I am not defending the Mormon cult or whatever they are for their actions. I think it is reprehensible for men to act that way. I do have a problem however with the State of Texas taking the children away from their moms and sticking them in foster homes. I also have a problem with Fox News getting all self righteous about young child/women getting preggers when there are simply a ton of other suspects in Texas that are doing the same thing. Are these moms and dads getting marched off to jail? Are their kids being torn away from them?31 of 53 Teen Girls Taken From Polygamist Sect Have Been Pregnant
SAN ANTONIO — Texas child welfare officials say more than half the teen girls swept into state custody from a polygamist sect's ranch have been pregnant.Child Protective Services spokesman Darrell Azar says 53 girls between the ages of 14 and 17 were living on the ranch in Eldorado. Of that group, 31 already have children or are pregnant.
State officials took custody of all 463 children at the Yearning For Zion Ranch more than three weeks ago after a raid prompted by calls to a domestic violence hotline.
Texas is one of the worst states in the Union for pregnant teenage girls. It is second only to California in total teen pregnancies, but Texas is the nation's leader in the percentage of teens that become pregnant (teenage being defined as 10 to 19 years of age.)
Using information from these sites (National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, US Teenage Pregnancy Statistics - 2000 pregnancy statistics) it appears that Texas has the highest percentage of teenage pregnancies within the ten to nineteen year old population group (81,800 pregnancies out of 3,427,615 teens or 2.4%). New York is second at 57,950 pregnancies out of 2,620,865 teens; Florida is third at 49,890 out of 2,325,893 teens and California is fourth at 115,850 pregnancies out of 5,455,796 teens. The USA had 841,450 teen pregnancies out of a populations of 41,896,732 teens or 2%.
And where does Utah, the home of those zany child-marrying polygamists rank in this mix? Utah had 5,730 pregnancies out of 383,197 teens or 1.5% of the teen population.
This changes somewhat when female children under the age of 15 are isolated from the rest of the teen population. Florida now has the dubious distinction of having the greatest percentage of any state's 10 to 14 yr children getting pregnant (1,450 out of 1,156,495 or 0.13%) New York is second at 0.12%, Texas and California are tied at 0.10%.
The nation as a whole is 0.09% - 19,640 pregnancies out of 20.8 million 10 to 14 year old girls.
Utah is 0.04% - 70 out of 187,823.
So where, other than the Mormons, are the mass arrests in Texas? Or any other State for that matter? For the children's sake of course.
Doug Patton has an excellent read on this:
Government-Approved Religions and Cults
By Doug Patton
April 28, 2008
So, let me make sure I have this straight. Hate-filled Islamic Madrassas are okay. To discriminate against them would be racial profiling.
Homes with two parents of the same sex are just fine. In fact, any “family” involving a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender relationship is to be tolerated — even encouraged. All enlightened people know this. To do anything but promote deviant lifestyles is narrow-minded, homophobic and borders on hate speech.
Even a cult like Scientology is winked at because it its most public practitioners are Hollywood stars who look prosperous and pretty, not dowdy and weird.
But God help any group which holds unusual religious views, whose fundamentalist Mormon adherents look strange and choose to withdraw from society to protect its children, and which runs afoul of the standard government definition of what comprises a religion.
I have deliberately waited several weeks to write about the raid by state authorities on the compound near Eldorado, Texas, but I am finally ready to opine on the subject.
I think it was Waco without the flames.
Make no mistake: there is no excuse for child sexual abuse. It should be punished with much greater severity than it is in most venues in this country. But as far as can be determined so far, the only evidence available in this case is an anonymous phone call from a female who claimed to be 16 years old and who said she was being forced to have sex with her 49-year-old “husband.” On the strength of that phone call, Texas authorities raided the compound, took more than 400 children into state custody and denied them access to their mothers. Worse, it appears these children may be placed in foster homes or even put up for adoption.
(Interestingly, the only person so far connected with the anonymous phone call is Rozita Swinton, a Colorado woman who also happens to be a Barack Obama delegate to her state’s Democratic convention. This is no reflection on Sen. Obama, but it would be interesting to see what the mainstream media might have done with the story had she been a Republican, especially if she had been committed to Mormon Mitt Romney.)
I personally know of situations where concerned neighbors and/or family members have tried in vain to get children removed from homes where one or both parents have been guilty of exposing their young children to dangerous drugs, including Meth. In one case, a case worker from Child Protective Services was quoted as saying, “We know they use drugs, but we can’t do anything about it.”
Why, then is a state government allowed to use military tactics and weaponry to raid a peaceful group of people on the strength of an anonymous phone call? For the same reason, Janet Reno’s Justice Department got away with burning the Branch Davidian compound to the ground, killing men, women and children in the process. It is the same reason the Clinton-Reno regime was allowed to take Emilio Gonzales at gunpoint and return him to the misery of Castro’s Cuba. Because we, the people, allowed it. There was not a sufficient outcry from the public to stop it. Unfortunately, I don’t believe there will be enough to stop this travesty, either.
If there is evidence of child abuse, or any other crime, by all means prosecute the perpetrators. But when government decides that hundreds of children should be taken from their mothers because the group to which those mothers belong is not on the sanctioned list of politically correct beliefs, America has crossed over into a dangerous area of government-approved religions and cults. And yours could be next.
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© Copyright 2008 by Doug Patton
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Doug Patton is a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and public policy advisor. His weekly columns are published in newspapers across the country and on selected Internet web sites, including Human Events Online, TheConservativeVoice.com and GOPUSA.com, where he is a senior writer and state editor. Readers may e-mail him at: dougpatton@cox.net.
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