The Child Snatchers Win (Updated)

According to police in Austin, Texas, Billy Dan Carroll spent the better part of the past three decades assaulting and raping dozens of victims -- from girls as young as two years of age to adult women whom he lured to his home and then drugged into unconsciousness.
His alleged acts ("alleged" because Mr. Carroll has yet to be convicted of a crime) are reportedly documented on videotapes kept in his possession.

Austin police Sgt. Brian Lloyd, a 22-year veteran child abuse investigator, has rarely seen the like of Mr. Carroll, who he describes as “the worst of the worst…. Several of these children were abused multiple times.” One six-year-old girl was allegedly raped twenty-three times.

Carroll made a handsome living operating a court recording [in fact, it was a court reporting service, not a court "recording" service; I regret the error -- WNG] business before he was inspired to volunteer for compassionate community service: In 2004, he became a court-appointed special advocate (CASA) for abused children. This means that he worked -- albeit as a volunteer -- for the same Texas Department of Family and Protective Services that recently abducted 460 children at gunpoint from their parents at the FLDS Church's YFZ Ranch.


It also means that Carroll was given access to many children -- some of them, perhaps, from abusive homes, others from homes and parents that were not abusive by any reasonable standard, but nonetheless were deemed unsatisfactory by the omniscient custodians of the State's children at the Texas DFPS.


In fact, it was through his work as a CASA on behalf of the Texas child "protection" bureaucracy that Carroll became acquainted with the 8-year-old girl whom he most recently molested, according to a criminal indictment. Understandably, other parents who suspect that Carroll may have taken indecent liberties with their children have been "flooding" the CASA organization with phone calls.


Credit must be given to the Austin Police Department for the professional fashion in which they have built their case against Mr. Carroll. His home -- which was never referred to as a "compound," incidentally -- was the subject of a search warrant that was issued on the basis of solid evidence, rather than an anonymous phone call from an obviously demented woman. Specific evidence was sought, found, and secured. Carroll was brought before a judge in a timely fashion and indicted on specific charges and given steep ($2 million) but reasonable bail.


This was done, incidentally, without sending in SWAT operators in paramilitary drag and deploying an APC and sniper teams. Nor was the entire neighborhood in which Carroll lived cordoned off and treated as one huge crime scene, with the neighbors being looked on as co-conspirators with Carroll on the basis of propinquity.


The search warrants and all photographic evidence against Mr. Carroll have been sealed, which is entirely appropriate: It wouldn't be wise to taint the jury pool against the suspect by publicizing salacious (and speculative) details or circulating lurid photographs.


Laura Wolf, executive director of the CASA program, made a point of telling the media that the suspect's application and background check are protected from public scrutiny by a confidentiality agreement. So until and unless those documents are subpoenaed and presented in court, we have no way of knowing whether CASA and the agency it answers to ignored any evidence that Carroll had been a practicing pederast for decades when they agreed to let him have access to vulnerable children.


Ms. Wolf, it should be remembered, played a conspicuous role in the seizure of more than 460 young people -- children, for the most part, but a handful of adult mothers who were deliberately mis-identified by CPS as "pregnant minors" -- from the FLDS community. I don't recall reading her protests over the due process irregularities that led to this mass kidnapping. Nor can I seem to turn up any publicly expressed misgivings from Ms. Wolf over the widespread selective publicity given by CPS to various documents seized from the FLDS -- including confidential church rosters and lurid photographs of FLDS leader Warren Jeffs that were introduced as a cynical PR gesture in a custody hearing to which those pictures were not germane.



Ms. Wolf helped scatter the FLDS children from one end of Texas to another, secreting them into a foster care and child welfare program riven with corruption and rife with abuse. To her credit, one of her public comments about the FLDS matter makes incontestable sense: "This particular story has gotten a lot of attention and piques a lot of interest. But there are children all over the state who are experiencing abuse and neglect every day."


Indeed. Many of them are being abused in that same child welfare system. In fact, one of them was probably being molested by Mr. Carroll as that sound-bite dribbled down Ms. Wolf's chin.


Carroll isn't the only opportunistic sexual predator recently uncovered in the Texas child welfare system.


Roughly a year ago, a 13-year veteran Child Protective Services caseworker named Frederick Shavers was arrested and charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year-old girl whom he was supervising. According to police in Grand Prairie, there was "a mountain of evidence" that Shavers began a sexual "relationship" with the young girl -- an unwed teenage mother -- when she was thirteen years of age.


Shavers was 37 years old and married with two children at the time of his arrest. This means he was 35, and his inamorata was 13, when they began their affair. Gee golly Ned, it seems to me that Mr. Shavers was doing exactly what the agency that employed him said was happening at the YFZ Ranch. The significant difference here, of course, is that CPS didn't bother to prove any of the things it professed to "know" about the FLDS community -- and Shavers was forced to resign in April before being arrested last June.


Furthermore, it appears that this was not the first time that Shavers had been accused of sexual misconduct and other improprieties. According to the Dallas News, Shavers "has been the subject of several prior CPS inquiries" regarding his conduct.


In 1994, a 12-year-old girl "accused Mr. Shavers of kissing her during horseplay at a pool in Greenville." Seven years later, he ended up in a fight with a 20-year-old man whom he had taken into his home as a minor in CPS custody. Just the week prior to his resignation from CPS in April 2007, Shavers was accused of coaching a child "about how to testify in a family court in Hunt County." The purpose of that coaching, explains the News, "was to make it seem like he was doing his job more thoroughly" than he had, according to the child's mother.


Remember, Shavers at the time of his 2007 resignation had been with CPS for thirteen years; that meant that the first allegation of sexual misbehavior came immediately after he was hired by the agency. And his work record ended with allegations of suborning perjury from a child witness.


Shavers supervised an estimated 600 children during his career as a caseworker. His case records are under police scrutiny on the assumption that other children were abused in various ways by the former child-saver.


But CPS, of course, did nothing wrong in keeping Shavers on the payroll for over a decade. Agency spokeswoman Marissa Gonzalez insisted that CPS "handled Mr. Shavers appropriately during his career," observes the News: "I think each of those incidents was handled appropriately."


Let us be clear about an important distinction: There are no due process considerations regarding a job on the public payroll. It's not necessary to prove an allegation beyond reasonable doubt in order to terminate the employment of a bureaucrat accused of a sexual offense against a child (although the allegation should be kept confidential pending any criminal proceedings). Had CPS been genuinely interested in child safety it would have excised Frederick Shavers from their roster in 1994.


But Shavers was given the benefit of every doubt. The same was quite possibly true of Billy Dan Carroll. The innocent FLDS parents, of course, enjoyed no such deference.


