Posted on 05/01/2008 4:44:54 PM PDT by Politicalmom
SAN ANTONIO — A judge ordered that the baby boy born to a girl taken from a polygamist sect's ranch in West Texas be placed in state custody, according to documents released Thursday.
Texas District Judge Barbara Walther signed the order Wednesday giving the state custody of the 1-day-old infant born to a teen believed to be 15 or 16 years old.
The girl has claimed to be 18, according to an affidavit signed by Ruby Gutierrez, a Child Protective Services caseworker, but officials believe she is younger and placed her in foster care with other children taken from the ranch.
The newborn is the teen's second child; the first is a 20-month-old boy. The father of both children was identified as Jackson Jessop, 22, but state officials say they don't know his whereabouts.
Child welfare officials now have 464 children in their custody, swept from the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado because authorities believe underage girls were forced into marriages and sex with older men. Authorities are also now investigating possible sexual abuse of boys.
Church members have vehemently denied there was any abuse, and civil liberties groups have raised concerns at the sweeping nature of the removals.
Individual custody hearings are set to be completed by June 5.
CPS and law enforcement raided the ranch on April 3 after a girl who was purportedly 16 called a domestic abuse hotline to complain of abuse at the hands her much older husband. Authorities are investigating whether the calls were a hoax.
Regardless, child welfare authorities say 31 of the 53 girls aged 14-17 have children or are pregnant.
Under Texas law, children under the age of 17 generally cannot consent to sex with an adult. A girl can get married with parental permission at 16, but the girls who belong to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are not believed to have legal marriages.
FLDS is a breakaway sect of the mainline Mormon church, which disavowed polygamy a century ago.
In the grooming of the child to be a sex toy. You just assumed in your question that the teen aged girl participated in abuse and your solution is to give her custody of a tiny human being?
I am hoping the above just means the state has jurisdiction now. It is possible the mother and child were placed together in a foster home. At least I hope so.
LEL: “PURE EVIL”
I couldn’t agree more. How is the newborn harmed by allowing it to stay with its mother? If actual abuse is proven in a court of law, that is one thing. To rip a newborn from its mother simply because the girl is a member of a religious cult we may or may not agree with is, as you say, pure evil.
Whatever happened to land of the free, even for people we may or may not agree with? Hundreds of thousands if not millions of underage girls are having sex and many are having babies. Shall we seize all children born to underage mothers, since apparently the mere fact they are giving birth is enough to prove a crime (statutory rape) and abuse occurred? I hope not.
Red Herring. the judge has already ordered that mothers with children could stay with their children. But this new baby was not included in original order. Just a paper work move.
I'm sure someone can, but why waste the time when it will be zotted in seconds?
calex59: “Is that it, or are the women and girls the victims or the criminals?”
The young women are the victims here. If this was about anything other than a weird cult, people would be up in arms over a child being taken from its mother. Yet, underage mothers are giving birth all the time. Is that, in itself, cause for seizing the children now?
Point taken!
They were ALL taken from their families by the government.
RULE #1: If you are a conservative, protecting the family is your first priority. This is the basic unit of our civilization.
Do you have any idea how that wee one could have been abused if left in the fLDS environment? This mother might well have already been trained in “breaking the baby”—which is a polite way of saying torture similar to waterboarding. This isn’t her first child, she probably already knows the technique.
Gosh, I would hope so. I hate to see anti-LDS propaganda go unchallenged.
WOW!! Check out the MASSIVE knee-jerking on this thread!!
THE GIRLS ARE ALL WITH THEIR CHILDREN!!!!!
Well, for one thing, this decision comes right on the heels of the media report yesterday about 41 known cases of broken bones among the children...this issue has possibly gone beyond sexual abuse to physical abuse...plus judges don't exactly close their eyes to reports of hundreds of children's graves & unmarked graves at the "sister fLDS communities."
Imagine being told that your children were to be considered wards of the state, but that they would be allowed to live with you until further notice. Could you accept that?
That is why the original planks of the republican party include being against polygamy.
It’s amazing how quickly people want to believe the worse about the government when no where in the article did it say they took the baby away from the mother. In fact it clearly stated the mother was also in state custody.
That has been my argument for the last few weeks. I even got banned from Free Republic (after being a member for 10 years) for standing up for American families.
This is wrong!
The mother is already a ward of the state. They, the state, has her listed as underage. You are trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill.
You did not get that notion from any survivors of childhood sexual abuse in the home, and you absolutely did not get it from any peer reviewed textbooks on sexual abuse used in teaching social workers and law enforcement.
You seem to be exclusively focused on making the mothers happy - to the utter abandonment of the safety of the children.
Here is a textbook I would recommend. It's a bit pricey, but cheap as college texts go. It isn't as long as the page count makes it appear, as 37 pages are references.
Whatever you do, stop trying to push the ludicrous notion that the women in sexual abuse situations are by default safe for the children. If you bother at all to research the subject - You will find that in the real world - they at the very least refused to listen to the child pleading for their help, and often lend tacit approval, or participate in the sexual abuse.
MrEdd: “Except of course, to protect the child - if one cares about such things.”
Ah, for the children—a mantra often used by the left to take away individual liberty. Let us hope the government never receives an anonymous call concerning your children or your children’s children. I’m sure you’ll eventually get them back, of course, but how could you possibly argue against the government seizing them until the messy details are resolved? It’s for the children!
Protect the child FROM WHAT? The mother's breast milk?!
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