The Wall Street Journal reports that Texas is going to appeal the ruling that handed them a stunning defeat for seizing 460 children from the Yearning For Zion ranch.

Texas officials sought Friday to retain custody of more than 460 children seized from a polygamist ranch after an appeals court ruled the children should be returned to their parents, but they also agreed to reunite 12 children with their parents while the case moves on.

The state apparently believes that what it is doing is the right thing.  In the face of widespread criticism, coupled with the stinging rebuke of the Austin appellate court, somebody must feel very strongly about this.

The most significant point in the article is this:

In a case in which everything is big — the number of children, the severity of the child-abuse allegations, the sprawling legal proceedings — a sense emerged among dueling experts that all involved are wielding blunt instruments.

It is a fault with all cases involving large numbers of people and broad-stroke allegations.  When there’s one child involved, the claims are specific.  The state proffers individualized evidence of claimed abuse, and the parents can refute it with equally specific allegations.

Here, it’s one big, vague, non-particularized mess.  What is fundamentally wrong with this approach is that each child, and each parent, has an individual right to be told of the specific allegations against them so that they can contest them.  You can’t contest broad-stroke vagaries.  Absent a specific allegation of wrongdoing, there’s nothing to dispute.

The motivation behind the Texas push harkens to their own past failures.

In the back of the minds of Texas child-welfare officials, said Mr. Choate, a lawyer in San Angelo, Texas, was the federal government’s 1993 raid on a compound in Waco, Texas, where members of a religious sect known as the Branch Davidians lived. Some 82 members of the group, including children, died in a fire following the federal raid.

While this may be a very real fear in the minds of Texas authorities, it’s not even close to a reason to take children from parents here.  Each child is a human being.  So is each parent.  People who are members of peculiar religious cults still get to be treated like actual people, no matter how much “fear” they generate by authorities who don’t want to be blasted later for having missed the chance to save them.

The law works better when used as a scalpel rather than a bludgeon.  Rarely, perhaps never, has it been used in so blunt a fashion as here.  The appellate court was absolutely right to order the return of the children to 38 families, and to blast Texas for is en masse handling of human beings. Rhetoric about “institutional abuse” is fine for media sound bites, but the court properly refused to allow such meaningless claims to rip children from their parents.

I don’t know if one or all of these children is at risk at all.  Perhaps they were.  But children should never be taken away from their parents by such blunt force.  If there’s any merit to the state’s concerns at all, then let them put up or shut up.  In the meantime, the children belong back with their families.  Parents, not the state, should be presumed to be the safe harbor.