Mother and child reunion -- for now: Freed from the criminal clutches of the Texas CPS, a boy ecstatically hugs his mother. Unfortunately, the CPS still has that child in its crosshairs.


And now, despite the fact that the Texas Supreme Court has made it clear that the entire abuse case against the FLDS community is a legal travesty, those long-suffering parents are still subject to an ongoing criminal probe -- as well as a species of home imprisonment under the arbitrary and plenary authority of the same agency that sheltered at least one known child molester and -- given the Carroll case -- quite possibly many more.

Barbara Walther, the criminally inept judge who issued both of the defective search warrants for the YFZ Ranch and the order separating the FLDS parents from their children, was the recipient of a brutal "bench slap"* from the Texas Supreme Court. That court ruled that the "removal of the children was not warranted" by the available evidence, and that Walther had "abused" her discretion by issuing the order to remove them.


Now, of course, Walther couldn't simply acknowledge her errors and do her best to undo them by repealing her order. She had to do something to maintain the pretense that her opinions about this case are somehow more respectable than those of any other self-important harridan.


So, in an act of consummate petulance, she refused to rescind her order last Friday. To the astonishment of all present, Walthers stalked out of the courtroom without concluding business, leaving counsel and spectators alike to gag on the stench of her toxic arrogance and spite.
















"C'mon, boys -- we've got families to destroy!" Protected by an armed phalanx, Judge Barbara Walther strides with purposeful malice toward the courtroom.


This was most likely done as a way of making the FLDS parents that much more pliant when Walthers (a veteran of the totalitarian family court system) presented them with her terms on Monday. According to the New York Times, Walther's order "imposed a lengthy list of caveats pending the conclusion of the investigation, including surprise home visits by caseworkers, possible psychiatric evaluation of the children and a ban on travel outside Texas."


Two things must be kept in mind.


First, the CPS is known to harbor child molesters among its caseworkers and legal volunteers. Walther's order compels these innocent parents to associate with a tainted population that could include child sex offenders.


Second, those parents -- once again -- are innocent before the law. They have been convicted of nothing, indicted for nothing -- indeed, they haven't been charged with any offense. Yet they are now imprisoned at their ranch by judicial degree, subject to the invasion of their property at the whim of a manifestly corrupt, incompetent, and hostile government bureaucracy, and forbidden the freedom to travel that is the indefeasible right of every American citizen.


The CPS is still engaged in a criminal enterprise, and Walther is their fully enlisted accomplice. That agency will not relent until someone in the FLDS community is railroaded into court as an abuser, thereby permitting the child-snatchers to try, once again, to prosecute the entire community under the novel doctrine of collective criminal guilt devised especially for this case.


Perhaps the only way that the CPS could be more cynical and devious would be to assign caseworkers known to be child abusers to supervise FLDS families -- and then demand the prosecution of the parents for associating with known abusers.


Update: Toss The Wench Off The Bench!

It may be entirely symbolic, of course, but a petition is being circulated calling for Judge Walther's impeachment.
__

*I owe that expression -- along with a fair piece of what we've learned about this case and the illustration at the top of this essay -- to the exceptionally fine writer who produces the Grits for Breakfast blog.



On sale now!










Don't let the sun go down without doing something to piss of the keepers of The List!

"Heroes In Error", Again (Media Update)

"We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."

Iraqi con-man Ahmed Chalabi (seen at right standing next to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with former Iraqi Viceroy Jerry Bremer looking over Rumsfeld's shoulder); Chalabi was the chief source of pre-war disinformation regarding Saddam's supposed WMD arsenal, replying to a question posed by the London Daily Telegraph in February 2004 about his role in misleading the public.


In her element: Media-favored FLDS critic Flora Jessop, a one-time polygamist "child bride," appears on the Fox "News" program "On the Record."

"I would like to hug her [Rozita Swinton]. She accomplished getting 416 children out of a very abusive situation. But I'd also like to slap her because she went about it the wrong way." --

Flora Jessop, former member of the FLDS Church-turned-anti-polygamy crusader, speaking with reference to the disturbed 33-year-old woman whose false child abuse report triggered the raid in Eldorado.



"I would like to point out that the system absolutely worked in this case," insisted Phoenix-based anti-polygamy activist Flora Jessop during the April 18 edition of "On the Record." "When -- as hotlines get calls from children purporting to be abused, just as I do, it's not my responsibility and my job to decide whether those calls are legitimate."


Which is to say that the system "worked," in Miss Jessop's view, because it brought about what she considered to be a desirable result -- the armed invasion of the YFZ Ranch, and the seizure of children from their parents by force -- irrespective of the truth. In fact, Jessop's statements on the record indicate that she considered the truth to be inconsequential.


In recounting her conversations with "Sarah," the supposed polygamist child bride and abuse victim at the YFZ Ranch who was actually a childless adult woman named Rozita Swinton in Colorado Springs, Jessop describes how the caller suddenly -- and conveniently -- became twin sisters named Sarah and Laura. She also candidly described those conversations as an elaborate game of "Let's Pretend":


"[At] one point during my conversations with the girl I was speaking with, I had actually asked her and confronted her ... and said, If you're the twin sister of Sarah, Sarah is in Texas, Dale Barlow [the supposed abuser] is in Colorado City [Arizona], things don't add up. And she said, Well, can we pretend? And I said, yes, we can pretend. And she said, Well, then let's pretend that when Sarah called, she couldn't tell the name of her husband because then she would be hurt worse. So Sarah actually used the name Dale Barlow because Dale Barlow was hurting her twin sister in Colorado City. And I said, So are we pretending that Sarah was trying to get help for both Sarah and Laura because they were both being hurt? And she said, yes, let's pretend that. I asked her, I said, Can we pretend that Dale Barlow is Laura's -- the twin sister's new dad? And she said, No let's not pretend that. And she was very elaborate in her ruse, very well rehearsed."


So: We're supposed to believe that the child "protection" system worked because it sprung into action on the basis of a transparent "ruse"?


Indeed we should -- assuming that we, like Jessop, the Texas CPS, and others who believe themselves to be exalted above normal human considerations of honesty and equity, subscribe to a purely consequentialist worldview.


In a conversation with the Arizona Republic, Jessop insisted that (in the words of the paper's paraphrase) "the calls in Texas had a good outcome, even if they were fraudulent, because they prompted police to raid the FLDS ranch."


This is a good thing, supposedly: FLDS children behind barricades in a detention facility health care workers called a "concentration camp."



