Re: the FLDS sect in Texas and the state's confiscation of over 400 children. What do you get when you cross arranged marriage and polygamy and pedophilia and religion and incest? Some people are upset that the state used what appears to be a bogus phone tip about the abuse of a 14-year-old girl to remove not just girls from the custody of their parents, but boys as well. The abuse of big government, they cry! I'm no advocate of big government, as anyone who knows me or reads my web site will say. But... show me the 14-year-old girl in any society who is mature and confident enough in her decision to consensually marry a middle-aged man. I don't care what your culture is, some things are obviously wrong and don't require debate. Allowing a deviant nutjob to create his own society where he can harvest 80 wives, some of whom were 14 years old, would be one of them. Does the state of Texas have the authority to go in clean up the mess created by a ring of pedophiles? Frankly, I wouldn't care if armed Boy Scouts in Eldorado, Texas, went in and broke up this illicit farce - it needed to be broken up. Some assert that the kids need to be returned to their parents, as Dr. Phil did at the end of his show on the subject. I get his point. But the families, after several generations of this lifestyle, will only try to continue as they have in the past. While it is traumatic for people to have to relearn what they have believed all of their lives, not every myth carries with it a Santa-like innocence. So to answer my earlier question: What do you get when you cross arranged marriage and polygamy and pedophilia and religion and incest? A lot of ruined lives. To put the chlidren back in this "lifestyle" with people who will try to continue to live this way is no answer at all. | 
