Grits For Breakfast, following the lead of Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch, questions why the rest of the blawgosphere has had so little to say about the West Texas polygamy case, with hundreds of women and children at stake.
Robert Ambrogi at Legal Blog Watch graciously acknowledges Grits’ coverage of Texas’ raid on the Eldorado polygamist compound, but rightly questions why,
as the biggest legal story in recent weeks moves forward, one involving hundreds of lawyers and affecting the lives of many hundreds of women and children, the legal blogosphere seems blind to it all. As one who has come to look forward to blog commentary for insight and perspective, I am disappointed.
It’s a very fair point.
The easy answer is that this entire affair is so fundamentally foreign to my experiences that I really don’t know what to make of it. New York doesn’t get a lot of polygamy cases, and we have very few 1700 acre compounds with religious cults. It’s easy to apply an east coast sensibility to this case, and say they’re all a bunch of religious nuts doing sick things with kids. But is that really true?
This Mormon off-shoot strikes me as bizarre, much as the Waco situation did. But does that mean that a substantial group of people who have sincerely held religious beliefs are wrong and must adhere to the Judeo-Christian ethic that provides the moral parameters of our laws? If we are true believers in religious freedom, they why aren’t these people as entitled to practice their religion without civil interference.
Then there’s the question of the children. Were they sexually abused, or simply married off in accordance with the sect’s beliefs? Young girls may be below the age of consent that the law imposes, but that’s really somewhat arbitrary and fails to address the question of whether this is criminal or just different than the choices made by lawmakers and agreed upon by most people who don’t share their religious beliefs.
As the Texas prosecutors will argue that all children should be removed from their parents, I tend to think that this blanket approach is not merely overkill, but harmful to the majority of the children. Children need parents, and it hardly serves them to put them in foster care if there is no real threat to their safety.
But without having a firm understanding of what this really means, it’s impossible to take a meaningful stand on this case, or to offer any insight that would be worthwhile.
Sorry Grits. Sorry Robert. The reason that this blawg hasn’t had anything to say is that I just don’t have anything to say. Maybe I will once I have a better grasp of the situation, but until then I’m going to do the most helpful thing I can. Remain silent.
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Who is coordinating the lawyers? Where are the appellate specialists? The civil rights legal organizations? Why haven’t 416 Petitions for Writs of Habeas Corpus been filed? (There is no way that proof of imminent harm to each of these children has been put before the Court to date.) Why isn’t there a federal case already filed? (Neither Rooker-Feldman, Younger or Middlesex are bars on these facts.)
This is an appalling abuse of power by local authorities in the State of Texas who allegedly acted on a “tip” from a Colorado woman. What, no caller ID in Texas? Why is no one substantively attacking the warrant and the basis upon which it was granted? Good faith or not, the 4th amendment absolutely does not permit such sweeping warrants. If the polygamists (like them or not) do not have constitutional rights (fundamental rights as parents under the 9th amendment, substantive due process rights under the 5th amendment, 4th amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, the right to the “Grand Ole Writ”) then neither do you. And what about the allegedly abused children? Think they might have some constitutional rights to be free from seizure by the State, what must be an emotionally-shocking separation from their parents, when the State has yet to prove imminent harm?
I am going to call some of the Texas attorneys involved in this case tomorrow to see if I can assist in at least one case to file some federal actions to back these inane locals off.
You wrote: “The easy answer is that this entire affair is so fundamentally foreign to my experiences that I really don’t know what to make of it.”
The “legal profession”, or law, takes children from their natural guardians in dissolution cases without batting an eye. Now how is it possible for a lawyer to claim that child kidnapping by government is a “foreign” concept?
Were you serious?
If you looked at the date of the post, you would see that it was before there was any information available as to the allegations of abuse. Still, asking how a lawyers could “claim that child kidnapping by government is a “foreign” concept” renders your quesion absurd.