In fact, she considered it necessary to continue the deception long after it was clear that the calls were phony, and even after the raid and child-grab were underway. Explains the Republic: "Jessop said she had to maintain the pretense that her caller was real so that Texas police could continue investigating."


"At that point," Jessop observes, "I was working with authorities and trying to keep contact with her."


This isn't the first time that Jessop has peddled puerile fabrications to the media. Four years ago, after taking in two 16-year-old female runaways from the FLDS redoubt in Hildale/Colorado City, she dramatically announced that six more teenagers had sought her out for support and shelter. "The majority are boys, but there are some girls," Jessop insisted, claiming that they were "spooked" and "not talking to anybody but me." She also refused to provide any tangible proof that the runaways existed.


Jessop's claims prompted a mixture of puzzlement and annoyance from others working to free discontented FLDS members from the authoritarian community.


"The information Flora's putting out that there's a mass exodus, it just isn't happening," insisted Bob Curran, director of a St. George, Utah-based group called Help the Child Brides. Rowenna Erickson of Tapestry Against Polygamy complained that Jessop's "inaccuracies" and "rumors" were undermining the credibility of the anti-polygamist cause.


According to Pennie Petersen, another FLDS defector who fled at age 14 when confronting the prospect of being "sealed" to a middle-aged man who reportedly had molested her, Jessop actually had come across a group of FLDS youth, but they weren't interested in leaving.


"There are no runaways," Petersen told the Deseret News. "Those kids were partying and they all went home late. They never wanted to leave." Petersen, who has often been at odds with Jessop, shared the concerns expressed by others in the counter-polygamy cause, and expressed them a bit more pointedly: "Flora's been getting away with these stories for a long time now, and it's time to shut her down. She's just hurting the organizations and our cause."


Flora's "stories" -- by passing Swinton's fabrications along when she knew them to be false, Jessop took ownership of those lies -- have now hurt hundreds of children who were pried away from their parents and placed into one of the country's most notoriously corrupt foster care systems.


It could have been even worse -- much, much worse. There were snipers targeting the YFZ property when the Child-Snatchers attacked. It's a matter of God's grace that none of the parents and children therein met the fate of Vicki and Sammy Weaver.


If such a tragedy had ensued, Flora Jessop -- who has a longstanding relationship with Texas law enforcement -- would likely have been among the first to insist that the bloodshed was entirely the fault of the FLDS and their leaders.


As it stands, nearly all of the FLDS families from YFZ Ranch remain torn apart. Despite recent legal reversals and the fundamental illegitimacy of the entire enforcement action (given the fatal defects in the original warrant), Texas authorities are continuing their criminal probe.


If they're looking for a slam-dunk criminal indictment, they could have one against Flora Jessop:


She has publicly confessed to making a "False report regarding [a] missing child or missing person," as defined by Chapter 37, section 081 of the Texas Penal Code.


Given that Flora Jessop appears to be the proverbial poisoned tree in this entire matter, she is the only legitimate target for a criminal probe -- unless, of course, the probe turns up tangible evidence of deliberate criminal misconduct on the part of CPS officials.


Assuming that her much-flaunted passion for justice extends beyond an understandable preoccupation with the FLDS Church, Jessop should cooperate in a genuinely independent inquiry, if such an undertaking is possible now. It would be fascinating to learn what she knows about the following questions:


*Was she, as many suspect despite repeated denials, the chief "anonymous" source mentioned in the original search warrant? How long and how extensive is Jessop's relationship with law enforcement bodies in Texas? What role did she have in tuning public and official expectations about the FLDS -- to the extent that a heavily armed raiding party was sent to confront the YFZ community?

*In her above-mentioned Fox interview, Jessop mentioned this interesting detail: "It's my understanding that [Rozita Swinton] was caught with -- when they went into her apartment, that they found reams and documents and just tons of information on the FLDS." Oh? Who provided Jessop with that "understanding"? Might she help us find out exactly what kind of information Swinton had, and -- if it's something beyond what might be turned up through diligent googling -- who provided it to her?


Miss Swinton, likewise, presents us with some very interesting questions. According to a profile in Westview (.pdf), a publication out of Nashville, "Rozita is a Mormon who suffers from MPD/DID [Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder] which falls under the heading of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.... Since she was a teenager, Rozita has flashbacks to a time when she was an abused child ... and to times when she had been locked up and kept hostage."


Swinton's Tennessee childhood was troubled in other ways. Her father was convicted of first degree murder in 1965 and released in 1977 along with hundreds of other felons by former Governor Ray Blanton, who was eventually convicted of granting pardons in exchange for bribes. In 1992, continues the profile, Rozita was a ward of the Tennessee Department of Human Services and protected from contact with her father by a restraining order. She spent years shuttling from foster home to foster home, eventually ending up in Colorado in 2005.


One of her foster parents has published books under the pseudonym Kate Rosemary. One of those books, Raising Shane, refers to Rozita by name, describing her as a loving member of a multi-ethnic foster family. At some point, she apparently made a mission trip to El Salvador.


Rozita Swinton's confirmed role in this imbroglio already plays like something out of a John Grisham novel. But as always, owing to the questions that remain unanswered (for instance, who posted Miss Swinton's bail in Colorado?), there are other possibilities -- not "probabilities," mind you, but possibilities -- that would take us into Dean Koontz territory.


The foster care system is a huge industry. So is the "tolerance" industry, which features such outfits as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the multi-multi-million-dollar racket operated by reputed pervert Morris Dees.


Both the foster care/adoption industry and the "tolerance" industry have had the FLDS in their scopes for a while. The SPLC, in particular, has been Jonesing for a crack-down of some kind on a "hate group" for a while, and the FLDS enclave in Eldorado -- occupied as it was by helpless, unarmed, unassuming white folks -- was an irresistible target.


The SPLC, it should be remembered, liaises with law enforcement agencies across the nation, indoctrinating them about various "hate groups" (which means, in practice, any group of people Dees and his comrades hate). And there's nothing that brings out the martial valor of paramilitary law enforcement agencies like the sight of an urban gathering of unarmed, peaceable white people. (I make that observation free of ethnic self-interest, as the photographic evidence will attest.)





















From tabloid trash to official policy: This porridge of herd-poisoning themes pretty much typifies the media's treatment of the FLDS; it also demonstrates how the same war propaganda methods used to whip up foreign conflicts can be used to demonize domestic groups targeted for assault by the State.


The foregoing is not to be construed as the beginnings of a conspiracy theory; instead, it's offered as a guide to some directions a real inquiry might take, should such a thing ever happen.


It's entirely irresponsible to think that the abduction of hundreds of children in Texas could reflect collaboration of some kind among anti-polygamy agitators, corrupt child protection and foster care officials, and the country's most obnoxious "hate group" crusader.


