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.
It takes a village!
That is not what is happening in this situation.
Every child was taken by the government, and all of them are in government custody today.
The fact that the left often misuses this mantra to justify its actions does in no way mean that it cannot be appropriately applied. There are many things that our country should do "for the children." Protecting them from predators, statutory rape and physical abuse is high on my list of things to do "for the children." Sorry if that upsets you.
It won't happen tomorrow. It won't happen next year. It will come slowly. The creeping, insidious assumption that our children don't belong to their parents, but that they belong to the nation.
Very telling.
Perhaps that would've been easier to do if the young ladies had been more consistent in the names they furnished to investigators for themselves, their husbands, the fathers of their children, their children, etc.
Their obfuscation caused the massive removal, not vice versa. The names given getting off the bus did not match the names given when getting on the bus. And you expect CPS to conduct an investigation on a case-by-case basis how in a communal environment where mothers will not or cannot identify their biological children and vice versa? We may have been born yesterday, but it wasn't dark.
By allowing it to remain in the default state, a ward of it’s mother.
This is extremely wrong to separate a new mother from her infant! Unless breast fed, that child could suffer permanent harm to its immune system in the short length of time it has to develop both antibodies and intestinal flora, and psychological or even brain damage from an inability to bond with its mother.
It is well established that infants need extensive tactile stimulation as well as gentle stimulation to their other senses, to properly develop neurologically. Unless their life is in extreme jeopardy from their mother, this should never be done.
I suspect these fools will put the infant in a crib, and just leave it, tending only to its food and changing of its diapers. And in that all of what I said is scientifically established, that child and their mother have grounds for a massive liability suit in the future.
Yes, the state could take away my babies as well...But that wouldn't make it right or legal. The baby is no longer hers. If the court decides she needs to go to a 'teen home' for logistical reasons, do you think she'll be allowed to take her children?
Families. Yeah, families of monsters. Child rapists. Child torturers.
You would probably stand up for a family of cannibals though if it suited your ‘off the planet’ hatred of ‘government’.
Or are you simply FLDS here plying your snake oil?
The second half of Bill O’Reilly is going to have a segment on this cult
Care to elaborate on that?
Mothers protecting their families and children, is now an excuse?
OK...
Please provide sources and links to back up your contention that much of what was done was illegal and that they didn't obey the law.
So what you describe when you say, "The creeping, insidious assumption that our children don't belong to their parents, but that they belong to the nation" it is already happening, except you have to substitute "the community" for "the nation."
Again, ignoring the particulars of the case does not strengthen your argument. The actions of the cult leading up to the time that CPS interviewed the families caused suspicion. The actions of the cultists during the interviews, the testimony given by those interviewed (including teenage girls admitting they were given in marriage to older men, changing the names they gave to investigators, etc.) and the evidence observed caused the removal. This is not your litmus test from which you can draw conclusions about how everyone else's kids will be treated in the future.
Where was your concern for the families that were split up when these same families would drive teenage boys into town and drop them off for every offense from "wearing short sleeve shirts," to "flirting with a girl?" Were you quiet then? Then shut up now.
A cult that abandons its teenage boys when they become inconvenient to the polygamous way of life deserves no sympathy for its crocodile tears when their young children and breeding-stock teenage girls are removed.
The mother running with the baby and both disappearing.
Most of the flds women have proven themselves to be untrustworthy with their changing of name bracelets and clothes and swapping babies since they've been off the compound.
IMO, the child was not safe with the mother. LEO must have thought so, too.
My Gosh! What kind of human beings do you think these mothers are? I am reading a book about polygamist's wives and polyandry wives in the early LDS history and the diary excerpts show how much they loved and cared for their children.
I don't know and no one on this thread knows how old these girls really are that are married and having babies. How do we judge at what age someone can marry. My own sister was given in marriage at the age of 16 (and she was not pregnant) She said she wanted to get married and my parents signed for her. There are societies where they get married at 14.
OK...
Giving conflicting and false information to the CPS is protecting your family? Or is it playing a cliff game, daring the government to do something massive, even when warranted? I think the latter. I think CPS called FLDS's bluff. "Well, sur-prise, sur-prise."
This case is about the sexual abuse of minors. I had assumed you were could read.
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