I was struck by what wonderful mothers they were: ABC FLDS reportage finally catches up to the facts

Today’s 3rd Appeals Court ruling potentially liberating FLDS children and parents from Texas State tyranny is a wonderful thing for parents around the United States whether they know it or not. The Texas Appeals Court has exposed one of America’s best kept, dirtiest, most dangerous secrets: every state in the Union has been infiltrated by bad CPS actors and judges like those in Texas. They have been quietly grabbing kids and power, under the radar, destroying the Constitution, bit by bit.

Now, with the great Texas child-snatching of 2008, they are finally in the open. Look around you. Some of them live near you, maybe even in your neighborhood. And they are trouble. Today, ABCNews reports — with odd understatement — that Texas mental health workers involved in the FLDS case are finally stepping up to reveal the sinister, lawless underbelly of Texas CPS. CPS looks much the same in your neighborhood:

[S]everal mental health workers, in court papers filed by Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ attorneys and obtained by ABC News, offered a portrait of the state’s raid that at times appeared [why does ABC understate this truly alarming contrast between the official story and what these independent witnesses describe?] at odds with Child Protective Services’ past descriptions, saying CPS workers were hostile and suspicious.

The state raided the compound and took all 463 children into state custody, first placing them in shelters at the local coliseum and then in temporary foster homes.

But a local judge had initially refused to allow Texas Rangers to search the compound, according to a statement from Texas Ranger Leslie Brooks Long. Long then took the same information to a different judge, who approved the search warrant, his statement says.

This is just jaw-droppingly dishonest if not illegal. It’s called opinion shopping. Imagine what would happen to a criminal defendant if a prosecutor could retry her case to a different jury after the first jury finds the defendant not guilty. Umm. That’s kind of what happened here. Isn’t it? The cop — who doesn’t deserve to be called an “officer” — didn’t like the first anwser, so he rooted around among the low-lifes on the Texas bench and found — Judge Barbara Walther! She’ll sign that damned warrant, by golly!

Linda Werlein, director of a local mental health and mental retardation center who assisted CPS in the days after the raid, said CPS workers treated her staff with suspicion, told her they would be arrested if they interfered with the questioning of the mothers, and that the church mothers would not talk without their attorneys present.

“Each and everything we were told was either inaccurate or untrue,” she said in her statement, adding, “I was struck by what wonderful mothers they were.”

She said CPS workers appeared suspicious of the mothers. At one point, she said, a CPS investigator told her that the sect would “kill all of the children they deemed to be imperfect.”

Another mental health worker described the coliseum where the children were staying after being seized by the state as “like a Nazi concentration camp,” saying the children were given inadequate food and lived in cramped quarters.

She said the lights were kept on at all hours and that CPS workers would shine flashlights in the faces of the women. When the mothers were separated from their children and returned to the ranch, several mental health workers said, they were not given a chance to say goodbye to their children.

By the end of their multiweek time in the emergency shelters, the women and children appeared “weak, confused and downright exhausted,” wrote Bianca Spies.

Another mental health worker, Terre Reid, said she heard a CPS worker say, “These women will have to choose between their church and their kids.”

This was the focus of CPS and Eldorado’s protestant scofflaws from the beginning. This battle has been going on since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was organized in 1830. Unable to legally attack the “real” LDS Church, these religious bigots and bullies went after the next best target — a small group of “rogue” LDS who they thought would not be able to defend themselves. If it were not for due process and the United States Constitution, they might have been right. They might still be right, if the people of Texas do not demand better behavior from their state officials.

“Both TRLA attorneys and the mothers that we represent are ecstatic about this news,” said Balovich. “In ruling this way, the 3rd Court of Appeals has stood up for the legal rights of these families and given these mothers hope that their families will be brought back together.”The state Child Protective Services had argued that more than 450 children taken from the sect’s compound in West Texas were at risk of abuse, arguing that the sect coerced underage girls to marry older men and groomed boys to become sexual perpetrators.

But contrary to what the state had argued, the court found that the polygamist sect’s belief system, by itself, did not place the children in danger of abuse.

“The department did not present any evidence of danger to the physical health and safety of any male children or any female children who had not reached puberty,” the court said.

There was also no evidence that any of the children of the 41 mothers had been sexually abused or lived in a household where another child had been abused, the court stated, rejecting the state’s argument that the entire ranch constituted one household. Nor was there any evidence that any of the mothers had allowed or would allow their daughters to be abused, the court said.

. . .
At a two-day group hearing last month, Walther ordered that all the children be kept in temporary state custody. Walther has 10 days to comply with today’s ruling.

The state had said that as many as 31 sect girls in state custody were underage and either pregnant or already had children. But at a series of follow-up hearings that began this week, the state has admitted that 15 of those girls are older than 18.

Indeed. Maybe these CPS officials were taught by their own abusive mothers that lying half the time is acceptable if doing so advances some “noble” cause, liking getting rid of Mormons. This, ladies and gentlemen, is called the means-end ethic. It produced Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, the guillotine, Calvin’s Geneva, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. You be the judge: Is that the kind of country you want to leave for your children?