the streets, or even worse, in jail;
Even though some 100,000 of these 500,000 youngsters are available for adoption, only a pitiful 1.2 percent will ever be adopted.
These statistics should concern every American. It's obvious that the government, which is great at starting wars and taxing the citizenry to pay for some of the worst hare-brained schemes imaginable, hasn't got the slightest idea of how to raise children.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
I found a link to a story on this:
Springs woman arrested for false reporting in raid
A Colorado Springs woman was arrested on charges of false reporting to authorities and is being investigated for her alleged involvement in the call that tipped authorities off to possible abuse at the Texas polygamist compound.
Police say they arrested 33-year-old Rozita Swinton at her home on Wednesday. The Texas Rangers were in Colorado Springs apparently as part of their investigation involving the compound in Texas.
They left and have not filed any charges on Swinton and the Colorado Springs Police spokesman said he could not discuss any aspects of the Texas case.
Our sister station KMGH in Denver found out that this is not the first time Swinton has been arrested on charges of making false reports to authorities. According to records the charge against Swinton was made in connection to calls received by police in February indicating she was 13 years old and trapped in a basement-- all a lie.
It appears the cult defenders are counting chickens before they hatch.
MANCOS, CO -- The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) has surreptitiously established a polygamous colony in the state of Colorado. Acting on behalf of the FLDS leadership, a 33-year-old Mormon Fundamentalist named David Steed Allred paid $1,394,000 for two 60-acre parcels of land six miles north of Mancos, a small community in Colorado's southwest corner. Allred, moreover, is presently maneuvering to purchase a third 60-acre parcel lying between the other properties, which would give the FLDS Church a private inholding of 180 contiguous acres entirely surrounded by publicly owned National Forest.
The leader of the exceedingly secretive polygamist sect is a furtive man named Warren Steed Jeffs. A self-proclaimed prophet, Jeffs claims to be God's mouthpiece on earth and is married to more than 70 women. He demands absolute, unquestioning obedience from his estimated 10,000 followers, whom he forbids to have any unnecessary contact with outsiders. Jeffs has repeatedly prophesied that the Lord will soon unleash a scourge of "pestilence, hail, famine, and earthquake" upon the earth, destroying all of humankind except the most zealous of his true believers. Notable for being the largest polygamous sect in North America, the FLDS Church is based in a pair of adjoining towns, Hildale and Colorado City, which straddle the border between Utah and Arizona in a parched expanse of desert north of the Grand Canyon.
Let's just start with the 4th and let the 350+ lawyers fill in the rest.
Re-read your quote above and pay special attention to the “what most likely has happened” part. THAT is what your gang has been relying on all along. “Presumed”, “what if”, “he said, she said”, “the girls smiling when they were rescued from the compound”, “I heard”, etc. ad nauseum. Jeez, you sound like a bunch of little girls talking about some guy in school they think is cute.
All based on a phone call. One phone call! You are probably right in the copycat theory. Your hatred for Mormons has paved the way for your lynch mob mentality to take over what has been in the past a mature common sense Conservative view.
Quite honestly, I don't know if you'd see a black in an FLDS compound. I do know that there are blacks in the LDS. You're not going to play the RACE CARD on us now are you?
I have seen unsubstatiated internet posts suggesting this woman is mainstream LDS, a member of the Colorado Springs, East Stake, and that she is copycatting the original call, and not a suspect in making the original “Sarah” calls.
At this point it is all speculation.
Perhaps they ought to be charged, but then allowed to plead insanity and get their records cleared after a couple of years if they participate in psychiatric treatment and do not engage in any further illegal activity. We can’t ignore what they’ve done and continue to advocate, but on the other hand, we also can’t ignore that through no fault of their own, they’ve been rendered mentally ill, and that that mental illness is at the root of their illegal activities.
The comments at Deseret News are amazingly like the ones here from the cult defenders.
I suspect that many of them are the same people.
