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Officials still have not identifi ed the 16-year-old girl among the children and the 139 women being held at two sites in Texas.
    “When you’re dealing with a culture like this, they’re taught from very early on that they don’t answer questions to the point,” Doran said. “All of that is certainly being sorted out right now.”

Quoted from CICERO

  If the government wants to find pregnant teens they should go to Schenectady High School.  Start yanking those kids out of their homes and see what happens.  

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Police face stumbling block in prosecuting sect members
Polygamists’ devotion to Jeffs may be big hurdle
BY CHRIS KAHN The Associated Press

    PHOENIX — Polygamous sect members who were moved to a Texas compound from their longtime homes along the Utah-Arizona line were hand-picked for their fierce loyalty to leader Warren Jeffs, and that allegiance may be a stumbling block for law enforcement, authorities say.
    Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, transferred people to Eldorado, Texas, to escape growing government scrutiny on the sect’s base in Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said.
    “This was Warren Jeffs’ all-star cast,” said Goddard, who has been investigating the sect since 2004. “They had the strongest sense of obedience.”
    As a result, their extreme devotion could make it hard on Texas authorities as they push for prosecutions, said Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.
    “All these girls are taught from the cradle not to trust anybody from the outside,” Shurtleff said. “Especially the government. We’re the beast. We’re the devil.”
    Authorities raided the Eldorado ranch April 3 after a girl from the clan made a whispered telephone call for help to a family violence shelter. Texas has since taken legal custody of 416 children on suspicions that they were being sexually and physically abused.
    Jeffs, who was convicted last year in Utah of being an accomplice to rape, wanted “to isolate and perhaps purify the sect from any kind of outside influences,” Goddard said.
    Eldorado “is the most concentrated version of this particular style of life,” he said.
    Prosecutors in Arizona and Utah struggled for years to gain the trust of witnesses in abuse cases, but many young girls still refused to speak out.
    “We’ve had them come out and make statements, and then they disappear, or they recant,” Shurtleff said.
    The FLDS split from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more than a century ago when the mainstream Mormon Church renounced polygamy. The Mormon Church excommunicates members who practice plural marriage.
    Until recently, Arizona and Utah authorities had left the FLDS communities in Hildale and Colorado City alone.
    The last time Arizona officials focused their attention on the FLDS homeland was a notorious raid in 1953. That action turned into a public relations debacle as pictures circulated of children being pulled from their mothers. Afterward, authorities left the FLDS to police themselves.
    However, Goddard started talking with Shurtleff about the FLDS in 2002 shortly after he was elected, his spokesman said.
    Arizona officials put up a billboard in Colorado City with a tollfree number for young women who felt abused. They got rid of local police officers, who had pledged loyalty to Jeffs, and opened an office in the community manned by Mohave County officers.
    The Arizona Board of Education took over the Colorado City school system, and Utah officials cut off a major source of assets from the sect’s United Effort Plan trust, which was estimated to contain as much as $114 million.
    “We were increasing the pressure,” Goddard said. “That’s when they started this escape to Texas.”
    In 2005, news started circulating about a new FLDS community that was being built on 1,700 acres in Eldorado.
    FLDS leaders said publicly at the time they weren’t expecting any apocalyptic event or mass exodus to Texas. But former FLDS member Flora Jessop, 38, said she heard a different story from family members who made it to the Texas compound. Eldorado, Jessop said, was to make up for the failures Jeffs perceived in Colorado City and Hildale.
    “Warren thought it was there were too many unfaithful people in Colorado City,” Jessop said. “So he started the culling, if you will.”
    “He started moving all the most faithful to Texas so that God would be able to lift them up while he swept the evil wicked outsiders off the face of the Earth.”
    Following his Utah conviction, Jeffs is in jail in Arizona while awaiting trial on four counts of incest, four counts of sexual contact with a minor, one of sexual conduct with a minor and one of conspiracy to conduct sexual conduct with a minor. The charges predate the Eldorado raid.

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Mothers from sect seek help from Texas governor
BY JENNIFER DOBNER The Associated Press

