Polygamists: You Violated Our Rights

Raided by officials after a call from a girl confirmed what everybody already knew - polygamist Mormon are all types of dangerous crazy, particularly when children are involved - men at the compound have struck back, claiming their rights were violated. If this is true, shame on the state of Texas for botching what should have been an easy set of prosecutions, and sadly, these men should go free.

However, I’m guessing that nobody’s going to walk here, because I really can’t see where any specific rights were violated. The claims being made by the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (that, amongst other things, police couldn’t have had warrants for every single home within the compound) are thin gruel and not likely to stand up in a court of law that will probably rule that the compound represents a single property and as such, everything within it was authorized to be searched. But I’m not going to law school, so maybe I’m wrong.

Still, it’s funny to see that these polygamists are claiming that their rights have been violated, as if they enjoyed a right to polygamy, underage sex, etc. It’s a funny thing when that Constitutional Freedom of Religion comes into conflict with other laws, and of course, it’s shameful when idiots hide behind that Freedom, claiming that whatever they’ve done was religious in nature and thus protected.

I’ve followed other, similar cases, although none with consequences this dire. One case, in the Northwest, involved a man who wanted to have his 12-year-old circumcised (the father had converted to Judaism), and his mother opposing it. The father claimed dominion on his son’s penis because he was religious. He was actually taken seriously.

It’s strange the lengths we’ll go to protect the religious in their expressions of faith. When I was in college in Massachusetts, the local legal establishment wore kids gloves, and did literally anything they could, to avoid offending the Catholic Church while pursuing the dangerous child molesters who happened to also be priests. Because really, the real victims were the priests.

This claim of violated rights is the first of this nonsense from the FLDS. It’s the only out that they’ve got. By claiming that they’re free to do whatever they want to children because God instructed them to do so, they’re hoping that America will take the same approach as always: generally hands off. “Well, it’s awful, but they’re religious…”

If only everybody enjoyed this sort of legal protection: a drug user saying he was told by God to get high, a recidivist drunk driver claiming God told him to get behind the wheel, a murdered claiming that he was instructed by God to kill. These sorts of things are generally laughed out of the courtroom if they’re allowed in the first place. But the FLDS claim will have credence, because if the problems were really so bad, wouldn’t Texas have intervened long before this situation came to light?

Sadly, the answer is no, because again, America takes a very hands off approach when it comes to the religious. That’s how these hundreds of girls ended up being left at the hands of the monsters in charge of the FLDS.

I’m not suggesting that people don’t enjoy a freedom of their faith, in case anybody was wondering, but rather, that the freedom ends where another person’s begins. Forcing 13-year-old girls, by virtue of the fact that they’ve gotten their periods, to get married and start having children isn’t an expression of free religion, but something more akin to slavery. These girls didn’t willingly choose this life, and those people claiming that the FLDS acted within their boundaries would be wise to remember that.