The majority of Texans may at one time have been the kind of people the rest of America might like to have as neighbors. Not any more, if the hardened arrogance of Texas CPS represents today’s Texas. The State has become the very embodiment of Lord Acton’s (pic right) famous turn of phrase: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
In this connection, the Toronto Globe and Mail reports on the heartless, insolent response of CPS spokesman Patrick Crimmins when asked if CPS had made any mistakes or owes any apology — to FLDS families or to the 18-year-old Canadian girl held since April — for removing them from their homes and brutally separating parents and children without cause:
Despite the reversal in court orders, Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for Child Protective Services, said yesterday that authorities do not believe they made any mistakes. Investigators acted on information they had at the time of the raid, he said in an interview.
“We stand by the fact that at the time, given the circumstances and the information we had, we did act appropriately and no, we haven’t changed that position,” he said. Asked whether an apology were necessary, Mr. Crimmins said: “Absolutely not.”
In other words, Crimmins and CPS don’t give a damn for the joint judgment of the Texas 3rd Court of Appeal and the Texas Supreme Court, both of which found that CPS violated the law in removing these children and separating them from their parents. In the face of such condemnation, Crimmins is unmoved. This says a lot about Texas CPS.
I believe God is preparing a special kind of hell for people like Patrick Crimmins. I predict that he will one day, here or hereafter, crawl on his knees to beg forgiveness of those whom he has wronged in this pogrom against the FLDS. For those who have suffered under the brutal thumb of these self-obsessed power mongers, take heart. God is watching. He will give the Patrick Crimmins of the world plenty of rope and then pull away the stool.
While God prepares his vengeance, Americans must act to deprive Crimmins-like creatures of the power to inflict similar harm on other families. The FLDS experience is isolated only in its size and scope. Thousands of other American parents and children suffer similar brutality every day across America, as CPS-like organizations prey on all walks of life under the banner of “saving the children.” They must be stopped through political and legal means. Until they are, we all live in the shadow of these, the ugliest of all Americans.
More on the story at the Globe and Mail.
{ 42 comments… read them below or add one }
Thomas Forguson 09.16.08 at 10:53 am
If you give people too much power, they will abuse it. Abuse of power goes to the heart of what has gone wrong here.
Abby 09.16.08 at 11:07 am
It’s a well known fact Kurt that girls were transported to and from canada for marriages. It’s called trafficking!
If it was found the girl is okay and she’s been returned back to canada, then they should be grateful. I see no need to apologize for LE doing their job.
Pliggy 09.16.08 at 11:28 am
Obviously Marrie you don’t know what “thier job” is.
Oh, and whoops, caught ya again:
“former FLDS members said the young women were taken across the border to be assigned as so-called celestial brides”
You don’t know them, right?
R 09.16.08 at 11:54 am
If it was found the girl is okay and she’s been returned back to canada, then they should be grateful.
Grateful for what? Could anyone explain what gives CPS jurisdiction over foreign nationals that aren’t long-term residents? Why, when learning some of the children were Canadian citizens (which they stated fairly early on, if not immediately), did they not contact the nearest consulate?
Kurt Schulzke 09.16.08 at 11:57 am
Abby & All –
For future reference, I will delete comments on this blog that represent obvious copyright violations. For example, Abby’s immediate prior post copied the Globe & Mail article that was excerpted in the post.
If you want to refer to a short paragraph or two with your commentary, that’s a different matter.
K
Kurt Schulzke 09.16.08 at 12:01 pm
Abby –
The reason that CPS should apologize is that they removed children and separated them from their parents WITHOUT legal justification for doing so. This was the conclusion of two Texas appellate courts.
Abby, I hope that if your 5-year-old were to steal a baseball from a neighbor that you would insist that he/she return the ball with an apology.
If it’s good enough for a 5-year-old, why isn’t it good enough for Patrick Crimmins? Answer: He either grew up in a barnyard or he’s forgotten what his mother taught him. This is just basic common sense — a commodity in woefully short supply in Texas these days.
Speaking of which, how about them idiots who decided to build homes on Galveston Island?
