Posted on 05/01/2008 4:44:54 PM PDT by Politicalmom
SAN ANTONIO — A judge ordered that the baby boy born to a girl taken from a polygamist sect's ranch in West Texas be placed in state custody, according to documents released Thursday.
Texas District Judge Barbara Walther signed the order Wednesday giving the state custody of the 1-day-old infant born to a teen believed to be 15 or 16 years old.
The girl has claimed to be 18, according to an affidavit signed by Ruby Gutierrez, a Child Protective Services caseworker, but officials believe she is younger and placed her in foster care with other children taken from the ranch.
The newborn is the teen's second child; the first is a 20-month-old boy. The father of both children was identified as Jackson Jessop, 22, but state officials say they don't know his whereabouts.
Child welfare officials now have 464 children in their custody, swept from the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado because authorities believe underage girls were forced into marriages and sex with older men. Authorities are also now investigating possible sexual abuse of boys.
Church members have vehemently denied there was any abuse, and civil liberties groups have raised concerns at the sweeping nature of the removals.
Individual custody hearings are set to be completed by June 5.
CPS and law enforcement raided the ranch on April 3 after a girl who was purportedly 16 called a domestic abuse hotline to complain of abuse at the hands her much older husband. Authorities are investigating whether the calls were a hoax.
Regardless, child welfare authorities say 31 of the 53 girls aged 14-17 have children or are pregnant.
Under Texas law, children under the age of 17 generally cannot consent to sex with an adult. A girl can get married with parental permission at 16, but the girls who belong to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are not believed to have legal marriages.
FLDS is a breakaway sect of the mainline Mormon church, which disavowed polygamy a century ago.
Families have been destroyed by the government. This is what got me upset.
This is more of a situation like a judge saying certain words are "out of bounds"...but when the prosecution itself opens up an exploration into those very words/terms, then previously establish boundaries by the judge are off.
When the LDS is reported to have "disavowed" polygamy, and there are current vows saying otherwise, then previously established boundaries are "off." (Similar to when a poster declares a thread as a "caucus" but claims are made in the article posted that leave it open to be rebutted.)
Statutory rapists who father children with multiple underage wives are not the "basic unit of our civilization." Quite the opposite.
In abusive homes, it's done all the time. This cult is one great big communal abusive home.
That’s just stupid. The girl is a ward of the state. How could the baby NOT be a ward of the state? By giving it to the other cultists?
President Hillary will be fantastic for some Freepers...
org.whodat: “Ignorance on full display.”
Could you be a bit more specific?
Wrong!
So from this, we can presume that you would prefer to allow a child to be abused, perhaps even to his death, rather than removed from an abusive home? I mean, after all, we can't be doing things "for the children," now, can we?
Now imagine that you were 15 when you had your first kid, you just had your second, your "husband" is 22 and you are living in a compound in Texas where polygamy is the rule, not the exception. Your husband was picked out for you by the cult leader who is in jail for facilitating rape and you had no say. Could you accept that?
You cannot pretend that this is suburban America where a high school girl got pregnant by a classmate. I don't know why you wish to. Ignoring the basic particulars of the present case to construct scary hypotheticals where all of our babies get taken away tomorrow does not strengthen your argument.
Guess what?
They did. I met with the case worker, she said it was obvious my children were well-loved, well taken care of, and I never heard from her again.
Maybe if you aren’t abusing your kids, you don’t have to worry so much.
This is not a good enough reason to give the state legal custody of the child unless they can prove abuse, and if they can, why keep the two of them together? The thought of the government 'allowing' me to keep my children until they decide otherwise is terrifying.
Oh my, I had three broken bones when I was a child. Obviously my parents beat me (NOT).
“Families”, my eye.
Oh, they share that task among the young ladies at the compound. No need to worry.
By the by, the baby has not been removed from the mother's presence.
The lack of logic in that statement is staggering.
Gee, you’ve won me over with your eloquence. ;-)
Families have been destroyed by the government.
And the moms and dads are a pure as the wind driven snow..... I see.
7:17-66861
Because these brainwashed victim women will go running off to one of the other compounds as soon as they get the chance and put themselves right back into slavery and willingly raise their daughters to be sex slaves. That’s why.
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