    SAN ANGELO, Texas — The mothers of children removed from a polygamous sect’s ranch in West Texas after an abuse allegation are appealing to Gov. Rick Perry for help, saying some of their children have become sick and even required hospitalization.
    In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, the mothers from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints also say children are “horrified” by physical examinations they have undergone while in state custody.
    The mothers said the letter was mailed Saturday. Perry spokesman Robert Black said Sunday that he had not seen the letter and couldn’t comment.
    Some 416 children were rounded up and placed in temporary custody 11 days ago after a domestic violence hot line recorded a complaint from a 16-year-old girl. She said she was physically and sexually abused by her 50-year-old husband.
    The one-page letter, signed by three women who claim they represent others, says about 15 mothers were away from the property when their children were removed.
    “We were contacted and told our homes had been raided, our children taken away with no explanation, and because of law enforcement blockade preventing entering or leaving the ranch, we were unable to get to our homes and had nowhere to go,” it said. “As of Wednesday, April 9, 2008, we have been permitted to return to our empty, ransacked homes, heartsick and lonely.”
    The mothers said they want Perry to examine the conditions in which the removed children have been placed.
    “You would be appalled,” the letter said. “Many of our children have become sick as a result of the conditions they have been placed in. Some have even had to be taken to the hospital. Our innocent children are continually being questioned on things they know nothing about. The physical examinations were horrifying to the children. The exposure to these conditions is traumatizing them.”
    A judge will decide this week whether the children will remain in state custody or return to their families. Hearings are scheduled for today and Thursday.
    On Sunday, state officials enforced a judge’s order to confi scate the cellphones of the women and children removed from the ranch.
    The order was sought by attorneys ad litem for 18 FLDS girls in the state’s custody, said Marissa Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Texas Child Protective Services.
    Reading from the court document, Gonzalez said attorneys reasoned that cutting off communications would “prevent the possible tampering of witnesses.”

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Mothers of sect’s children sent away
Huge child custody case a legal morass
BY JENNIFER DOBNER AND MICHAEL GRACZYK
The Associated Press

    SAN ANGELO, Texas — Texas officials who took 416 children from a polygamist retreat into state custody sent many of their mothers away Monday, as a judge and lawyers struggled with a legal and logistical morass in one of the biggest childcustody cases in U.S. history.
    Of the 139 women who voluntarily left the compound with their children since an April 3 raid, only those with children 4 or younger were allowed to continue staying with them, said Marissa Gonzales, spokeswoman for the state Children’s Protective Services agency. She did not know how many women stayed.
    “It is not the normal practice to allow parents to accompany the child when an abuse allegation is made,” Gonzales said.
    The women were given a choice: Return to the Eldorado ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a renegade Mormon sect, or go to another safe location. Some women chose the latter, Gonzales said.
    The state is accusing the sect of physically and sexually abusing the youngsters and wants to strip their parents of custody and place the children in foster care or put them up for adoption. The sheer size of the case was an obstacle.
    “Quite frankly, I’m not sure what we’re going to do,” Texas District Judge Barbara Walther said after a conference that included three to four dozen attorneys either representing or hoping to represent youngsters.
    The mothers were taken away Monday after they and the children were taken by bus under heavy security out of historic Fort Concho, where they had been staying, to the San Angelo Coliseum, which holds nearly 5,000 people and is used for hockey games, rodeos and concerts. The polygamist retreat is about 45 miles south of San Angelo.
    Authorities ordered the children to be moved after some of the youngsters’ mothers complained to Gov. Rick Perry that the children were getting sick in the crowded fort.
    About 20 children had a mild case of chicken pox, said Dr. Sandra Guerra-Cantu with the state Health Department.
    Perry spokesman Robert Black said the governor did not believe the children were being housed in poor conditions at the West Texas fort. “Let’s be honest here, this is not the Ritz,” Black said, but he called the accommodations “clean and neat.”
    Monday’s courtroom conference was held to work out the ground rules for a court hearing beginning Thursday on the fate of the children.
    The judge made no immediate decisions on how the hearing will be carried out. Among the questions left unanswered: Would a courtroom big enough to hold everyone be available at the Tom Green County Courthouse, or would some kind of video link be employed?
    Texas bar officials said more than 350 lawyers across the state have volunteered to represent the children free of charge. Moreover, the 139 mothers who voluntarily left the sect to be with their children may hire lawyers, too, to fight for custody.
    The sheer numbers left the judge perplexed as she considered suggestions from the lawyers for how to handle Thursday’s hearing.
    “It would seem inefficient to have a witness testify 416 times,” the judge offered. “If I gave everybody fi ve minutes, that would be 70 hours.”
    In an unintended illustration of the problem, Walther gave the lawyers 30 minutes to break into groups and report back to her with ideas. It took almost two hours for everyone to reassemble.

