Quid Spucatum Tauri Est? (Second Update, April 22)

This is the new "normal": A teenage skateboarder maneuvers through a pack of paramilitary thugs practicing urban warfare tactics.

In the Texas government's war against the women and children of the FLDS Church, Colorado Springs resident Rozita Swinton, a 33-year-old woman (a precinct delegate for the El Paso County Democratic Party who intends to vote for Barack Obama at the state convention in May), is "Curveball." That was the code-name of a veteran con artist whose patently false intelligence provided the pretext for a the Iraq invasion. In this case, "Curveball" was "Sarah," the purported 16-year-old FLDS polygamist wife who called a domestic abuse hotline and set in motion the invasion of the sect's YFZ Ranch commune in El Dorado.


And once the government that carried out the assault had what it needed -- first, access to the children, and then physical possession of the same -- it blithely disavowed any need to obey the law and demonstrated its disinclination to "re-litigate" the issue. Oh, yes, the initial raid was based on an affidavit containing third-party hearsay from a bogus source, but that is of little moment in post-Constitutional Amerika.


It doesn't really matter how or why the original raid took place, y'see. What really matters now is that the effort succeed. Now that the FLDS Children are in state custody, everybody simply has to support the government's efforts to see that they receive the care they need. After all, our protectors would have taken such a drastic step as the seizure of all 416 children unless it had been absolutely necessary. What else could be done when a 16-year-old "plural wife" is being beaten and abused...


Oh, yeah. That's right -- there was no 16-year-old "Sarah."


But-- who cares?. Taking the kids was the right thing to do anyway, under the principle of preemptive warfare. Since this kind of abuse may have happened, or may happen someday, we might as well yank the kids out today. Some might not approve of the way this was done, but everybody must agree that the FLDS kids are better off now than they were living in their insular little cult.

Such are the blessings of living under a quasi-totalitarian Regime presided over by benevolent and far-seeing rulers such as ours: Their intentions are invariably pure, and their prescriptions inevitably work out for the best. We simply must have faith that the humanitarian violence the Regime inflicted on the FLDS in El Dorado will be just as successful as the even larger exercise in applied compassion that we call the Iraq War.


From the available photographic evidence, the FLDS children are healthy, active, and untouched by the modern plague of childhood obesity. They were schooled at home and spent most of each day involved in vigorous physical labor and energetic recreation. Their diet was barren of processed foods and consisted of such fare as home-grown vegetables and bread made from freshly ground wheat.

"That's no way for a woman to dress here in Texas!" For appropriate couture, see the photo below.


Now, like the Branch Davidian children "rescued" before them (prior to the immolation of nearly that entire sect by the FBI), the FLDS children are free to enjoy the benefits of our homogenized corporatist society. They'll be wired in to the society of unlimited sensate distraction -- television, video games, My Space, and so on.


They'll be fed a proper diet of pre-packaged food products and sugar-suffused beverages. They'll not be required to work in gardens, build fences, or otherwise apply themselves in such exploitative labor that would have left them with well-developed muscles and an equally developed work ethic. Now they can be harmonized down to the norm of our sedentary, passive consumer collective. In short order they can be assimilated by the government school system, where they will be purged of retrograde ideas and refractory attitudes and prepared for proper service to the State.


Rather than being groomed to be predatory polygamists, the FLDS boys can now be preyed upon by military flesh-peddlers desperate to fill the ranks of the Empire's armies of conquest and occupation. Why, I'll bet that as arrangements are made to distribute the FLDS children around the country, recruiters are preparing to descend on them wherever they land.


Think of the opportunities those children would have missed, confined as they were to a remote faith community and insulated from the effects of our degenerate imperial culture! In a few years, instead of assuming the responsibilities of raising and providing for families of their own (within the admittedly aberrant teachings of their sect), the FLDS boys will be given the opportunity to exterminate Muslim families very much like their own in Iraq, Iran, and wherever else the almighty State choses to send them.


No longer will the prospect of polygamy becloud the future for the FLDS girls. Thanks to the benevolent coercion exercised by the State of Texas, those girls will be free to emulate the Lone Star State's racoon-eyed exemplars of modern Christian womanhood -- the Simpson sisters, Jessica and Ashlee.


Oh, sure: Jessica's determination to market herself to the one-handed reader set destroyed her marriage and has left her a kind of Ronin among pop culture courtesans. And Ashlee, an alleged singer whose talents run more toward pantomime, recently announced that she is enceinte without benefit of marriage vows.