That would be like believing the Iraq War was somehow brought about through the covert collaboration of ideological White House zealots and a small-gauge Iraqi con artist like Ahmed Chalabi.


I mean, get real, dude.


Update --

Yesterday (Monday, May 26), Dale Williams of KTKK radio in Salt Lake City had me on to discuss the FLDS atrocity. The MP3 of that program can be found here (scroll down to the archive section). I consider Dale to be a bold, honest, and exceptionally insightful host, and also appreciate Barbara Jean for including the interview in her archive.




Available now.










Have you done something today to piss off the powerful?

A Bureaucracy Bares Its Teeth

Entrenchment: FLDS members at the YFZ Ranch huddle behind padlocked gates while Texas State officials pursue new strategies to make their mass child abduction "legal."







There are many millions of adults who suffer from a peculiar logic disorder I call "Severe Ipse-Dixitism" that leads them to mistake assertions for evidence. This affliction is quite widespread among political pundits, particularly those who pollute the talk radio industry. Both the Texas Department of Child Protective Services and its media allies suffer from a particularly acute case of that tragic condition.


In a brief filed before the Texas Supreme Court seeking relief from its devastating legal defeat last Friday, the Texas CPS emits a dense fog of unsupported allegations about serious crimes purportedly committed by members of the FLDS Church. The CPS condemns the Texas Third District Appeals Court for insisting that the Agency provide actual evidence of crimes before seizing from the community all of the children 18 years of age and younger -- as well as several adult mothers who, the Agency insisted, were minors.


The appeals court's error, insists the CPS, can only be corrected if the state Supreme Court treats the Agency's unproven assertions as if they were proven facts.


"This case is about adult men commanding sex from underage children; about adult women knowingly condoning and allowing sexual abuse of underage children; about the need for the Department to take action under difficult, time-sensitive and unprecedented circumstances to protect children on an emergency basis," insists the CPS brief.


Oddly enough, when the CPS first slithered into the YFZ refuge on April 3rd, it piously insisted that the case was "about" the ongoing abuse of a 16-year-old child bride at the cruel hands of her loutish polygamist "husband." The Agency and its trained pets in law enforcement knew that the alleged perpetrator was not at the YFZ Ranch, and before the child-grab was consummated they also knew that the "victim" didn't exist. Not that this made a particle of difference, of course.


“The record is uncontroverted that adult men engage in ‘spiritual marriages’ with under-age children,” the CPS brief continues. “No age was too young to marry and they wanted to have as many babies as they could.” To what "record" does the CPS refer here? That some FLDS men have contracted "marriages" with under-age girls is a demonstrated fact, yes. But so far, not a single criminal charge of that kind has been filed with respect to anybody living at the YFZ Ranch.


Here the CPS, which seems determined to run the table of logical fallacies, offers up a museum-quality specimen of the fallacy of the undistributed middle: FLDS men enter into polygamous "marriages" with underage girls; the male inhabitants of YFZ Ranch are members of the FLDS Church; ergo, the men at YFZ Ranch are engaged in polygamous "marriages" with underage girls.


To which contention rational people will reply: Yes, there are some FLDS men who have behaved in just that fashion. Find them, indict them, prosecute them, and imprison them if they're convicted -- but neither the CPS nor any other government agency has the authority to abduct several hundred people on the basis of unsubstantiated assumptions that are supported by nothing but defective syllogisms and smug bureaucratic self-assurance. The statement above isn't a legal argument -- even a very bad legal argument. It is a sound-bite begotten by a cynical public relations strategy by a corrupt, dishonest bureaucracy that no longer even maintains the pretense of caring about the children it kidnapped. For the Texas CPS, the gig now is all about institutional self-preservation.


A child is saved from the "Child Savers": Dan Jessop and his wife, Louisa, emerge from a courtroom cradling the newborn son the Texas CPS had tried to seize from the couple. Louisa, 22, an adult mother of legal age, was taken into CPS custody as a "pregnant minor." Dan says that this is only the second time he has been able to see his child.


How do we know that the CPS has abandoned its pose of protecting the best interests of (make sure to speak the phrase in a voice thick with pious sentiment tremulous with affected compassion) the children? It's simple: They agreed to return a dozen children to their FLDS parents, albeit under CPS supervision.


These are twelve children, recall, who simply had to be separated from their parents.


Right now, dammit!


This was a matter of immediate, exigent, three-alarm, screw-the-warrant, kick-down-the-doors, oh-dear-I'm-wetting-my-pants urgency.


Those kids, and hundreds in identical circumstances, couldn't be left in the fell clutches of their parents, because even though no evidence is available that abuse has been committed at YFZ Ranch, the children there could someday become abusers or victims.


But now those children are being reunited with their parents, despite the CPS's borderline-apocalyptic warnings, and -- here's the really important part -- the fact that there's no material difference between those children and the hundreds who remain captives of the CPS.


If the objective here were child "protection," rather than the abduction of hundreds of children and the demolition of an entire community, the CPS (acting on their professed principles) would have reacted to the appeals court decision on Friday by returning all of the children to their parents on the same terms. Rather than doing the honest and principled thing, CPS is simply playing for time, scrambling to create "evidence," and doing what it can to manipulate public opinion.


This helps explain why the CPS, during a custody hearing over a newborn son born to Dan and Louisa Jessop, introduced as "evidence" a series of photos of FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs involved in what can delicately be called "inappropriate" behavior with a 12-year-old girl. Louisa Jessop had been seized by CPS as a "pregnant minor"; in other circumstances, this might have been considered flattering, given that she is 22 years old. The CPS stood ready to steal the Jessops' son as soon as he was born.


They call this "help."


According to the Salt Lake Tribune's account of this incident, the young girl shown sitting in the lap of Warren Jeffs, and then being kissed by him on the mouth, is Dan Jessop's sister, and he was asked -- while on the witness stand -- what he thought of the spectacle. The purpose of this line of questioning, supposedly, was to establish that Dan and Louisa were part of a "household" (the collective population of YFZ Ranch) that supports underage marriage.


The actual purpose was likely two-fold: It was to bait Jessop on the stand while reinforcing the impression that all adult FLDS members are incorrigible pederasts, or enablers of the same.


Significantly, although Jeffs (who is serving a sentence for statutory rape as an accomplice) reportedly "married" (or was "sealed" to) the twelve-year-old about a month before his arrest in 2006, a physical examination has revealed no evidence that she has engaged in sexual relations. So those admittedly nauseating photographs, in addition to being a crashing non sequitir when introduced in the Dan and Louisa Jessop custody hearing, have no evidentiary value.