K
April 38 09.16.08 at 12:34 pm
CPS in another state “saved” a couple of children we knew from a good adoptive family. (They had been removed originally from their natural family for good cause, like their dad raping them repeatedly and attempting to murder the older child.)
Despite the vehement objections of the therapists treating those children in their adoptive location, CPS took them back anyway. The results are that the older child, after threatening suicide several times and running away three times, in her desperation to get back to her adoptive parents, is now a 15 year old out of wedlock mother. The younger child has been involved in homosexual abuse of another child in the foster home to which they were returned. Perhaps significantly, that foster home was one with two mommies, but no daddy for this boy to identify with.
This is nothing out of the ordinary in foster “care.” The story is repeated thousands of times over.
Doran Williams 09.16.08 at 1:25 pm
CPS and some of the individuals therein are expecting to be sued big time in Federal Court for their actions at Eldorado. The people in CPS who have contact with the public and the press have undoubtedly been told by State attorneys and/or supervisors not to apologize because it would be taken as an admission of wrongdoing. Which of course it would be. They are playing CYA. Not what you want to expect of public servants, but what you should expect. I agree with all of Kurt’s condemnatory language, but I’m sure he will agree with me that this is par for the course when litigation is eminent.
rikitikitavi1 09.16.08 at 1:59 pm
Um, not to nit-pick or anything, but an 18 year old female is an adult woman, not a girl or a child.
kbp 09.16.08 at 2:16 pm
Doran,
Just a small portion of a comment I posted elsewhere, to show how much we agree:
“When you start seeing resignations, retirements, people blaming others within their departments, denial of doing any wrong… you’re seeing them run for cover.”
TxBlogger 09.16.08 at 2:23 pm
They could start here with apologizes:
Rep Naishtat, on the committee that overseees CPS, “There’s something called due process rights and you can’t deprive children, or families, or anyone in this country of their due process rights. And that was a big mistake.”
Naishtat was referring to CPS considering and acting as the entire ranch as one household.
The list of abuses goes on and on from there.
Take away the potential legal action against them, they still wouldn’t admit wrong doing. They want to continue to be able to take kids with little/no evidence. Their inexperienced, righteous, sadistic worker bees can not discern when a child is in real danger or not. Simple, so you have a wide margin of error. “We did the best we could given the information we had at the time.”
There’s a 40% turn-over now. Imagine if the workers didn’t have immunity.
Joey 09.16.08 at 3:03 pm
It was the Canadian press that dared to even ask whether an apology was in order. That says a lot about our own gutless mainstream media.
Kurt Schulzke 09.16.08 at 4:52 pm
I agree with Doran that, in a narrow-minded technical sense — from an organization utterly without the kind of human emotion that should be required of an organization with the CPS mission to guard and care for society’s most vulnerable — we should “expect” cold-blooded words and actions like those of Mr. Crimmins.
But, no, not even as a lawyer do I condone the lack of human kindness and humility demonstrated by Texas CPS in this case. No strategic considerations should prevent real human beings — which these people, I am growing to believe are not — from expressing shame and horror at the distress inflicted on hundreds of entirely innocent people.
These people are at the level of war criminals and ought to be treated as such. This organization creates sociopaths and monsters. It should be destroyed — legally and politically — and it’s creators should be brought to justice for their crimes just as if they were organizers of the Nazi party after WWII.
Doran Williams 09.16.08 at 5:08 pm
Kurt, over at Grits For Breakfast, when this debacle was first launched, I compared the removal of the kids, and adults mistaken for kids, from the YFZ Ranch with the taking of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto by Nazis. I got a lot of flak for that being over-the-top, but I haven’t changed my mind.
Kurt Schulzke 09.16.08 at 5:37 pm
You didn’t catch any heat from me. I’ve ID’d this as a pogrom from the beginning. We may not agree on much, but on this we see eye to eye.
kbp 09.16.08 at 6:08 pm
I’d write how I really feel about some of the people in the child protection system, but suspecting Kurt has the words I’d use in already in the Discussion Settings, the comments would prolly vanish while locked up waiting for approval
Dena 09.16.08 at 6:28 pm
Why does CPS have such poor judgement? There was a case in Oregon last spring that attracted national media attention. A 4 year old boy had been in foster care since birth because both parents were in prison. The mother finally released her parental rights and recommended adoption by the foster parents because they were the only family the boy had known . So the foster parents were approved by CPS and proceeded with the adoption.
