Quid Spucatum Tauri Est? (Second Update, April 22)

This is the new "normal": A teenage skateboarder maneuvers through a pack of paramilitary thugs practicing urban warfare tactics.

In the Texas government's war against the women and children of the FLDS Church, Colorado Springs resident Rozita Swinton, a 33-year-old woman (a precinct delegate for the El Paso County Democratic Party who intends to vote for Barack Obama at the state convention in May), is "Curveball." That was the code-name of a veteran con artist whose patently false intelligence provided the pretext for a the Iraq invasion. In this case, "Curveball" was "Sarah," the purported 16-year-old FLDS polygamist wife who called a domestic abuse hotline and set in motion the invasion of the sect's YFZ Ranch commune in El Dorado.


And once the government that carried out the assault had what it needed -- first, access to the children, and then physical possession of the same -- it blithely disavowed any need to obey the law and demonstrated its disinclination to "re-litigate" the issue. Oh, yes, the initial raid was based on an affidavit containing third-party hearsay from a bogus source, but that is of little moment in post-Constitutional Amerika.


It doesn't really matter how or why the original raid took place, y'see. What really matters now is that the effort succeed. Now that the FLDS Children are in state custody, everybody simply has to support the government's efforts to see that they receive the care they need. After all, our protectors would have taken such a drastic step as the seizure of all 416 children unless it had been absolutely necessary. What else could be done when a 16-year-old "plural wife" is being beaten and abused...


Oh, yeah. That's right -- there was no 16-year-old "Sarah."


But-- who cares?. Taking the kids was the right thing to do anyway, under the principle of preemptive warfare. Since this kind of abuse may have happened, or may happen someday, we might as well yank the kids out today. Some might not approve of the way this was done, but everybody must agree that the FLDS kids are better off now than they were living in their insular little cult.

Such are the blessings of living under a quasi-totalitarian Regime presided over by benevolent and far-seeing rulers such as ours: Their intentions are invariably pure, and their prescriptions inevitably work out for the best. We simply must have faith that the humanitarian violence the Regime inflicted on the FLDS in El Dorado will be just as successful as the even larger exercise in applied compassion that we call the Iraq War.


From the available photographic evidence, the FLDS children are healthy, active, and untouched by the modern plague of childhood obesity. They were schooled at home and spent most of each day involved in vigorous physical labor and energetic recreation. Their diet was barren of processed foods and consisted of such fare as home-grown vegetables and bread made from freshly ground wheat.

"That's no way for a woman to dress here in Texas!" For appropriate couture, see the photo below.


Now, like the Branch Davidian children "rescued" before them (prior to the immolation of nearly that entire sect by the FBI), the FLDS children are free to enjoy the benefits of our homogenized corporatist society. They'll be wired in to the society of unlimited sensate distraction -- television, video games, My Space, and so on.


They'll be fed a proper diet of pre-packaged food products and sugar-suffused beverages. They'll not be required to work in gardens, build fences, or otherwise apply themselves in such exploitative labor that would have left them with well-developed muscles and an equally developed work ethic. Now they can be harmonized down to the norm of our sedentary, passive consumer collective. In short order they can be assimilated by the government school system, where they will be purged of retrograde ideas and refractory attitudes and prepared for proper service to the State.


Rather than being groomed to be predatory polygamists, the FLDS boys can now be preyed upon by military flesh-peddlers desperate to fill the ranks of the Empire's armies of conquest and occupation. Why, I'll bet that as arrangements are made to distribute the FLDS children around the country, recruiters are preparing to descend on them wherever they land.


Think of the opportunities those children would have missed, confined as they were to a remote faith community and insulated from the effects of our degenerate imperial culture! In a few years, instead of assuming the responsibilities of raising and providing for families of their own (within the admittedly aberrant teachings of their sect), the FLDS boys will be given the opportunity to exterminate Muslim families very much like their own in Iraq, Iran, and wherever else the almighty State choses to send them.


No longer will the prospect of polygamy becloud the future for the FLDS girls. Thanks to the benevolent coercion exercised by the State of Texas, those girls will be free to emulate the Lone Star State's racoon-eyed exemplars of modern Christian womanhood -- the Simpson sisters, Jessica and Ashlee.


Oh, sure: Jessica's determination to market herself to the one-handed reader set destroyed her marriage and has left her a kind of Ronin among pop culture courtesans. And Ashlee, an alleged singer whose talents run more toward pantomime, recently announced that she is enceinte without benefit of marriage vows.


What really matters here is that the Simpson sisters aren't polygamous "wives" in some rustic fundamentalist cult. They're the sterling offspring of a former Baptist minister. Oh, I grant that Joe Simpson has displayed a certain skeevy interest in his eldest daughter's mammalial allotment (or "suckers," as he so inelegantly referred to them) -- but he's just, ah, pumping up his most profitable assets.