While it is inappropriate for a male of Warren Jeffs' age to kiss a twelve-year-old on the mouth, that act is not a crime or evidence of one -- unless, as is the CPS's habit, we are to assume facts that have not been entered into evidence, and then use those "facts" to impute collective guilt on the basis of kinship and religious association. Unfortunately, by kidnapping the FLDS children the CPS has actually managed to manufacture some "facts" that most likely will result in some pretty severe hardship for a few FLDS couples.


Desperate to get their children back, and convinced that the only way to do so is to mollify the abductors, at least some parents have signed "family service plans" containing an admission that they have, in some sense, been party to child abuse. In fact, I'm convinced that those concessions represent the only "evidence" at the CPS's disposal.


"CPS's investigation of the Yearning for Zion Ranch found evidence under Texas law of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse," lied the CPS in the standard cover letter for the "Family Service Plan" distributed to FLDS parents. "Because of what CPS found, CPS removed your child from the ranch. After a hearing, the judge agreed with CPS's belief that your child was not safe from abuse. The judge gave CPS temporary custody of your child. Your child has been placed in foster care."


Now that the children have been taken away, what happens if parents don't placate the CPS's demands? "The judge will expect you to work with your caseworker" in carrying out the terms of the Family Service Plan, which include signing a document that states, as a matter of proven fact, that the CPS "investigation" found that "sexual and mental and emotional abuse" were underway there. "Not working with CPS is something the judge may consider when making decisions for you and your child," continues the CPS letter in the same tone of ominous condescension. "If the judge is not satisfied that you can provide a safe place for your child where they are free from abuse, the judge may decide to limit or even permanently take away all of your rights as a parent of the child. The child then could be placed in permanent foster care or be adopted."


Relieved of the cloying, euphemistic legalese, these statements are an unadorned threat: Admit that you're an abuser, submit to all of our demands, or your child will be taken from you permanently.


To their credit, at least some of the attorneys representing FLDS parents are telling their clients to avoid even reading the documents. But at least some of the parents have signed the documents, which means that they have effectively confessed to unspecified acts of child abuse. And under the collectivist theory of communal guilt being followed by Texas CPS, the Agency will almost certainly attempt to use those admissions -- obtained through extortion -- to incriminate the entire community. And thus the game will go on, as the children remain captive.


So do the parents, as the following incident at the end of the Jessop family's custody hearing illustrates (emphasis mine):


"As [Dan Jessop] spoke to reporters, a CPS worker interrupted him. `We need to take her,' the woman said, trying to remove his arm which was wrapped around his wife [Louisa]. `I'll walk with her,' he said. `We have to go,' the worker said, prodding them toward the street. `Come on, let's go.' The couple walked toward an SUV, where [Louisa] was loaded in the back seat and her baby was placed in a carseat next to her. Jessop reached in and hugged his wife."


In what sense is this a free country when a young husband and father who has not been accused of a crime can not only be separated from his wife and newborn son, but suffer such contemptuous treatment by some tax-fattened termagant?


Apropos of nothing...


Scott Watson, a good and very generous friend, has sent along some photographs I think you'll enjoy:



















Here we see William Wallace, age 10, proudly displaying an autographed Ron Paul sign at the hero's recent speech in Caldwell, Idaho.
















Here we see William Wallace's father, age unspecified, uprooting an old tree in Scott's backyard last Saturday. (Vanity, that cruel and ever-attentive mistress, compels me to point out that I'm wearing a loose-fitting shirt, and my girth isn't quite as Falstaffian as this photo would suggest.)

Tearing up this tree was the most fun I've had in weeks (I hope Scott has a few more he'd like removed.) This is old-school, Dino-style exercise. It was a good compliment to my morning workout, during which our middle son, Isaiah Athanasius, got to see me put up 410 lbs. on the bench press.



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An Ambiguous Victory (Updated)

Yes, the Constitution applies even to them: FLDS member Willie Jessop turns away a CPS commissarina who demanded access to the YFZ Ranch to conduct a warrantless search. Mr. Jessop told the finger-wagging shrike to get the constitutionally mandated paperwork together, and he'd let her in.


It was shortly before noon on Wednesday, May 20, when two Texas CPS officials, in the company of armed Sheriff's Deputies, arrived at the gates of the largely deserted YFZ Ranch. Nearly everybody involved in the custody fight over some 463 people (both children and young emancipated adults dishonestly depicted as minors by the CPS) was either in court, on the way to court, or somewhere in the vast Texas state highway system trying to visit their abducted kids.


So apparently the CPS decided to exploit this opportunity to snoop around the FLDS property. The purported reason for this raid was a hot tip from a conveniently anonymous informant -- hey, we know that leads of that kind are always reliable, right? -- that five children, including one with Down's Syndrome, had arrived at the ranch sometime after the other children had been taken into government custody.


Last time, the CPS prevailed on Merrill Jessop, the Bishop (or Overseer) of the FLDS community, to order his followers to let the Child Snatchers in, despite the fact that their search warrant was entirely invalid.


Trained from infancy to comply immediately and without qualification to an order from their "priesthood head," the FLDS cooperated -- and as a result hundreds of children were abducted by the state at gunpoint on the basis of non-existent "evidence" of widespread abuse.


On Wednesday morning, however, FLDS officials were not as complaisant.


"If they have an honest complaint, we'll be honest, but we were lied to," protested Willie Jessop to the handful of reporters who had scrambled out to the ranch.


Asked later in the day about the abortive raid, CPS spokesliar Marleigh Meisner insisted (in the words of a Salt Lake Tribune paraphrase) that the agency, which "does not conduct criminal investigations, never uses search warrants. "


Those blessed with memories longer than the life-span of the typical Mayfly will recall that the CPS did get a search warrant before the initial April 3 raid. Yes, I know that the CPS arrogantly claims that its investigators aren't impeded by familiar Due Process requirements. But it's odd, nonetheless, that the agency took the time to get a warrant (albeit a spurious one) for the first raid, but conducted the most recent one with such indecent haste that it didn't even bother with the pretense of filing the proper paperwork.


Another oddity: The 5-year-old with Down Syndrome for whom the CPS was searching on May 20 had already been abducted and was in the custody of the agency. While the CPS, even at what passes for its best, is hardly a model of competence, the haste and sloppiness of this most recent attempted raid suggests that, in addition to the agency's familiar malice, something akin to panic might have been at work.


