Offshoot polygamous Mormon sects are about as popular in West Texas as neo-Nazis are in Skokie. Texas law was changed in 2005, raising the marriage age to 16 from 14 explicitly to target polygamous sects. The police watched the sects compound, the Yearning for Zion Ranch, like hawks, but were stymied by a lack of evidence. What they needed was an outcry, a credible victims complaint.
In early April, they conveniently got one in the form of a phone call to a local abuse hot line...
In their first incursion, to search for Sarah, the S.W.A.T.-like team ransacked the place, scared the children and scooped up books, records, bibles and photographs. With the new evidence in hand, they got a second search warrant the next day that allowed them to take into custody all children on the ranch, of all ages and both genders, and to place them, at least temporarily, in foster care.
Nearly all of the mothers were separated from their children, the only exceptions being a handful of nursing mothers with infants under 12 months. Siblings were separated from each other and placed in different foster care locations hundreds of miles apart, making it impossible for many mothers regularly to see their children, a fact that was reported in the local press in Texas and Utah weeks before it made it into The New York Times.
The state painted all of the members of the community with the same broad brush. Individualized hearings, the state argued to the appellate court, would have taken weeks or even months and would have been an extraordinary waste of judicial resources.
In other words, why bother? They are all guilty.
In the intermediate appellate court, and in its appeal to the Texas Supreme Court, the state has baldly argued what appears to be the only evidence it really has against the mothers: their appalling religion.
Well, that is just not enough. In America, we punish conduct, not belief systems.
And by the way, the Sarah call was a hoax. She is apparently a troubled woman in Colorado Springs with a history of making such calls. Texas authorities dont deny that, but they say it does not matter because, in effect, the ends justified the means.
Not always, and not this time.
Kathleen Peratis, a partner at the New York law firm Outten & Golden, is a board member emerita of Human Rights Watch.
http://www.forward.com/articles/13462/
