Polygamy: An issue of religious freedom?

Now comes the hard part, said Bill Hanna in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. On April 3, Texas authorities raided the ranch of a polygamist sect, taking 416 children into “protective custody” amid evidence that 13- and 14-year-old girls were being married off and impregnated by men in their 40s and 50s. But now that a court is trying to determine what to do with the youngsters—part of a breakaway Mormon faction—the state’s responsibility to protect children is clashing with another principle: “religious freedom.” Last week, following a chaotic hearing involving dozens of lawyers, a judge ruled that all the children and adults from the compound must undergo DNA testing, so the court can determine who belongs to whom. Meanwhile, the children will remain wards of the state. “It’s shocking and disturbing,” said sect lawyer Rod Parker, “that a judge will take away 416 children from their parents on allegations concerning their religious beliefs.”

Let’s be clear about what “religious beliefs” we’re talking about here, said Rebecca Walsh in The Salt Lake Tribune. The so-called Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or FLDS, follows a particularly harsh and authoritarian creed. “Knowing the predilection of FLDS men to marry girls the age of their granddaughters and bind first cousins and uncles and nieces in multiple ‘spiritual marriages,’ the mind reels at the potential perversions.” As a Texas child-welfare official testified, every girl in the ultra-insular sect “is a potential rape victim.” The government had no choice but to step in.

But nothing justifies this massive violation of parental rights, said Ed Firmage, also in the Tribune. If anyone had sex with a minor, he should be prosecuted. But most of the kids seized by authorities—including 6-month-old babies—were healthy and well-fed, with no evidence of sexual abuse. Clearly, this mass seizure of children is an attack on polygamy itself. And as such, it is “unconstitutional, savage, and utterly self-defeating,” as it will only drive practitioners of this “deeply held tradition’’ further underground. You can’t be serious, said Rich Lowry in National Review Online. Polygamy is illegal for sound reasons. In polygamist cultures, “older, higher-status men take as many women as they can.” The women are raised and taught to be “as pliable as possible,” so they’ll meekly accept their fate as just one of many wives. “Now polygamists are trying to ride on the liberal wave of nonjudgmentalism and of hostility to traditional marriage.” Liberals don’t like to hear this, but as this ugly incident shows, “there are limits to pluralism.”

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