I suspect -- but cannot yet prove -- that the attempted raid on May 20 had a great deal to do with the appellate decision (.pdf) handed down the following day (yesterday, May 21) excoriating the agency for abusing its "discretion" in conducting a mass child seizure without so much as a particle of evidence that abuse was underway or an imminent threat.


The CPS surely knew the weakness of its case against the FLDS, and could probably predict how the Third District Court of Appeals would rule. I suspect that they needed to find something to supplement its anemic brief, thereby buttressing the illusion that an investigation into actual abuse was underway and that the appeals court should let them have sufficient time to build a case.


The Court of Appeals decision is significant primarily for the tone of composed indignation with which it demolishes the CPS's claim to have conducted a "child protection" operation, as opposed to a straight-up mass child abduction under the color of State power.


On pages five and six of that document, the court makes four separate uses of the expression "no evidence" in dismissing the abuse claims made by CPS (the emphasis in each use is mine):


*"There was no evidence that the male children, or the female children who had no reached puberty, were victims of sexual or other physical abuse or in danger of being victims of sexual or other physical abuse";


*"... there was no evidence regarding the marital status of [twenty pregnant females identified by CPS as being from 13-20 years of age] when they became pregnant or the circumstances under which they became pregnant other than the general allegation that the girls were living in an FLDS community with a belief system that condoned underage marriage and sex";


*"There was no evidence that any of the female children other than the five identified as having become pregnant between the ages of fifteen and seventeen were victims or potential victims of sexual or other physical abuse";


*Except for that same group of five expectant mothers, "there was no evidence of any physical abuse or harm to any other child[.]"


The Court's ruling came in response to a petition for a Writ of Mandamus filed on behalf of thirty-eight women (referred to as "Realtors") whose children were seized by CPS. In conducting the seizure, CPS "failed to establish that the need for protection of the Realtors' children was urgent and required immediate removal of the children.... [N]one of the identified minors who are or have been pregnant are children of Realtors. There is no evidence" -- that phrase again -- "that any of the five pregnant minors live in the same household as the Realtors' children."


The decision likewise eviscerates the CPS's novel collectivist theory that the entire community should be treated as one "household" for the purpose of a child "protection" action. Under that approach, a single alleged incident of abuse would effectively incriminate every adult in the community and justify the "protective" seizure of all the resident children.


In words savoring of chilled contempt, the Court vivisected that theory and discarded the bleeding remains:


"The notion that the entire ranch community constitutes a `household' as contemplated by section 262.201 [of the Texas Code, which deals with child protection actions] and justifies removing all children from the ranch community if there even is one incident of suspected child sexual abuse is" -- here we go again! -- "contrary to the evidence. The Department's witnesses acknowledged that the ranch community was divided into separate family groups and separate households. While there was evidence that the living arrangements on the ranch are more communal than most typical neighborhoods, the evidence was not legally or factually sufficient to support a theory that the entire ranch community was a `household.'..."


Even if were proper to treat the FLDS retreat as a single undifferentiated household, the CPS is still left with that nagging, persistent lack of evidence that actual abuse of any kind was underway.


To make the case that the children at YFZ Ranch confronted a dire threat of abuse, the CPS had to go to the First Bank of Cosmic Supposition and borrow heavily on the assumption that at some unspecified future date the children may be abused. The "evidence" presented as collateral for this loan, notes the court, was that the children "live in a community where there is a `pervasive belief system' that condones marriage and child-rearing as soon as females reach puberty."


Once that belief is wedded (if you'll pardon the expression) to an actual, provable incident of sexual misconduct, it is proper to arrest the accused offender and put him on trial. Our system of laws -- as I remember reading about that system; it was dead long before my time -- was designed to deal out justice in individualized portions once due process had provided proof beyond a reasonable doubt.


The CPS has displayed disdain for that bourgeois approach: Why deal out individual justice for crimes that have been committed, when we can accuse the entire community of participation in crimes yet to be conceived, and then blackmail the adults into accepting their guilt by stealing their children?


To its considerable credit, the Third District Court of Appeals refused to ratify this Vladimir Lenin-by-way-of-Hillary Clinton approach to collective punishment in the name of "the children." And once again, the court was able to cite key factual concessions by the CPS to demonstrate how its innovative legal theory was unsustainable:


"The simple fact [writes the court in footnote 11 of the decision], conceded by the Department, that not all FLDS families are polygamous or allow their female children to marry as minors demonstrates the danger of removing children from their homes based on the broad-brush ascription of every aspect of a belief system to every person living among followers of the belief system or professing to follow the belief system."


Digested to its essence, the decision reads as follows:


If you're going accuse someone of child abuse, you have to follow the rules of Due Process. This means, among other things, citing tangible, plausible evidence of actual offenses, rather than presenting to the court the reeking discharge from your collective emunctory aperture and describing it as a novel theory of collective punishment.


This seems like a very simple and obvious proposition. But as Chesterton once said, sometimes it takes a certain kind of courage to stand up in public and say that two times two equals four.


Unfortunately, after demolishing the CPS's legal claims down to the sub-atomic level, the Court did not issue the desired Writ of Mandamus -- an order to the department to return the children immediately. This gave the CPS the option of keeping the children in its custody while appealing the decision -- a course of action the agency has, quite predictably, followed.


A new reason to hope -- but their children aren't free, yet.


Some observers believe the FLDS court victory presages an eventual -- and perhaps immediate -- restoration of the children to their families. I wish I could share that optimistic assessment.


As an appendage of the Texas government, the CPS has the resources to drag out this legal battle for as long as necessary -- until every child taken from YFZ Ranch reaches adulthood, should it come to that. Perhaps the only thing that could prevent this from happening would be a court order to CPS -- backed with a threat to hold in contempt, and arrest, non-cooperating agency officials -- that the children must be returned while the legal dispute continues.


But as I've pointed out, the CPS isn't interested in the law, only in the physical possession of the children. As long as the children remain in that agency's hands -- as long as the CPS in any state has the power to seize children in the first place -- the law simply doesn't matter.


Chipping away at the stonewall....


This is pretty compelling evidence that CPS knows its position is completely untenable, but they'll continue to drag out this matter as long as they can:

"State child welfare authorities have agreed to reunite 12 children from a west Texas polygamist sect with their parents until the state Supreme Court rules on their custody case. Teresa Kelly, a spokeswoman for the parents' lawyer, says Child Protective Services agreed on Friday to allow the parents to live with their children in the San Antonio area under state supervision."

Two things should be understood about this grudging tactical concession.


First, there is no need for the CPS to retain custody of any of these children while the legal challenges play out. The Court of Appeals decision makes it pretty clear that there is no evidence that any of the children abducted by the CPS was in danger of abuse, much less a victim of the same.


