Posts from — April 2008

I was not previously aware of Brooke Adams excellent Salt Lake Tribune blog on the Texas polygamy debacle. The details provided by Adams — even at this distance — are enough to simultaneously turn stomachs and bring tears to the eyes. God cannot be pleased at what is occurring there. Judge Walthers, in my estimation, is either wholly incompetent or utterly without feeling or moral compass.

No feeling human being can watch — let alone inflict — such suffering without feeling a profound sense of loss and outrage at how the Constitution of the United States and basic norms of humanity have been violated by a lone, rogue judge in a small West Texas town. More at The Polygamy Files.

The tricoteuses—that is, Frenchwomen who attended the Convention [of the French Revolution] knitting, and encouraged the Commune in all their most bloodthirsty excesses. Never in any age or any country did women so disgrace their sex. E. Cobham Brewer

Never, that is, until the year of our Lord 2008 in which Judge Barbara Walther set her sights on a small religious minority in the otherwise unremarkable town of Eldorado, Texas. So much about this FLDS case smacks of official malice or malpractice, it’s hard to decide where to start deconstructing.

To get some sense of the concentration-camp-like horrors inflicted in this case by Judge Walther, you might start with the independent eye-witness accounts of mental health care workers who were hired (in form only, it turns out) to emotionally triage the FLDS mothers and children after they were taken by force from their homes in the middle of the night. Several of their letters are now linked to this blog here. Once you have read these accounts, you might take time to read the analysis below.

Before reading on, consider this: CPS and Judge Walther in this case actually thought that they could get away with this atrocity because they do this same kind of thing every day to individual families who have insufficient knowledge, resources or press coverage to defend themselves. For them, this was all hum-drum, business as usual. It came as a huge shock to them that the Texas Supreme Court disagreed.

[The reminder of the post was written on April 27, 2008, long before the Texas Supreme Court ruled.]

One thing’s for sure: judges who decide child abuse and deprivation cases should be subject to severe sanction, I think including imprisonment, for violating due process as they go about breaking up families. The personal and societal havoc wrought by a single rogue judge is catastrophic, akin in some ways to murder. When a judge takes a child away, it is to parent and child as a death in the family. We agonize for years over the execution of a single convicted murderer. In stark contrast, we allow unsupervised small-time judges and CPS hacks to murder families on the basis of flimsy rumors. This should not be. [Read more →]

This evening, in a small, otherwise unremarkable West Texas town, Judge Barbara Walthers ruled — for all the world to see — that all 416 FLDS children now held by her and the State of Texas will remain separated from their parents until at least June 5, more than a month away. This despite abundant testimony in her courtroom over the past two days that the damage inflicted on the children (odd, isn’t that the law gives no regard to harm to the parents) by the separation will likely or certainly be greater than any damage suffered in the care of their parents back at home on the Ranch.

As I have written in previous blog entries, this is typical behavior on the part of CPS agents and their enabler judges across the United States. I hope that Americans are watching carefully this all-too-vivid tutorial on how states go about taking children from parents. Whatever crimes, if any, have been committed by individual YFZ Ranch residents, the handling of this case by the State of Texas will be a constitutional disaster for America if it is not corrected by an appellate court. (Update: Fortunately, both the Texas Third Court of Appeals and the Texas Supreme Court later held that Judge Walther and CPS violated Texas law in removing the children.) [Read more →]

Time Magazine’s politically motivated switch to a green border (see right) has some WWII vets seeing red. As Jeff Poor, Business and Media Institute reports, Time’s April 21 cover exploits a legendary Joe Rosenthal photo of U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima to push global warming alarmism.

The author of the Time story, Bryan Walsh, calls green “the new red, white and blue.” Understandably, however, the men who fought in that storied engagement see the colors differently:

Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.” [Read more →]

The Madness of Texas continued today in the FLDS custody case. The Deseret News and St. Angelo Standard-Times reported that, right out of the gate, Texas “child protective” authorities requested authority to collect genetic samples from all of the children and parents in the case. Judge Barbara Walther recessed the court almost immediately as attorneys for many of the 419 children objected to obvious violations of fundamental due process, including the lack of a full adversarial hearing:

But when prosecutors tried to enter into evidence the medical records of three girls — two 17-year-olds and an 18-year-old — the lawyers jumped to their feet and crammed the aisles trying to see the papers. That’s when Walther called the recess. [Read more →]

More official misconduct by Texas authorities in the FLDS case. The AP reports that Texas CPS, not content with breaking into private homes on the basis of a fraudulent warrant, is now lamely trying to justify having lied to FLDS mothers to snooker them away from their kids because CPS “decided” that “children are more truthful in interviews about possible abuse if their parents are not around.” [Read more →]

How is that some modern Americans, like those responsible for separating FLDS mothers and children in El Dorado, Texas, can be so devoid of human kindness that they can tear crying children from the arms of their weeping mothers at the point of a gun as did Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro?

What has turned so many people in our supposedly “liberal” democracy into such antisocial brutes? The picture below portrays the Texas-style response to an unverified call by what was reportedly a single 16-year-old (whom no one can find) complaining of abuse by a single man who has now been cleared by the Texas Rangers as having nothing to do with the alleged accusations. In Texas, law enforcement like to dress up and play soldiers. Waco wasn’t enough, it appears.

[Read more →]

Some new developments in the YFZ case, most notably the witness of a Texas doctor who has visited the YFZ hostages and says what he has seen makes him him “upset” and “very sad for what we have done.” As reported by ABCNews:

Pfeifer and others who have been inside the temporary shelters told ABC News that the women and children repeatedly said they wanted to go home. Pfeifer said the conditions inside the shelter were cramped, with cots lined up close together and lots of women tending to infants. [Read more →]

Picking up where Tarek Ibn Ziyad left off in 711 A.D., Muslim cleric and Hamas rep to the Palestinian parliament, Yunis al-Astal, got on the same page with visiting Baptist sunday school teacher (and crackpot former U.S. President) Jimmy Carter, announcing that Rome, “the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital,” and “Europe in its entirety” would soon fall to the Islamic Jihad. Watch here:

The Baptists have had it in for the Catholics for a long time, so it appears that Carter’s diplomatic mission to Hamas is bearing fruit. Go Jimmy! PTL, dude! [Read more →]

This afternoon — at 5:15 p.m. EST — CNN’s website was again busy misinforming and distorting the non-involvement of the Mormon Church in the YFZ affair, falsely drawing an indirect connection between the Mormons and prior criminal activity by the man who, by all appearances, was falsely accused of abusing the 16-year-old YFZ informant who doesn’t exist:

Barlow, who met with authorities over the weekend and was not arrested, is a member of a rogue branch of the Mormon church that runs the Texas ranch. He is serving three years of probation after pleading no contest last year to charges of conspiracy to have sex with a minor.

Fact: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) does not have any “rogue branches” nor does it “run” or have any other connection with the YFZ Ranch. The YFZs are no more Mormons or Latter-Day Saints than the Baptists are Catholics. It’s that simple.

Another fact alluded to above: The Texas Rangers met with and interviewed Barlow and decided not to arrest him. Must have been a really credible caller who touched off the Texas invasion of the YFZ compound in El Dorado.