Posted on 05/23/2008 1:24:53 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 ...
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
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