Second, even after these children are reunited with their parents, the CPS will continue to keep the families under scrutiny, as if the parents -- who have been charged with nothing -- were paroled criminals.


I'm a full-time cynic, and in my spare time cynicism is my favorite hobby. Perhaps this is why I think the Texas CPS is desperately trying to extort abuse accusations from at least some of the FLDS children over whom the agency retains custody.


These people are as disinclined to surrender the children as Hillary is to bow out gracefully, and for roughly the same reason: A pathological lust for power.



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Texas Child Grab: Possession Is The Entire "Law"

Ready to kill for the State: A sniper takes aim at unarmed parents at the YFZ Ranch, prepared to kill any who resist as their children are stolen by lying, corrupt strangers.


"The important thing to understand," insists former Texas judge Scott McCown, referring to the status hearings for the abducted FLDS children that begin on May 19, "is this ... is not an opportunity to re-litigate the removal [of the children]. The child has already been removed, so this is about where to go from here. What's the plan?"


McCown's comment, of course, is a variation on a standard statist trope, the rapist's argument from inevitability: Look, it's going to happen anyway, so just lie down and enjoy it -- and once the deed is done, there's no point "re-litigating" the matter.


I grant that Mr. McCown, as a former judge, is most likely someone indoctrinated from an early age to believe that the point of the legal system is to validate the wisdom of the State, as opposed to punishing the guilty and vindicating the rights of the innocent. And he must have forgotten a useful rule of evidence: It is the guilty, rather than the innocent, who want to change the subject or stop the inquiry once inconvenient facts begin to materialize. That would explain the eagerness of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to foreclose a critical examination of the process that led to the criminal abduction of over 460 children.


And so, once again, apologists for the child-snatchers are taking refuge in the rapist's defense: It happened, it's over, just get over it and move on. (And, by the way, you better put some ice on that. )


The chief difference between common rape and the crime committed by the Texas CPS against the mothers and children of YFZ Ranch, of course, is that what was taken in this instance can, should, and must be returned. There was no legal reason to take the children in the first place, and there is abundant, uncontested evidence that the entire operation to seize the children was carried out in patent, palpable bad faith.


I am aware that what follows will avail nothing in dealing with the criminals who run the "justice" and child "protection" systems in Texas. Their contempt for the law is self-evident and apparently incurable. So why do I even bother to set out the facts, and expatiate on the law, given that those who stole these innocent children aren't concerned about either?


To put the matter simply:


If this crime proceeds unpunished -- as appears likely -- and if it spawns copycat crimes elsewhere -- which, once again, is a reasonable surmise -- the next such attempt will lead to bloodshed. And if that's the only option left to innocent parents trying to keep their children from the hands of State-employed criminals, I devoutly (albeit unrealistically) hope that a jury can be found that will vote for acquittal on the grounds of self-defense.


In anticipation of such a tragic but perhaps inevitable contingency, I think it's necessary to present the facts about the seizure of the FLDS children before a candid world.


Both child "protection" and law enforcement personnel knew that they had no probable cause to conduct a search of the YFZ Ranch. They knew this before they obtained the first search warrant, let alone the second one.


The critical facts, drawn from relevant legal filings and sworn testimony -- most of it offered by the child-nappers -- are presented in a 75-page petition for a writ of habeas corpus (.pdf) filed on behalf of Amy Marie Dockstader, Natalie Joanne Keate, Britton Bauer Keate, Jameson Rand Keate, and Marreta Keate, as well as their fathers, James Dockstader, Rulon Keate and LeLand Keate.


Each of the fathers lives "in a monogamous relationship with [his] wife (who was of age at the time of their marriage), and their children in single family, stand-alone, separate residences located on the YFZ Ranch property," reports the petition. "There was no evidence nor allegation of physical or sexual abuse of any of these children."


And this is where things would end with respect to those families, were the Texas CPS governed by constitutional law and the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. But that agency, like its counterparts elsewhere in this once-free country, subscribes to a degenerate form of collectivism akin to the family law theories espoused by Soviet psychologist A.S. Makarenko.


Please indulge me in a brief but necessary digression.


Makarenko's The Collective Family: A Handbook for Russian Parents, was the child-rearing bible of Stalin's Russia. It was also a seminal work for many Western social activists during the 1950s and 1960s, when the pestilential Child "Protection" bureaucracy was gestating in the womb of the Regime. (Makarenko's influence on those who created our nation's child "protection" system was attested by Russian expatriate Urie Bronfenbrenner, a key architect of the Head Start program.)


The purpose of the family, Makarenko wrote, was to raise the State's children to be good collectivists: "We are living on the summit of the greatest pass in history, our day has seen the beginning of a new order in human relations, a new morality, a new law, the foundation of which is the victorious idea of human solidarity.... In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist. Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism."


"Somebody get this skeevy collectivist's clammy hands off of me!" Something to that effect seems to be going through the head of the little girl on the left as she's made to pose in the arms of Urie Bronfenbrenner, an apostle of collectivist child-rearing.


Accordingly, the Soviet family was not a "closed-in," autonomous entity, like the "bouregois" family; it was "an organic part of Soviet society," subject to intimate and constant regulation in the interests of "society." To this end it was necessary to discredit the authority of the father in the home: Makarenko identified the traditional patriarch as an "odious figure" - "Master, overseer, teacher, judge and sometimes executioner" -- even as he extolled the supposed mercies of a State headed by the uber-benevolent father figure named Joseph Stalin.


Da, Commissarina: Texas CPS Child-grabber Angie Voss



The collectivist order described by Makarenko is very different from a communal arrangement like that of the FLDS at the YFZ Ranch. In seeking to justify seizing the FLDS children, CPS Commissarina Angie Voss emphasized that she was told by church members that "they are one big family, one large community, and they have the same belief system." This is true, quite common among small religious groups, and entirely benign.


However, Voss and her legal cohorts have used this affinity to justify treating the YFZ population as one literal family: In this way, any evidence of abuse can be used to incriminate everybody in that population, toward the end of breaking up this natural, private collective and bringing it under the plenary power of the coercive collective that employs Voss and her henchmen. This is collective punishment, carried out for collectivist ends.


From that perspective, it doesn't matter whether a given family is headed by a monogamous husband and lives in an independent dwelling. The State has decreed that they are part of a rogue group that must be assimilated into the larger national Collective. And since the State now has possession of the children, the law doesn't matter, because it can now use the children as blackmail leverage against the parents -- something that is already underway.