A picture is worth a thousand words
Meaning they found enough the first time to make a more fully explicit search warrant? And the problem with that, is?
>>”At this point it is all speculation.”<<
Finally, somebody gets it.
The comments at Deseret News are amazingly like the ones here from the Constitution defenders.
Corrected it for you.
If there is an issue with mental capacity, as some have indicated has happened due to inbreeding, then I don’t think that they could really have the wherewithal to resist.
I”m sure you have all the evidence right in front of you? Do you know where this mythical teenager is that made the allegation? This is still America, where we don’t round up 400 children on the anonymous word of someone who may or may not exist..but if you wanna live in a facist state where we round hundreds up without a single shred of evidence you go right ahead.
That is what "the problem" is.
Bttt & bkmd...
Save the bandwidth, it will not do any good. Too much propaganda, to many cop shows on TV, too much cop idolatry in the MSM. They are fully conditioned and do in fact believe that a couple of unsubstaniated phone calls regarding an individual the “reliable informant” should have known was never there is in fact very good reason to detain hundreds of American Citizens, terrorize children, break up families etc.
In the mean time the constitution is smoldering in the corner.
You know what really just blows me away in this? The Sheriff playing himself off as such a good guy. He reports he has an informant for four years giving him information regarding crimes being committed in the facilities. Yet he goes on about how he “didn’t know.”
Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran also said he had been working with a confidential informant for four years who was feeding him information about life inside the polygamist sect.
Ok, four years worth of information form someone that allegedly could report "reliable information" regarding details of the people inside, right?
The he states It wasn't until after the search had begun that Doran learned about... the forced marriages of underage girls to older men."
Huh? The confidential informant was totally unaware of that? The one that supposedly has built trust enough to be let in for four years? Yet when a bunch of strangers raid the place and start separating families all of a sudden the residents just start telling the strangers intimate details of what goes on?
The B.S. meter is screaming on that one.
Then he contradicts himself with…
"We are aware that this group is capable of (sexually abusing young girls)," Doran said.
Yeeow! He KNOWS they could be committing crimes and his “reliable informant” can’t get a clue about this for four years?
There is more.
"But there again, this is the United States. We are going to respect them. We're not going to violate their civil rights until we get an outcry. I've said that from day one."
Odd, I don’t think he would need a complaining phone call to go chase down a bank robber or burglar. Yet he seems to believe he must turn a blind eye to what he now claims he knows about.
Something isn’t right with the Sheriff on this one either. In fact, with the current info on this the contradictions and inconsistencies are always drifting over to the LEO’s involved.
It's noteworthy that the mainline LDS REPUDIATED this brand of folk religion. You may well not agree with their having done that, but when LDS repudiated polygamous lifestyles and social organization it definitely read subgrups like the FLDS and all it's Church of the First Born affiliates, cousins, or co-religionists OUT of the main line of Mormonism.
Ergo, you'll find virtually none of the opponents of FLDS, its leadership, lackeys and enablers are anti-Mormon. In fact, I could care less what the Mormons do ~ they repudiated this business and, their reputation in the 21st century is that they don't do it. Some of the others opposed to FLDS on these threads are, in fact, Mormons ~ some of them members of other break-away groups in fact.
It's a doggone shame you can't tell the difference between FLDS and LDS, or Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of LDS, or.... well, you know the names. There's a bunch of 'em eh?!
I'd wondered how they kept the cost down on that issue and there it is ~ no climbing toys where they could fall and break a bone.
Bet all their camps are like that.
The Prophet is definitely a cheap skate.
Are you serious?
you are so right about not wasting bandwidth on this issue.. I guess I should know when I’m fighting a losing battle around here... thank you for at least being one of the few sensible voices around here that still believes in the Constitution and knows a rat when they smell one.
The women don't give the correct names to the police even to identify their OWN CHILDREN, why on earth should we think the men would give their correct names to the women who could potentially identify them?
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