Boundary, by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor, has a character (Madeline Fathom) who has become a government security specialist on the back of a childhood formative experience: being rescued by a military raid from a compound of followers of a sociopathic leader. That’s the stereotype you’re supposed to be seeing here.

Well bystander, they are going to have plenty of points of access now if they want their children back, and the judge and many others could tell them. But I should add, I’m not so sure they are entirely insulated from the outside world and don’t know they can leave. Some women have left, after all, and even written books about their experience.

Well, let’s read her next post and see what she means by “close oversight”.

I think we should certainly watch the FLDS closely enough to ensure that they are not marrying 14 year old girls or abusing/abandoning young boys. If Sara means “let’s watch them closely not to harass them, but to make sure no abuses take place away from sight,” then I say, good.

I said this,

I don’t find her wholly unsympathetic to the community.
before I read this,

In the next post, I’ll cover a few more reasons that the FLDS should never again be allowed to operate without close oversight from the outside world.

Shoulda read that last sentence before commenting. *sigh*

I disagree with her there. What I do wonder is whether/how the community could have “access points/points of trade” to the larger community for choices like engaging legal help. If you are so insulated that you don’t know the choice exists, how could it be argued there is a choice?

As I tried to indicate, my intent is to understand first, and to try to be discerning later. Sara has a new post up. What We’re Not Talking About, Part I: Other Issues With the FLDS

Although Sara has a point of view which ought to be at odds with FDLS, and often is, I don’t find her wholly unsympathetic to the community. I find the juxtaposition of Sara’s analysis with your own (and, your commenters) illuminating.

I think that’s a great idea. In order for the women to “choose” to stay they must be made aware that there are options.

That’s what I’m thinking. If, as has been alleged in some venues, women are afraid to leave an FLDS community because they’ve been told the sect will keep their kids, for god’s sake start a legal aid fund for them so they can fight for custody, and let them know it exists.

And if the sect (or anyone else) prevents a law-abiding mother from leaving a premises with her own children, that is a crime. It might be a workable compromise to simply make sure all FLDS women are informed that legal help, if they want it, is available to them. That’s better than violent raids and grossly dislocating all the children.

And yet most of us here, presumably, I hope, were nevertheless still against U.S. invasion of Iraq, not because we thought Saddam was a good person or because we denied that he committed crimes against his own people, but because using the U.S. government to intervene for humanitarian reasons (to replace a cruel dictator with “democracy”) is unwise in the extreme, for a variety of reasons. First, it would be naive to expect a government rife with massive failure in the domestic arena to achieve success with nation building. Second, the justification knows no limits; if it is proper to invade, occupy, and rebuild Iraq in our own image, why not also Iran, or North Korea, or Zimbabwe? Feel free to to add in the many other reasons why intervention was a bad idea.

Now, what is true in a clear-cut case like Iraq is a fortiori true in a less clear-cut case like the FLDS. As much as we may dislike the internal practices of these regimes, violent intervention is unlikely to improve things. Better to persuade peacefully with things like Radio Free Europe or pamphleteering than calling in the jackbooted government goon squads.

Those are are all good questions, Micha Ghertner. I’d like to read mtraven’s answer, since s/he is the one who made a point of the inbreeding issue within pockets of the FLDS, which reportedly has caused many FLDS children to be born developmentally disabled and with other severe disabilities.

But myself, I think vis-a-vis the FLDS the solution is to stop persecuting them, so that they can be open to new members.

(Marriage or sex within too close a degree of consanguinity, unless both parties are sterilized, perhaps should be illegal.)

Should marriage or sex between potential carriers of genetic defects–say, two carriers of Tay Sachs–be illegal unless both parties are sterilized? Should dwarfs be banned from ever having sex or getting married unless they agree to be sterilized first, since they have a 50% chance of passing on dwarfism to their children?

The “genetic defect” argument is perhaps the strongest justification for legal prohibitions against incest, but it quickly unravels when we follow its eugenic implications all the way through.