What really matters here is that the Simpson sisters aren't polygamous "wives" in some rustic fundamentalist cult. They're the sterling offspring of a former Baptist minister. Oh, I grant that Joe Simpson has displayed a certain skeevy interest in his eldest daughter's mammalial allotment (or "suckers," as he so inelegantly referred to them) -- but he's just, ah, pumping up his most profitable assets.


Down Texas way, fine upstandin' Christian-folk know that it's nothing more than cynical flesh-peddling to raise a daughter to be the second, third, or seventh "wife" of a Mormon polygamist. That's no way to do it -- there's no money to be made. No, the right way to do it is to get them a record deal and a reality show and parade them -- for money -- in various stages of undress in front of concupiscent strangers, the way Joe Simpson did.


The FLDS children living at YFZ Ranch had been denied the blessings of our degenerate late-imperial culture. Blessed be the Regime, and all of its appendages, for rescuing those children from such cruel social isolation!


Update: Unfathomable Cruelty

The Texas Department of Child Abduction, sometimes wittily referred to as the Department of Protective and Family Services, has announced that as soon as it has extracted DNA samples from the FLDS child captives they will be placed in foster care. In many instances this will require tearing newborn or nursing infants out of the arms of their mothers:

"Some FLDS mothers with nursing babies and toddlers may be unaware that they will be forced to leave their children behind once Texas officials gather the DNA samples from them. `I don't know how many mothers have babies, but I would say there are dozens of mothers who are nursing little ones,' said Monica Jessop, whose five children between the ages of 3 and 11 are in state custody. `I'm sure they don't know they will be separated.'"


As with every other act of government coercion, this unspeakably cruel crime will be accompanied by the threat of lethal violence.


"Oh, but surely the kind people carrying out this directive would never threaten, injure, or kill an unarmed mother!" some would complain.


Such people are wrong, of course, since this has already happened.


The above-quoted Mrs. Jessop has described an attempt she made yesterday with a group of mothers to visit their children, who are being held prisoner at the San Angelo Coliseum. They were -- to use a phrase made offensive by its dishonest delicacy -- "turned away by law enforcement." Which is to say that they were threatened with lethal violence by the State's rented thugs: "They told us if we went on that property again we would be arrested."


To get a sense of the pure, unalloyed evil being wrought by "law enforcement" in this matter, we turn to the indispensable blog published by Brooke Adams of the Salt Lake Tribune. Scroll down to the April 15 entry "The Women Speak," and you'll get the context of the scene depicted in the photo found to the left.


"We watched as this woman was greeted by younger women, all hugging her, obviously going to her for comfort, crying," writes Adams. "From afar, we had no idea who they were or what they were doing or what the emotions playing out were."


The name of the woman being embraced is Janet.


"She has five children in state custody, three girls and two boys. The girls are ages 9, 13 and 16. The boys are 11 and 15. This is what she said about that moment: "I was in the shelter and had girls in the other one. They told me my two girls were running for me and I went across to hug them. Instantly I had eight police men around me. I was just hugging them."


These women and children have neither been accused of a crime, nor convicted of one. Yet they are being treated like inmates in one of the nouveau gulags called Supermax Prisons.


It occurs to me that this is the kind of situation in which a writ of habeas corpus would be appropriate... if, that is, the habeas corpus guarantee still existed in this once-free country.


Second Update: When Prayer Is Ruled Impermissible

There are ironic benefits to be enjoyed whenever the Regime displays its genuine nature. In the case of the abduction of the 437 FLDS children (not 416, as previously reported; the diligent child-nappers didn't originally provide an accurate count), we see the edifying spectacle of a judge ruling that unsupervised prayer is impermissible:

"Child protective services workers denied that they were eavesdropping on the FLDS women involved [in twice-daily prayer sessions with their captive children], but attorneys for Texas child protective services expressed concerns about improper communications between mothers and children that could occur in private prayer times, which could affect pending investigations."

Given that none of these captives has been charged with a crime, the state has no right or authority to hold them, much less to regulate or ration their communications in any way. But as noted above, spontaneous expressions of maternal love immediate attract the malign attention of, and provoke threats of violence from, "law enforcement" operatives. It's not difficult to imagine how the official eavesdroppers would react to imprecatory prayers.

Judge Walther, seeking to devise a compromise, asked if local LDS officials could be deputized as prayer monitors. This prompted from Charles L. Webb, president of the local LDS stake (an administrative unit akin to a diocese), a rendition of the LDS leadership's refrain: We have nothing to do with those people: "They think we're the same ones because we use the Book of Mormon. I'm dumbfounded they would suggest that."

