Some thoughts on the FLDS case in Texas

Over at Liberty and Power, I've just posted a longish entry on the Texas Supreme Court decision yesterday mandating the return of the children to their fundamentalist Mormon community in Texas.  Comments over there make more sense, but if you don't wish to register at HNN, I'll leave comments open here for those who read it and wish to join the fray somewhere.

Comments

[Brian Pitt]

"The parent-child bond is simply too important to the well-being of children, not to mention the constitutional protection of parental rights, not to hold the state to an extremely high standard when it intervenes in families."

This is simply impeccable. Unfortunately, most -if not all - states' child protective service agencies simply have to demonstrate a "preponderance of the evidence" in order to not only remove, but to not return the child subsequent to removal. What's more, a cps worker needs to only believe that a child is in danger in order to take the child from the parents. Listen to this, I know of a cps worker who removed a child from a home due to the home being infested with rats. With the extremely high cost (fiscal, emotional, time) of removal, why not place the entire family in a motel for a few days, and, pay for an exterminator? Unfortunately, we live in a world of "experts," who have the arm of the law at their disposal.

[Steven Horwitz]

A good example. There are almost always alternatives to yanking the kids away.

If folks haven't seen my update to that post, you should. Tim Lynch at Cato's blog presents evidence from social workers invited by CPS itself as to how CPS treated the children and mothers they allowed to stay together under CPS supervision. If you think any dangers they faced from their own parents were bad, you should see how much worse CPS was.

These sorts of situations MUST be addressed with comparative analyses.

[Skip Oliva]

To emphasize the point, it's clear that state social workers place little to no value on an young child's *need* for an emotional bond with a parent. At best it's treated like a luxury; as long as the child gets food and an occasional diaper change, CPS seems content to allow infants and toddlers to languish in containers, isolated from all but minimal human contact.

The FLDS case reminds me of antitrust cases that I've observed over the years: The state feels it's unfair to make them prove individual violations in every case, so they take generalizing shortcuts deemed in the "public interest."