As for the rest of your argument, I pretty much agree. While I find religious cultures in general, and patriarchal totalitarian religious cultures in particular very disturbing and unwise, the alternative of coercive intervention is even worse.

Chandran Kukathas has written on this inherent tension within libertarianism: “Two Constructions of Libertarianism.”

Point being, that the various evils that occur in society at large, when they occur in one of those “scary cults,” is luridly focused on all over the media and by both liberal/feminist bloggers, as well as by your good solid Baptists who “know” FLDS is a “false religion.” It is a perfect storm of diverse, powerful ideological groups combining to pile on the despised, small new religious communities.

When crimes that should be crimes are committed anywhere — including in an FLDS community — prosecute away! But it is very wise to be skeptical of picking this or that crime committed by a single or comparatively few “cult” members, and extrapolating that to the entire group. Further — and this cannot be emphasized enough — turning them into a persecuted community that has a basis for paranoia, is only likely to make them become more extreme and hostile to outsiders, and to discourage their members from mixing with the outside world. That’s one lesson of Jim Jones, which is, however, another entire post.

If the polygamists are to be singled out, why not inner city Catholic schools, the Hindu (or Sikh?) “city” - yes, an enclave on the outskirts of my hometown Sacramento - Orthodox synagogues, Nation of Islam mosques, or even radically progressive homeschools? On the latter, I’ve seen some evidence of very illiberal stereotyping of men, destructive and erroneous economic doctrine, and potentially dangerous Luddite style assertions.

The point is there are many “cults” that fall far short of asserting pure reason and Rawlsian egalitarianism, if that be what is left to defend after doing away with all the freaks, eccentrics and recalcitrants.

can someone who has been born and raised in an authoritarian cult atmosphere properly be said to be exercising freedom of choice
Can anyone? Who is to decide what upbringing renders people capable of making decisions for themselves? It is nonsensical to imagine a sort of default upbringing or privileged perspective relative to which others are measured and the behaviors produced by which are dismissed. We are all inevitably products of our circumstances. We come up with notions of “brainwashing” because we refuse to accept that some people come to believe things we find ridiculous through many of the same processes that result in our own beliefs.

mtraven’s link says it’s quite difficult to remove children from their parents custody, but it didn’t seem to be that way in this case and at the end they state the majority of child removals are upheld. What I’d like to know is if state services have every been found to be incompetent to take care of the children in their custody, because I’ve heard of numerous cases where they simply lost track of kids.

Speaking of wacky religious groups, I actually like the Fred Phelps WBC video Your Pastor is a Whore.

I find Sara’s analysis wholly unpersuasive as to the matter of “brainwashing.” She writes:

There’s a whole lot more depth and nuance to this story, and I’ll try to get at some of it over the next several days. But let’s start with the premise that almost nothing you’re hearing in the mainstream media about this group can or should be taken at face value. Stand by for more.

The MSM is consulting academics who have studied the “brainwashing” accusation that has been hurled at all manner of new religious movement for decades. Brainwashing — to the extent it exists at all — is, as one expert said, exceedingly rare. Now, these women most certainly are indoctrinated, but that is not the same thing.

My bias is to believe these academics, because I majored in religion in America as an undergrad, and learned to think critically about so-called “cults.” Many of the atrocity tales circulating about them tend to be either exaggerated or untrue altogether. A small, despised religious group that manistream religions don’t like, creates a great and lurid fixation for the media — throughout the 70s we had cult-mania, saw the rise of “deprogrammers” literally kidnapping adults from their new religious communities, and haranguing them in locked basements to “get over it.” Until the courts stepped in and put a stop to it.

Whatever dangers the FDLS presents (and one would be wise not to uncritically accept everything the media and critics such as Sara assert), anti-cult moral panic is at least as dangerous.

Agreed. Any marriages to underage girls should be prosecuted. Ditto for actually coerced marriages to young women who have reached the age of consent. And parents have financial obligations to male teens until they are 18, which they must by law fulfill.

Those laws ought to be enforced — for FLDS or anyone else. But it is entirely possible that the extent to which abuse is occurring in FDLS is being exaggerated by a media that loves this kind of story, as well as by crusading law enforcement that, like Americans at large, despises “cults.”