In the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, as distinct from the post-Marxist collectivism that informs that Child "welfare" system, the government has to justify its intrusion into the sanctity of the home. This is why the Fourth Amendment (and its equivalent in every state constitution, including that of Texas), defines the non-negotiable probable cause requirement in terms of "particular" places to be searched and "persons or things to be seized."


Where the April 3 raid on the YFZ Ranch is concerned, the initial warrant referred to the much-discussed "Sarah Jessup Barlow," a supposedly abused polygamous "child bride" who had purportedly been impregnated by an abusive middle-aged man identified as Dale Barlow. The entire purpose of that initial search was to find Sarah and take her into custody, and to find the 49-year-old Mr. Barlow and place him under arrest.


However, as the habeas corpus petition points out:


"The [child `protection'] Agency's pre-raid investigation determined that the accused 49-year-old man was an Arizona resident, under supervision on probation by an Arizona probation officer who resided in Arizona. Before execution of the warrant, Sheriff Doran was also advised that Dale Barlow was in Arizona and not within the [FLDS] Community. In fact, Sheriff [David] Doran spoke to Mr. Barlow in Arizona by cell phone and, after confirming his identity, Barlow told the Sheriff that he did not know any Sarah Jessup and had never been to the yearning [sic] for Zion Community nor to Texas for some twenty years. The Agency was also advised that there was no Sarah living in the Ranch." (Emphasis added.)


The assumption behind the initial raid was that Mr. Barlow -- and he alone -- posed "an immediate risk to physical or sexual abuse of a child." But even before the first search warrant was executed, Sheriff Doran and his associates in the Texas Rangers "had been apprised, and [had] even verified, that the only person these officers alleged to be suspected of criminal activity ... was not located on the premises, or even in the State of Texas."


What of the "victim," the much-abused Sarah Jessup Barlow? It is now well known that the woman claiming to be Sarah is disturbed 33-year-old woman from Colorado Springs named Rozita Swinton, who is in the habit of making false abuse reports to police agencies across the country. (.pdf)


Those calls were made by telephones with a 719 area code. When Swinton made those calls on March 29 and March 30, Texas officials who followed up "were immediately advised that one of these telephone numbers was associated with an individual who had made numerous `false reports of sexual abuse to police agencies' in the Colorado Springs area." (Note carefully the word "immediately.") In fact, she was linked to false allegations of abuse to more than ten police departments, from Monroe, Washington to Ft. Meyers, Florida.


So at the time of the original assault on the YFZ Ranch, Sheriff Doran and the CPS knew that the alleged abuser wouldn't be found therein. Yet they conducted that home invasion anyway. They also sought a second affidavit from Judge Barbara Walther -- who issued it with blithe indifference -- without informing Walther the alleged abuser had an air-tight alibi: He was in Arizona, under the constant surveillance of his probation officer.


Just as significantly, the CPS had enlisted the aid of the Midland Sheriff Department's SWAT team to raid the YFZ Ranch after it was clear that Mr. Barlow wasn't there, and that there would be no violent resistance to the CPS invasion of the commune.


The CPS had already written a narrative, and it was sticking to its script. According to a legal brief filed on behalf of the Agency, once Comrade Voss and her 12-member CPS raiding party had defiled the YFZ Ranch, "The Department's investigation was thwarted due to misinformation about the identities of the girls.... Ms. Voss indicated that she believed she was encountering a `brick wall' because some girls were saying that they were going to plead `the Fifth' and not answer questions."


This storyline -- "Polygamous Cult Covers Up Abuse of Hapless Child Bride" -- was fed into the organ of mass dishonesty called the mainstream media within hours of the raid at the Ranch. This was done by people who knew that the residents of that community couldn't "cooperate" in the search for Sarah Barlow, because she didn't exist.


Furthermore, the testimonies offered by mental health workers who attended the mothers and children in various detention facilities after the raid flatly contradict Voss's statements that the FLDS women and girls refused to cooperate. These workers -- who, unlike Voss and her comrades, have no reason to shade or misrepresent the truth -- emphasized that although the briefings they received from the CPS told them that the FLDS women would "plead the Fifth" (as if that were somehow impermissible), the captive women were very polite and cooperative. In fact, according to these disinterested witnesses, it was the CPS who routinely lied to and misled the FLDS women, rather than the reverse.


A portrait in serene suffering: One need not respect the FLDS community's teachings (I certainly do not) in order to admire the character many of them have displayed in the face of aggressive evil.



But the CPS stuck to its storyline. Those people knew that by the time the truth was available, the public wouldn't be interested in it.


And the children would be in their hands.


This is a case in which possession is the entire "law."


To the child snatchers, the only "law" that matters here is the power that flows from the barrel of a gun. Look at the photograph at the top of this essay: It documents the murderous intent behind this premeditated crime. That individual was prepared to murder, in cold blood, any parent who raised a hand to rescue his child.


The individual behind the sights of that rifle lent his potentially lethal services to a knot of criminals who violated the law flagrantly, deliberately, knowingly, and with calculated malice. They did so for reasons rooted in ideology and, quite possibly, simple statist greed.


What recourse do parents have, if their children can be seized from them through culpable fraud and the threat of lethal force -- and the law is of no avail?


Are parents simply required to submit, because the agency that has stolen their children is not disposed to "re-litigate" the issue, once it has full possession of the children? That's the "wisdom" offered by the Texas legal system.


Consider Judge Walther's glib response to an objection raised by one attorney during the cattle-call status hearing. When an attorney trying to represent one of the FLDS mothers protested that the women were being "detained" at the local sports coliseum his objection prompted Walther to extrude the following Orwellian soliloquy:


"I want to make one thing very, very clear. There is no mother at the coliseum or at the Wells Fargo [detention area] that is an adult that everyone agrees is an adult that is detained. They are free to go. The [Child "protection"] Department has said that they [the mothers] may stay and provide care for their children, should they choose. So your client, the mothers, are not being held by this Court."


That is to say: The mothers were perfectly free to leave their children in the hands of people who had invaded their homes through malevolent guile and taken the youngsters away amid threats of lethal force. As the attorney incredulously replied to Judge Walther: "I'm supposed to tell the mother of [a] two-year-old she's free to go, [but] the two-year-old gets to stay[?] That's detention, Your Honor."


To which Walther offered the snide reply:


"[I]f you want to take the position that these women are being held by the Court, I want you to go tell them that they can leave. If they want to stay, they're going to have to sign something saying that they want to stay."


So now the mothers would be required to ask the State's kind permission to remain captive with their children -- until, that is, Walther issued an order sending the children away.


This is a bit like requiring a victim to write a thank-you note to her rapist, and perhaps send him flowers as well.


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Dum spiro, pugno!