Then suddenly CPS changed their mind and said they were going to send the child to his paternal grandmother in Mexico City as an act of “family reunification”. The child had never met the grandmother, she lived in poverty in a little cinder block shack and didn’t speak a word of English, but it was the judgement of CPS that this little boy should be separated from the only parents he had ever known and be placed with a stranger who couldn’t even speak his language. Furthermore, he was a U.S. citizen.
There was so much public outrage that the Oregon Dept. of Human Services finally backed off and let the foster parents adopt the child. But what on earth causes such poor judgement by these so call “experts” who make permanent decisions for helpless children?
Bill Medvecky 09.16.08 at 7:20 pm
It’s all a very moot point. Marlene Blackmore left for Canada on her own back in June. To this day, CPS does not know where she is.
She’s also not 18 yet, her Birth is on the 29, of this month.
Just one more example of their stupidity and ineptitude.
If these chilren were so in danger of being sexually abused as CPS claimed in both the Appeals Court and the Supreme Court, why didn’t they follow the children after being forced to free them from captivity?
Why don’t they KNOW the girl no longer lives on Kings Way in New Boerne?
Doran Williams 09.16.08 at 7:20 pm
Hubris. Arrogance. Stupidity. Ego.
Doran Williams 09.16.08 at 7:32 pm
Incompetence.
Jerri Lynn Ward 09.16.08 at 8:03 pm
I believe that our country is under God’s wrathful judgment for many transgressions against His Law. One of those transgressions is the granting of immunity to those in civil government. The Bible is very clear that those with greater authority should suffer greater consequences for their transgressions. No man or government is above the sovereignty of God. Yet, we have passed laws granting qualified immunity to people like Crimmins, fostering civil governmental absolutism, negating the authority of God and destroying our liberties.
My client’s kids were all nonsuited. I get to comment now.
kbp 09.16.08 at 8:43 pm
Great to hear from you Jerri.
Jerri Lynn Ward 09.16.08 at 9:27 pm
kbp,
Your research has been invaluable. I have passed much of it on hoping that some of the judicial system can be an instrument of justice against CPS.
My next goal is to prevent the addition of funding to CPS. Unfortunately, unlike in the private sector, when the public sector performs abysmally, fools advocate to give it greater funding thereby perpetuating insanity.
Jeny 09.16.08 at 10:14 pm
Doran Williams { 09.16.08 at 5:08 pm } Kurt, over at Grits For Breakfast, when this debacle was first launched, I compared the removal of the kids, and adults mistaken for kids, from the YFZ Ranch with the taking of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto by Nazis. I got a lot of flak for that being over-the-top, but I haven’t changed my mind.
=======================
Doran—your comment/opinion is in NO WAY “over the top” at all. I agree fully with you…..and always have.
What was done to the FLDS—loading them all up into buses to take hundreds of absolutely terrified women and children with only the clothes on their backs–to an unknown destination, which ended up being a horse barn (at first) was nothing less than Hitleresque and entirely unacceptable here in America. No matter *what* the supposed charges or cause for the action is.
I hope Texas is sued by the FLDS and that they keep paying and paying and paying and paying. I suspect Hurricane Ike is God’s way of saying “ENOUGH” to the idiots running that state–he’s trying to get their attention. They really ought to heed this chance he’s giving them to get their act together!
Best
Jeny
Joey 09.16.08 at 10:54 pm
Well I’ve said from the beginning that the CPS are a bunch of no-good kidnappers.
Put this evil/insanity together with a corrupt court, and well…reading the San Angelo site that night hearing that Walther had ordered hundreds of kids to stay in state custody away from their parents for a year or even permanently as she hinted…was one of the most shocking moments of my life. Pure Evil, total genocide, is all that can be said about it.
deputyheadmistress 09.17.08 at 12:43 am
Moving to or from Canada for the purpose of marriage is only called ‘Trafficking’ by bigoted dolts.