I think this goes back to what I was saying in my post about atomization. The least amount of state interference does not always result in the largest amount of individual freedom.

The FLDS is a tiny tiny exception. And as they say, hard cases makes bad law. So I’m not going to advocate banning the FLDS or anything like that.

But I do think the authorities need to watch them closely and come down on them like a ton of bricks when they cross the line of law — child marriage especially. But also the abandonment of young men like garbage.

Religious freedom is sort of a messy compromise. But you can’t say that anything goes as long as it’s religious. In some cases (e.g. the Amish, the Quakers, and native Americans) laws are bent or rewritten to accommodate a religion’s practices. In other cases (the Mormons), the religion is pressured to change its practices.

By and large, this case looks like a reminder of the way that The State can function to increase human freedom, at the expense of what are essentially patriarchal tribal authorities. And in fact, that’s part of the history of the rise of freedom.

P.S. I quit reading because of the passage I cited, which is the kind of boilerplate fudging that PR men and Mafia lawyers use.

Newsflash: My views on sects and cults were the same as the CW until I majored in religious studies where liberal professors taught me to think critically about how the majority demonizes and sometimes commits atrocities against religions it does not like. My feminist professor who taught “Cults in America” did her Ph.D. thesis on Jonestown, and concluded that state persecution exacerbated the paranoia Jim Jones and his followers had about outsiders and government.

But if you wish to “stop reading” because you find my ideological affiliation so off-putting, by all means do so.

I stopped reading right there.

This is not a new story. A lot of the early interest was motivated by the fact that the vast majority of the sons of the cult were expelled, so that the fathers could trade 14-year-old girls back and forth like purebred dogs. Polygyny produces a lot of throwaway bachelors.

The Libertarian obsession with The State is ludicrous in this case, because the rulers of these small towns do exactly the kind of things that the worst states do. And apparently they’re welfare-dependent too.

What is the alternative to defending such groups on “libertarian principles?” In a free society, people are allowed to break away and form their own segregated communities into which children will be born. But individuals do leave such groups, all the indoctrination notwithstanding. And as long as they are free to do so, that is all the state should be concerned with — that, and enforcing actual laws against sexual liaisons where consanguinity is harmful, or the children are being physically or sexually abused.

One need not like, and may even be horrified, by what these groups believe. (I think the substance of the FLDS faith is absurd and its mores unpleasant, to put it mildly.) But because the state disapproves of a religious community’s beliefs and lifestyle is not sufficient grounds to persecute and prosecute its members. And again, they might not live so walled-off if they were not justified in believing the state was out to get them. The Amish, after all, will make forays into the regular community to shop and what not. But we leave them alone.

It’s a problem. A small problem because I don’t see many more FLDS coming into being. A real problem because more people continue to be born in the FLDS.

I was raised in an authoritarian sect - Traditionalist Catholics, the same insane group Mel Gibson and his viciously anti-Semitic father belong to (we are not talking about the regular Catholic Church here, by a long-shot) — and spent a good deal of time in counseling undoing those effects. But I could and did leave.

Many members of cults/sects leave. It is not only possible, but happens in droves.

I don’t want to downplay your experience, but I don’t think your experiences growing up are completely comparable with the wretches of the YFZ ranch. The physical and emotional isolation they faced is, from what I’ve gathered from the media, absolute or close to it. I have no doubt that if I had been raised under such conditions and indoctrinated with such values and have faced brutal punishment for the smallest transgressions since I was an infant, I would have ended up married at 14 and popping out babies until menopause unaware that there is more to life.

The reason why entities like the FLDS bothers me so much is not because of lack of tolerance for their polygamous lifestyle, it’s because it is horrendously coercive and controlling of its members.

Something feels very wrong to me about the way you are defending the FLDS on libertarian principles and respecting their right to self-determination and freedom of religion when their whole way of life seems centered on stripping self-determination and freedom from their individual members. Remember that most FLDS members (the vast majority in fact) are not converts but were born into the faith and that was all they have ever known.