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Polygamous mothers decry loss of children; Texas says it was necessary
By Brooke Adams
and Kristen Moulton
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 04/15/2008 11:35:00 AM MDT

ELDORADO, Texas - Concealing their anger but not their tears, more than two dozen women of a polygamous sect told reporters they were surrounded by troopers and forced to leave their children in state custody Monday.
    In an extraordinary break from past reticence, the women met with reporters at the YFZ Ranch hours after leaving their children and accused the Texas Child Protective Services of lies and trickery.
    "They just as well line us up and shoot us as take our children away," said Donna, a 35-year-old mother who left behind a 10-year-old daughter. The women used only their first names.
    After a week's stay at two makeshift shelters - described by one woman as a
"concentration camp" - state authorities moved women and children to the San Angelo Coliseum on Monday, promising them they were being taken to a "bigger, better" place. They were told they would be reunited with other family members, the women said.
    Once at the coliseum, the women were separated according to the ages of their children.
    Mothers of those age 6 or older were herded into a room, each one flanked by a CPS worker. More than 50 troopers, according to the women, lined the room. The women were given a choice: return to the ranch or go to a domestic violence shelter.
    Their children, they were told, were no longer theirs. "They told us the state is in charge of them now," said Donna.
    "They wouldn't even let us go back and say goodbye to our children," said Sarah, who now has five children, ages 8 to 16, in state custody.
    Like many of the women, she wept as she spoke.
    Marissa Gonzales, spokeswoman for CPS, said 82 women remained Monday with the youngest of the 416 children taken from the ranch. She said 51 women returned home and six chose to go to a "safe location."
    Rod Parker, a Salt Lake City attorney representing the FLDS families, said no women went to the shelter.
    One woman said that CPS workers pressed the women to go to the shelter, assuring them they would see their children more often if they did.
    Donna said she didn't believe it. "We have not been able to trust anybody."
    State authorities raided the YFZ Ranch on April 3 after receiving a report from a local family violence shelter that a 16-year-old girl telephoned several times, claiming she had been abused by her "spiritual" husband.
    The women from YFZ Ranch said Monday the girl does not exist and the calls were a hoax.
"It is a bogus person. It is a person they made up. That person does not exist on this land," said Joy.
    Janet said no one has heard of the girl named in a search warrant. "She is a fictitious person."
    Another girl with a name similar to that of the girl in the search warrant was grilled for hours by investigators, Janet said. They kept telling her " 'You are this girl. Why don't you want our help?' " she said.
    State officials said Monday they still have not located the caller but are "hopeful" she is among the children in custody.
    Texas CPS say that because of a "pervasive pattern" of abuse and exploitation at the ranch, all children need to be removed.
    The women said no one is forced to stay at the ranch and that anyone can leave at any time, contrary to the state's contention that it is a closed, controlled community.
    Teenage girls were separated early on after the raid, and several mothers said that boys 12 and older were taken away Sunday. CPS said the boys have been moved to a facility "outside the area."
    One mother said she was asked if her two daughters, 15 and 16, were married or pregnant. She said no. The girls were given pregnancy tests, she said, and the results proved she was truthful.
    Asked if any teenage girls were pregnant, the women refused to answer.
     Monday evening, reporters were allowed to travel the half-mile dirt road onto the ranch and were escorted to a log building, where they were met by the women, whose faces were drawn and weary.
    Construction of the ranch began four years ago by members of the FLDS faith, most of whom lived in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.
    The women described how Texas Rangers and CPS workers came knocking on their doors and began removing their children 11 days ago.
    Sarah said she and her two teenage daughters were taken to a school building at the ranch, where authorities spent three or four hours questioning the girls. She has not seen the girls since.
    "We just want our children back, clean and pure," she said.
    While at Fort Concho, the woman said her 10-year-old son was asked by CPS workers if he was married and if he had ever been touched in "sacred" places.
    "He said, 'Of course not. That is a stupid question,' " Sarah said.
    Donna said that living conditions at the shelters became harsh Sunday when CPS confiscated the women's cell phones and forced even the smallest child to pass through a metal detector. Their bedding was searched, too.
    When they were hastily separated from their children on Monday, the women had to leave bags of belongings - including medication - behind.
    They described some of the CPS workers and troopers in tears as the women were loaded on buses that took them back to the ranch.
    "There were a few whose hearts were touched," said Mary, now separated from her 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son.
    "The truth is we need our children and our children need us," said Donna.
    Janet said her 11-year-old son was hopeful that the buses were taking them home.
    "The last thing my little boy said is, 'I just want to go home.' "

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Strip club fee found unconstitutional

    AUSTIN, Texas — A $5-percustomer fee on strip club patrons dubbed the “pole tax” has been declared unconstitutional.
    A state district judge ruled that clubs can’t collect the fee. The charge went into effect in January and was expected to raise about $44 million for sexual assault prevention programs and health care for the uninsured.
    Judge Scott Jenkins wrote in the March 28 decision that the fee, “while furthering laudable goals, violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and is therefore invalid.”
    The Texas Entertainment Association Inc., which is a group of topless clubs, and Karpod Inc., the owner of an Amarillo club, sued Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Comptroller Susan Combs over the fee.