I read the original Globe article where they passed Flora’s accusations of trafficking, and it was one of the most poorly sourced, inaccurate news stories I have ever seen in my life. The only example of trafficking given was a case where a man legally divorced his first wife so he could marry the second and the second was a Canadian. And even there, the most Globe’s sources could say about that was that they’d ‘heard’ of that story.
Chai Tea 09.17.08 at 5:20 am
Abby, please document your sources of ‘well known facts’ about child bride trafficking. I won’t accept Flora or Carolyn or Elissa’s tabloids as ‘factual’ as I believe they have been manufactured to titilate those seeking some kind of sick gratification.
If you have some actual facts and figures, documented by an unbiased source, I’d be glad to review those.
Thanks.
tickledpink 09.17.08 at 6:21 am
“I suspect Hurricane Ike is God’s way of saying “ENOUGH” to the idiots running that state–he’s trying to get their attention.”
and the holocaust was God’s way of saying what?
Bill Medvecky 09.17.08 at 7:04 am
It galvanized people to destroy adolf didn’t it?
Now, go back to reading mein kamph.
Jeny 09.17.08 at 7:14 am
Tickledpink–my family is in North Houston. And my sister agrees that Ike was a wake up call for the idiots running her state.
Don’t like my comment? Oh well. Your problem, not mine.
Have a great day…
Jeny
kbp 09.17.08 at 8:26 am
Where is Abby getting that “trafficking” word? Is there a definition for that?
I remember our marriage anniversary is April 13, After a few times of almost forgetting it(!), but I’m terrible at the number of years.
Just guessing from our age variance, if I was 30-ish she was 16. She was taken across a couple of lines dividing jurisdiction just so we could get married.
Is that some form of “trafficking”?
Bill Medvecky 09.17.08 at 9:20 am
When I was 30, my wife was 14 and I took her from New Jersey to New York. Is that “trafficking” ?
Abby 09.17.08 at 10:45 am
Kdp,
Esther Chatwin was 13 and Nicole Holm was 14 when they were taken to Canada to be married to older men. Taking underage girls across borders into another country to be married is trafficking.
Pliggy 09.17.08 at 11:16 am
Oh alleged Abby you are so full of it. Nichole was married at 18, and in the USA.
txmom77 09.17.08 at 12:12 pm
Nicole Holm was 16 when her marriage was arranged, but her mom stopped it until she was 18. She married the guy at 18, and they both left the church.
TxBlogger 09.17.08 at 12:14 pm
And Texans used to slip ‘over the border’ to Ok to marry. Lots of people. And I can’t remember any ever being prosecuted. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. There’s only so much government can control and much more is being controlled than was ever intended.
Joey 09.17.08 at 1:12 pm
Yes, really. When it comes down to the final appeals, the high court will examine the original intent of the law. I don’t think the law makers had arranged marriages in mind when they crafted the Mann Act.
kbp 09.17.08 at 2:38 pm
TxBlogger,
“…There’s only so much government can control and much more is being controlled than was ever intended.”
With the government moving in to the financing or ownership of the biggest investment banks, mortgage companies, AND insurance company, our children will ALL be living in homes and working for companies ALL owned by the government.
Maybe we can do away with the laws then and then they’ll control us by way of the company rules!
Jeny 09.17.08 at 2:42 pm
My parents were 16 and 21 back in 1959 (still married too). They lived in Virginia–went to Maryland and got married by a JP.
Is that trafficking?
Jeny
Jeny 09.17.08 at 2:43 pm
“…There’s only so much government can control and much more is being controlled than was ever intended.”
=======
AMEN!!!!!
Toes 09.17.08 at 5:38 pm
You can tell I am not in charge. If I were, Ike would have taken a westward swing and as a consequence, the remnants of the Governor’s mansion in Austin would have been demolished, along a couple of FBI Texas field offices, the courthouse in San Angelo, several CPS offices, and a couple of strategic buildings in Eldorado, all the while leaving untouched any structure owned or resided in by FLDS or their supporters. Nonetheless, I have much empathy for those who have suffered loss of life and property. Even if they didn’t organize a march on Austin as this fiasco was happening.
Toes 09.17.08 at 5:38 pm
*along WITH*