FLDS Final Post - probably

At this point, I'm not predicting any major challenges to the legal situation in Texas concerning the CPS. Judge Walther has rescinded her emergency order at the order of the Texas Supreme Court after the appeals court then supreme court of Texas found that CPS and Judge Walther had overstepped their respective authorities. As typical of such an order from a higher court, there were no details of how the order should be rescinded, so Judge Walther has ordered all the children to return if the FLDS clarified their age of marrying at 18, the parents agree to attend parenting classes, notice is to be given if the families travel more than 100 miles away from their home, and Texas CPS can have full access to homes for inspections. One young lady won't be returned because of "identified sexual abuse *edit(14 hours after orginal post): the CPS went ahead and agreed to release the final child* , but at this point all the other children are heading home. Everyone has agree to the terms.

Sadly, because of this rushed judgement in the first place, the children are now victims of known, undisputed, serious psychological scarring of taking kids away from their parents at a young age (which occurs even if the parents are innocent and the children are quickly returned); the tripled rate of future incarceration that comes from being in foster homes for any period of time; and likely sexual abuse that occurs in foster homes (such abuse is 4 times more likely in foster homes than in the general population... especially when the foster homes some of these kids have already been reprimanded because of KNOWN sexual abuse at the homes ). Uhg. Researching the effects of child welfare actions is a very sobering process. There are no "exemplar" states where Child Protective Services is concerned, which brings to my mind the idea that the very concept of CPS is broken.

It is wonderful that the children have finally been returned to the parents. All the newspaper articles are reporting that this is a good change. In fact, all the articles are reporting the exact same thing, just with the occasional word substitutions - what happened to original reporting? All the newspapers seem to act as one big marionette. Individual thought or independent analysis seems to be a foreign concept. Go ahead and try searching for "FLDS" in google news and organize by date. All the articles, which includes big newspapers like the USA Today, are nearly word perfect copies of each other. *edit: It took about 3 days before most of the articles started being original. The turnaround is vastly improved over when this started. After the first raid, it took almost 2 weeks for wide variation to occur*


There are still problems with the new situation and the problems are the same as before. Its the exact same problem that I brought up in the first post. The problem with the current situation, which probably won't be settled quickly, is the idea that the judge has any right to set conditions on the parents for getting their children back. The whole process of taking the children away was invalidated by the upper court, so why does the judge have the right to put conditions on giving the children back, especially when the parents are not charged with anything except for being under a general cloud of suspicion by the CPS? Judge Walther's new order is essentially what would happen if the CPS brought a suspicion of sexual abuse toward a specific individual before a court. If that is the way the state sets it up then so be it, but Judge Walther has set aside the standard legal steps that the Texas CPS must go through in order to gain the right to unlimited inspections. Judge Walther, in the interest of the children, has usurped the legal right of the parent and set aside the legislated restrictions on the CPS. It goes back to Judge Walther's apparent philosophy that the government can get involved on suspicion alone when child abuse is involved.... ah... here I go again.

I'll quit right here, since I would only start repeating previous points. My hope is that the massive expenditures by the CPS will bankrupt it for this year or next year, but government doesn't quite work like that. I hope this whole situation will lead to a re-examination of child protective services country wide, because as far as I can tell, it is a terrible system where the cure is worse than the bite.

And just to see if anyone reads these... The next few posts will be personal info posts (which I'm sure my mom will enjoy reading more), but no more posts will be posted until I get thought out comments from two separate people. replies to comments by myself will not count. :-)