Down Texas way, fine upstandin' Christian-folk know that it's nothing more than cynical flesh-peddling to raise a daughter to be the second, third, or seventh "wife" of a Mormon polygamist. That's no way to do it -- there's no money to be made. No, the right way to do it is to get them a record deal and a reality show and parade them -- for money -- in various stages of undress in front of concupiscent strangers, the way Joe Simpson did.


The FLDS children living at YFZ Ranch had been denied the blessings of our degenerate late-imperial culture. Blessed be the Regime, and all of its appendages, for rescuing those children from such cruel social isolation!


Update: Unfathomable Cruelty

The Texas Department of Child Abduction, sometimes wittily referred to as the Department of Protective and Family Services, has announced that as soon as it has extracted DNA samples from the FLDS child captives they will be placed in foster care. In many instances this will require tearing newborn or nursing infants out of the arms of their mothers:

"Some FLDS mothers with nursing babies and toddlers may be unaware that they will be forced to leave their children behind once Texas officials gather the DNA samples from them. `I don't know how many mothers have babies, but I would say there are dozens of mothers who are nursing little ones,' said Monica Jessop, whose five children between the ages of 3 and 11 are in state custody. `I'm sure they don't know they will be separated.'"


As with every other act of government coercion, this unspeakably cruel crime will be accompanied by the threat of lethal violence.


"Oh, but surely the kind people carrying out this directive would never threaten, injure, or kill an unarmed mother!" some would complain.


Such people are wrong, of course, since this has already happened.


The above-quoted Mrs. Jessop has described an attempt she made yesterday with a group of mothers to visit their children, who are being held prisoner at the San Angelo Coliseum. They were -- to use a phrase made offensive by its dishonest delicacy -- "turned away by law enforcement." Which is to say that they were threatened with lethal violence by the State's rented thugs: "They told us if we went on that property again we would be arrested."


To get a sense of the pure, unalloyed evil being wrought by "law enforcement" in this matter, we turn to the indispensable blog published by Brooke Adams of the Salt Lake Tribune. Scroll down to the April 15 entry "The Women Speak," and you'll get the context of the scene depicted in the photo found to the left.


"We watched as this woman was greeted by younger women, all hugging her, obviously going to her for comfort, crying," writes Adams. "From afar, we had no idea who they were or what they were doing or what the emotions playing out were."


The name of the woman being embraced is Janet.


"She has five children in state custody, three girls and two boys. The girls are ages 9, 13 and 16. The boys are 11 and 15. This is what she said about that moment: "I was in the shelter and had girls in the other one. They told me my two girls were running for me and I went across to hug them. Instantly I had eight police men around me. I was just hugging them."


These women and children have neither been accused of a crime, nor convicted of one. Yet they are being treated like inmates in one of the nouveau gulags called Supermax Prisons.


It occurs to me that this is the kind of situation in which a writ of habeas corpus would be appropriate... if, that is, the habeas corpus guarantee still existed in this once-free country.


Second Update: When Prayer Is Ruled Impermissible

There are ironic benefits to be enjoyed whenever the Regime displays its genuine nature. In the case of the abduction of the 437 FLDS children (not 416, as previously reported; the diligent child-nappers didn't originally provide an accurate count), we see the edifying spectacle of a judge ruling that unsupervised prayer is impermissible:

"Child protective services workers denied that they were eavesdropping on the FLDS women involved [in twice-daily prayer sessions with their captive children], but attorneys for Texas child protective services expressed concerns about improper communications between mothers and children that could occur in private prayer times, which could affect pending investigations."

Given that none of these captives has been charged with a crime, the state has no right or authority to hold them, much less to regulate or ration their communications in any way. But as noted above, spontaneous expressions of maternal love immediate attract the malign attention of, and provoke threats of violence from, "law enforcement" operatives. It's not difficult to imagine how the official eavesdroppers would react to imprecatory prayers.

Judge Walther, seeking to devise a compromise, asked if local LDS officials could be deputized as prayer monitors. This prompted from Charles L. Webb, president of the local LDS stake (an administrative unit akin to a diocese), a rendition of the LDS leadership's refrain: We have nothing to do with those people: "They think we're the same ones because we use the Book of Mormon. I'm dumbfounded they would suggest that."

Oh, for the love of Nephi, Charles, man up and do some version of the right thing. Stop acting like a corporate shill. If you don't have the requisite anatomy to condemn what has been done to the FLDS mothers and children, then at least do something to mitigate the circumstances of those innocent people, instead of dutifully waiting for permission from PR-obsessed people in Salt Lake City.

Yesterday I suggested that somebody file a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the abductees and detained mothers. Apparently, Judge Walther has received received thirty-five habeas corpus filings. If attorneys for the victims press this issue, I expect that child "protection" officials will eventually argue that the Great Writ is officially a dead letter in this country as of October 2006. Child-snatchers have never been impeded by any due process considerations, of course, but it would be somewhat useful to have Texas state officials admit, on the record, that the fundamental Anglo-Saxon due process guarantee has been abolished.


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Dum spiro, pugno!