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Polygamy laws expose our own hypocrisy
By Jonathan Turley

Tom Green is an American polygamist. This month, he will appeal his conviction in Utah for that offense to the United States Supreme Court, in a case that could redefine the limits of marriage, privacy and religious freedom.
If the court agrees to take the case, it would be forced to confront a 126-year-old decision allowing states to criminalize polygamy that few would find credible today, even as they reject the practice. And it could be forced to address glaring contradictions created in recent decisions of constitutional law.

For polygamists, it is simply a matter of unequal treatment under the law.

Individuals have a recognized constitutional right to engage in any form of consensual sexual relationship with any number of partners. Thus, a person can live with multiple partners and even sire children from different partners so long as they do not marry. However, when that same person accepts a legal commitment for those partners "as a spouse," we jail them.

Likewise, someone such as singer Britney Spears can have multiple husbands so long as they are consecutive, not concurrent. Thus, Spears can marry and divorce men in quick succession and become the maven of tabloid covers. Yet if she marries two of the men for life, she will become the matron of a state prison.

Religion defines the issue

The difference between a polygamist and the follower of an "alternative lifestyle" is often religion. In addition to protecting privacy, the Constitution is supposed to protect the free exercise of religion unless the religious practice injures a third party or causes some public danger.

However, in its 1878 opinion in Reynolds vs. United States, the court refused to recognize polygamy as a legitimate religious practice, dismissing it in racist and anti-Mormon terms as "almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and African people." In later decisions, the court declared polygamy to be "a blot on our civilization" and compared it to human sacrifice and "a return to barbarism." Most tellingly, the court found that the practice is "contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity has produced in the Western World."

Contrary to the court's statements, the practice of polygamy is actually one of the common threads between Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Deuteronomy contains a rule for the division of property in polygamist marriages. Old Testament figures such as Abraham, David, Jacob and Solomon were all favored by God and were all polygamists. Solomon truly put the "poly" to polygamy with 700 wives and 300 concubines. Mohammed had 10 wives, though the Koran limits multiple wives to four. Martin Luther at one time accepted polygamy as a practical necessity. Polygamy is still present among Jews in Israel, Yemen and the Mediterranean.

Indeed, studies have found polygamy present in 78% of the world's cultures, including some Native American tribes. (While most are polygynists — with one man and multiple women — there are polyandrists in Nepal and Tibet in which one woman has multiple male spouses.) As many as 50,000 polygamists live in the United States.

Given this history and the long religious traditions, it cannot be seriously denied that polygamy is a legitimate religious belief. Since polygamy is a criminal offense, polygamists do not seek marriage licenses. However, even living as married can send you to prison. Prosecutors have asked courts to declare a person as married under common law and then convicted them of polygamy.

The Green case

This is what happened in the case of Green, who was sentenced to five years to life in prison. In his case, the state first used the common law to classify Green and four women as constructively married — even though they never sought a license. Green was then convicted of polygamy.

While the justifications have changed over the years, the most common argument today in favor of a criminal ban is that underage girls have been coerced into polygamist marriages. There are indeed such cases. However, banning polygamy is no more a solution to child abuse than banning marriage would be a solution to spousal abuse. The country has laws to punish pedophiles and there is no religious exception to those laws.

In Green's case, he was shown to have "married" a 13-year-old girl. If Green had relations with her, he is a pedophile and was properly prosecuted for a child sex crime — just as a person in a monogamous marriage would be prosecuted.

The First Amendment was designed to protect the least popular and least powerful among us. When the high court struck down anti-sodomy laws in Lawrence vs. Texas, we ended decades of the use of criminal laws to persecute gays. However, this recent change was brought about in part by the greater acceptance of gay men and lesbians into society, including openly gay politicians and popular TV characters.

Such a day of social acceptance will never come for polygamists. It is unlikely that any network is going to air The Polygamist Eye for the Monogamist Guy or add a polygamist twist to Everyone Loves Raymond. No matter. The rights of polygamists should not be based on popularity, but principle.

I personally detest polygamy. Yet if we yield to our impulse and single out one hated minority, the First Amendment becomes little more than hype and we become little more than hypocrites. For my part, I would rather have a neighbor with different spouses than a country with different standards for its citizens.

I know I can educate my three sons about the importance of monogamy, but hypocrisy can leave a more lasting impression.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School.

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Why isn't the media asking where the 16 year old girl is that made the phone call.  It's been 12 days and nobody's been arrested.  These libs in the media complain about Guantanamo Cuba and the detention of suspected terrorist, but are silent on 400 detained American children.