The building blocks of our society are individuals with free will. This is why we not allow people to enter into slavery, even if it is of their own free will.

This makes dealing with sects like the FLDS very tricky.

On the one hand, respecting someone’s free will means not second-guessing their choices, even when they make choices that we think are bad. Horrendous. On the other hand, when people make choices that undermine free-will in themselves or others, that threatens the whole fabric of our society.

Just FYI, my “reflexes” on issues such as this are at least 50% the result of a BA in religious studies — religion in America emphasis — where one librul prof after another defended the rights of even the most patriarchal and closed communities to be left alone by govt, except to the extent actual crimes that should be crimes are committed. Prior to that education, I drank all the anti-cult Kool-Aid, even as a libertarian.

In the case of FLDS, it is clear that abuse was happening. I am not sure how the authorities are supposed to proceed in order to stop the abuse, since they can’t get access to the compound without busting the whole thing. They can’t even tell whose children are whose without DNA testing (which is ongoing).

You said: I’m not sure what a better alternative system might be. and I agree. The CPS system has obvious flaws and abuses, don’t ask me how to fix it. In the FLDS case, from what I have gleaned it is pretty clear that the use of state power is the lesser of two evils. But where do you draw the line, and who draws it?

I am mostly just arguing against the libertarian reflex that presumes that the state is always opposed to individual liberty. In some cases, it is defending it.

However, your readers who believe that the fact that authorities cannot locate the girl who originally made allegations of abuse means that CPS has no grounds to investigate the allegations do not understand that CPS agencies do not have a choice in investigating allegations of abuse.

So before you guys begin circling the wagons and start getting paranoid that CPS might be coming for your kids next, relax.

is bullshit. Any anonymous person can make a complaint to CPS, and it a common tactic engaged in by estranged lovers, spouses in custody proceedings, or just anyone who hates you for whatever reason. A CPS investigation can scare the shit out of folks, make them hire a lawyer, and cause untold disruption in a family. (And no, I’m not sure what a better alternative system might be.)

And yes, I do wonder why the purported 16-year-old girl who made the call has not been located. (I’m not sure, btw, what the age of consent is in TX, but 16 is it in many states.)

I was raised in an authoritarian sect - Traditionalist Catholics, the same insane group Mel Gibson and his viciously anti-Semitic father belong to (we are not talking about the regular Catholic Church here, by a long-shot) — and spent a good deal of time in counseling undoing those effects. But I could and did leave.

Many members of cults/sects leave. It is not only possible, but happens in droves.

As long as that choice is available, there ought be no harassment of the religion; and it should be prosecuted only to the extent it does not permit adults to leave, or actually abuses children. AS well as, if a sect is a “rape farm,” prosecute the actual rapes.

- you don’t address the question I raised in the earlier thread, to wit, can someone who has been born and raised in an authoritarian cult atmosphere properly be said to be exercising freedom of choice? The fact that you can’t draw a hard line between cults, sects, and religions is not really very relevant. Personally, I think the Catholic Church is just as much of a criminal child abuse ring as the FLDS.

- in (libertarian) theory, polygamy should just be one of many options available to consenting adults. You want to marry 3 women, 4 men, and 1 goat, go right ahead. Polygamy in practice is very different, as Sara Robinson at Orcinus has been pointing out recently. In actual practice, it’s basically a rape farm.

- If you consider the biology realities, widespread polygamy can’t help but be problematic. If a community produces equal numbers of male and female children, and the males end up taking multiple wives, that leaves bunches of males with no mates at all. The result is usually that young males get expelled from the community when they reach adolescence. Perhaps this isn’t a problem for libertarians, since they are free to go wherever they want…but presumably you can see how this can be a social problem? A surplus of unattached males is a dangerous thing — China has this problem (for different reasons, obviously).

When individual “choices” lead to social problems, that becomes a point where social intervention is (sometimes) justified. This makes polygamy an interesting challenge for libertarian theory. I don’t have a fixed view of what the law should be, but it seems like a serious libertarian take on polygamy has to at least address the hard issues.