Oh, for the love of Nephi, Charles, man up and do some version of the right thing. Stop acting like a corporate shill. If you don't have the requisite anatomy to condemn what has been done to the FLDS mothers and children, then at least do something to mitigate the circumstances of those innocent people, instead of dutifully waiting for permission from PR-obsessed people in Salt Lake City.

Yesterday I suggested that somebody file a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the abductees and detained mothers. Apparently, Judge Walther has received received thirty-five habeas corpus filings. If attorneys for the victims press this issue, I expect that child "protection" officials will eventually argue that the Great Writ is officially a dead letter in this country as of October 2006. Child-snatchers have never been impeded by any due process considerations, of course, but it would be somewhat useful to have Texas state officials admit, on the record, that the fundamental Anglo-Saxon due process guarantee has been abolished.


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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Perils of Parens Patriae, or When the State Becomes Daddy

“Children belong to the general family, to the state, before belonging to private families."

French Revolutionary leader Bertrand Barere, whose memory was later invoked by French parents to scare disobedient children (I'm serious)

"In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand."

Frederick Gates, chairman of the Rockefeller-created General Education Board, 1902.

For those of us who love and understand individual freedom, it sometimes seems as if the Atlantic just isn't wide enough to impede the collaboration of Anglo-American elites seeking to re-mold the world closer to their hearts' desire.

That last phrase, incidentally, assumes that those elites, who look at us with “bright, dead alien eyes,” could be said to have human hearts.

The government of departing British Prime Minister Tony Blair has announced a new initiative entitled the “Nurse Family Partnership” that would (in the words of the Guardian of London) “intervene as early as possible in troubled families, first-time mothers identified just 16 weeks after conception [who] will be given intensive weekly support from midwives and health visitors until the unborn child reaches two years old.”

This program could be considered a form of pre-emptive parens patriae; that phrase refers to the fatherhood of the State. The Guardian captured the essence of the British early-intervention initiative in its headline: “Unborn babies targeted in crackdown on criminality.”

The Blair government, summarized that left-leaning periodical, “is prepared to single out babies still in the womb to break cycles of deprivation and behaviour.... Under the programme, which has been copied from the United States, young, first-time mothers will be assigned a personal health visitor at between 16 and 20 weeks into their pregnancy. They will continue to have weekly or fortnightly visits until the child is two....” (Emphasis added.)

The objective is for these intruders, who are clothed in the supposed authority of the State (the “coldest of all cold monsters”), to instruct mothers how to care for their own flesh and blood. The program is “voluntary,” for now. It will not remain so.

As noted above, the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) was devised in the United States by Dr. David Olds of the University of Colorado. It has been implemented in 22 states, and legislation proposed by Senators Ken Salazar (D-Colorado) and Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) would “expand access” to the program to all 50 states and the District of Columbia “through the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) ... providing at-home nurse visits for up to 570,000 first-time mothers each year.”

For more than a century, collectivist social engineers have extolled the merits of home visitations by State-assigned social workers as a way of circumventing parental authority and establishing a proprietary claim on children. The most notorious recent examples – on this side of the Atlantic, in any case – are Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno, the latter demonstrating her solicitude for children by immolating more than a dozen of them at Mt. Carmel and sending stormtroopers to seize another from his Miami relatives at gunpoint.

"Home visitation" ala Janet Reno in Miami....







... and in Waco.

In her ghost-written opus It Takes a Village, Madame Hillary rhapsodized that she “can't say enough” about the merits of home visitation programs. The Nation's Alexander Cockburn, whose household acquaintances in England included members of the Fabian Socialist movement, has pointed out that Hillary's blueprint for social engineering bears a familial resemblance to Fabianism.

"Time and again, reading … It Takes a Village, I was reminded of [Fabian founder] Beatrice Webb," Cockburn has observed. "There's the same imperious gleam, the same lust to improve the human condition until it conforms to the wretchedly constricted vision of freedom that gave us social-worker liberalism, otherwise known as therapeutic policing."

ZZ Top they ain't, but they are one of history's most notable power trios, "The Therapeutic Police": Fabian founders Beatrice and Sydney Webb (from the left, appropriately), and Fabian popularizer George Bernard Shaw.

In his 1919 book New Worlds for Old, Fabian activist H.G. Wells (better known for his science fiction offerings), laid out the basic premise of “therapeutic policing”: “Socialism regards parentage under proper safeguards as 'not only a duty but a service' to the state; that is to say, it proposes to pay for good parentage - in other words, to endow the home.”

By making the mother dependent on subsidies, the State became the surrogate father. And, as Wells pointed out, the State claims the right to raise “its” children, should the natural parents be found unsuitable. This is the tacit but unmistakable threat that accompanies every State official who is permitted to violate the sanctity of the home.

