23rd May 2008

Ends and means

posted in Adoption, News |

The court has ruled that Texas CPS acted incorrectly in seizing 48 women’s children.

But not underage.  At this point, 15 of the 31 "girls" who were pregnant or already mothers that Texas CPS claimed were underage have turned out to be adults.

The anonymous, hushed call that started it all?  "Sarah was officially considered to be a real person until Monday, when CPS dropped her court case, acknowledging that she doesn’t actually exist. State police are now investigating the calls for help from "Sarah" as hoax phone calls, made by an adult from Colorado with a history of making false reports."

I do not condone old men using the cloak of religion to force underage girls into "spiritual" marriages with other old men.  I do not condone child abuse.  I do not condone sexual abuse.

But ruthlessly sweeping through the compound and separating 440 children from their families in the guise of "doing good" makes me think of the road to Hell.  It’s paved with good intentions, as we all know.

Were there girls being forced into marriage and childbirth against their will?  I’m sure of it.

Were all of them?  I’m sure not.

Does the end–rescuing women and children from life in what seems to be a cult–justify the means?  I don’t think so.

But other people seem to think so.  While there is a contingent of people like me who found the entire operation a sweeping infringement on civil rights, there is also a contingent who has been saying, "If there are underage girls there who have been trapped, then it’s right."  My thought is what should have been done is an examination–case by case–before any warrants were served, before any children were taken.

While I tend to think that all religions are essentially lunacy, and I regard people who live their lives circumscribed by religious beliefs with a certain amount of befuddlement, this does not mean that their civil rights are negligible, eligible to be tossed aside for the "good of the chiiilllldrunnnn".

Given also that my forays into adoption research made me aware of the inconsistent oversight of foster care from state to state, and even county to county, and the fact that many states offer what is essentially a "bounty" for children to be moved to adoption as soon as possible, and the relentless market for healthy white infants, and I am bound to cast a jaundiced eye on such a widespread sweep as this.

The good thing is that the eyes of the mainstream media are upon this case.  The faults of the MSM aside, when the journalists are in full cry, the tendency for things to be hidden away, shadowed, swept under a rug will be difficult to fulfill.

I am sure that there will be some cases where the separation of the children is justified.  But there was never a justification for the full-scale raid.  Even if the "ends" are good, the "means" were not.  If a sweep like this is done and no outcry is raised, then the next time the sweep may be aimed at…inner city welfare mothers…homeschoolers…who knows.  The outcry and the subsequent examination it has provoked is a Good Thing to this observer.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 12:06 am and is filed under Adoption, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 4 responses to “Ends and means”

  1. 1 On May 23rd, 2008, you know where you are with said:

    I think the adoption angle you raise here is an apt one. And one I hadn’t thought about ’til now, but you’re so right.

  2. 2 On May 23rd, 2008, Lisa said:

    I completely agree with you and have felt the same from the start. The experience those children have been through will be so life-altering they will never fully recover from it (remember that month in 2008 when we were ripped forcefully from the arms of our mothers and taken into a completely alien culture to live with strangers, unsure of when, if ever, we’d be allowed to go home?)

    There are certainly issues that need to be addressed within that compound, but taking 440 children away from their families is not the answer.

  3. 3 On May 23rd, 2008, noreen said:

    As a social worker and someone who once worked in foster care/adoption I can only say AMEN to everything you you have written. I had a wonderful supervisor once who said foster care should only be a last resort, but my experiences were that if you were poor, or not in the economic/social mainstream, you were much more at risk of the state stepping and taking your children.

  4. 4 On May 24th, 2008, carosgram said:

    What justification did they have for taking a newborn from her mother? This negation of basic individual rights is an abomination. We all know that foster care is not as good as being in a family and yet these children were not only taken from their mothers, they were separated from their siblings. Was this so they could be brainwashed by the State? Every tenent I have ever known about dealing with abused children goes against what they have done in this case. I hope that CPS gets sued by the FLDS big time. And I do not support the lifestyle that FLDS believes in, but if they can do this to them, what prevents them from taking our children? Who gets to decide whether we are raising them right? How many underage children do we hear about regualarly getting pregnant without the benefit of even a ’spiritual marriage” and yet their children are not taken from them? What about states where you can marry at 14 with parental permission? This is more about religious intolerance than it is about ’saving abused children’.

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