The Blair regime's NFP Action Plan makes this quite plain, at least to people alert to the nuances of State-speak:

*Section 1.2 of the Action Plan claims a mandate for the government to assure that nobody is permitted to “waste” his “human potential,” since this is “bad for the whole country.

*Section 1.6 asserts the State's right and capacity to take “preventative action” within the home in order to “tackle problems before they become fully entrenched and blight the lives of both individuals and wider society.”

*Section 1.9 attempts to cast “wider society” as a victim of unregulated families, since “the behaviour of some people – particularly some of the most challenging families – causes real disruption and distress in the community around them.”

Thus the need, as the Blair regime and its American consultant describe it, to “develop and promote better prediction tools for use by front-line practitioners” and take measures “to ensure that those identified as at risk are followed up.”

Some sense of the purpose of “following up” on “at risk” families can be found in the British Government's Policy Review paper, “The Role of the State”:

“The state ... has the legitimate monopoly of force in a given territory,” that paper begins, immediately laying a totalitarian foundation (from Lenin – the State exercises “power without limit, resting directly on force”; from Mussolini -- “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”).

The NFP initiative, the paper continues, is inspired by the vision of a “strategic and enabling state” which would be “less about command and control and more about collaboration and partnership.”The state will “focus on ends, not the means by which [its] goals are delivered,” working through “a new partnership between the State and the citizen.”

Ah, but remember that the “collaborator” and “partner” offering its assistance to the citizen claims “the legitimate monopoly of force,” which means that in the event of a dispute, it is the citizen, not the State, that will be compelled to yield.

The Fabian Socialist crest depicts a wolf in sheep's clothing -- a suitable symbol for that subversive movement, and an apt metaphor for government "home visitation" programs.

To anyone even slightly familiar with the tenets of the Clinton-era “Third Way,” or the nostrums of the attenuated variety of Marxism called “Communitarianism,” none of this will be new. It may strike some as remarkable that the American version of the NFP program has become so deeply entrenched during the reign of George W. Bush, but this wouldn't be considered odd by those who understand “compassionate conservatism” to be politically enharmonic with Clinton's “I Feel Your Pain”-style corporatism.

Furthermore, as much as it pains me to admit it, the British Fabian Socialists have nothing on their American counterparts regarding the long, patient campaign to subvert the family.

“Since the 1840s … American social history could be written as the deliberate dismantling of the home-centered economy, and the consequent decay of the foundations of our liberty,” observers Dr. Alan Carlson. “[T]his turn against the home was not a natural consequence of industrialization or the emergence of a modern economy. Rather, the change derived from the application of statist ideology and consciously-made political and legal choices.”

"The first direct assault on family autonomy grew out of the reform school movement during the 1830s," whose influence was particularly strong in New York and Pennsylvania, continues Dr. Carlson. In 1839, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, acting on assumptions inspired by the reform school movement, invoked the concept of parens patriae to justify the state's actions in supplanting parents it found "unequal to" or "unworthy of the task" of educating children.

In 1882, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled: "It is the unquestioned right and imperative duty of every enlightened government, in its character of parens patriae to protect and provide for the comfort and well-being of its citizens.... The performance of this duty is justly regarded as one of the most important governmental functions, and all constitutional limitations must be so understood and construed so as not to interfere with its proper and legitimate exercise." (Emphasis added.) The principle of parens patriae, properly understood, requires the demolition of all constitutional limitations, rather than their “redefinition.”

In 1913, Dr. Arthur W. Calhoun published A Social History of The American Family: From Colonial Times to the Present, which would become an authoritative text for American social-service and welfare workers. Calhoun was remarkably unabashed in promoting a perspective on State supremacy that could have been offered by Marx and Engels (who brazenly called for “abolition of the family!” in the Communist Manifesto):

"American history consummates the disappearance of the wider [or extended] familism and the substitution of the parentalism of society.... The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer be supreme."

By 1930, the year that President Herbert Hoover convened the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, it was possible for an American president to describe, in public, the individual child as someone "who belongs to the community almost as much as to the family," and a citizen of "a world predestinedly [sic] moving toward unity.” The latter phrase seems to foretell, by roughly six decades, the claim contained in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child that government is the primary custodian of all children, with the UN itself at the head of a global system of parens patriae.

For more than a century and a half, collectivist cliques on both sides of the Atlantic have been engaged in a kind of dialectical pas de deux where State control over the family is concerned, each side propelling the other to ever-greater heights of presumption. As I said, sometimes it seems a pity that England is just one ocean away.

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