Last one on child abuse for a while. Honest.

Playing in the background: The breathless pause between the deep freeze and the blast furnace (it's spring in Texas)
Meters swum today: Nada. Going back tomorrow.

Look, sorry to be such a downer, but between the FLDS kids and Elisabeth Fritzl I'm having nightmares. What's weird, though, is for once in my life I don't feel like driving over to Eldorado (or flying over to Austria, which is just across the street from downtown Dallas) and beating the snot out of one of these men. In times past that'd be my first reaction. "He did what?! To his own daughter?! I'll *&^*%!! kill him!!" Then the more rational part of my brain would remind me that spending the next twenty years in jail wasn't my idea of a good time and I'd settle for ranting at whatever co-worker or family member was unlucky enough to be closest about how effed up is our culture that it can churn out monsters like this and maybe these bastards just need to spend twenty-four years locked in someone else's cellar with a couple of armed sadistic rapists so they can Understand What It's Like. (Not that I have Issues. Certainly not.)

That's not happening this time around, though. With the FLDS kids, my first thought was, "Why don't we just make the men leave and let the women and children stay?" Not exactly an original thought but hey, it was new for me. Then this thing in Austria came along and I've hardly given Josef Fritzl, quaintly dubbed "Horror Dad" by the British media (I love those guys), a second thought. I've seen his pic a few times on the Internet and what usually crosses my mind (after "No wonder he had to rape his own daughter, what other woman would have him?") is something like, "That poor deluded psychotic. Somebody please lock him up before he hurts himself or anyone else" and then I'm right back with Elisabeth and her kids. How are they feeling? What do they need? Do they know there's a whole country, hell, half a planet, cheering for them and wishing them well right now? And is there anything I can do to help? (Not really, no. But I always want to help.)

This Means Something, Roger. I'm not sure what, though. Maybe all those trips through the A.A. Big Book are starting to sink in. Or maybe it's the Heart Sutra. Well, probably not that second thing. I'm kind of a Buddhist Catholic; "The Sutras? Oh, yeah, I've heard those are good books." It's just a little scary, though, because if my first immediate thought isn't to strangle the perpetrator, I might start to, I dunno, develop some compassion for these human monsters that were once five-year-old children who laughed and played with puppies before something went so drastically wrong and turned them into the creatures they are now. If that happens, I might have to acknowledge the vast complexity of the natural world and how useless all our dualities of "yes" and "no" and "truth" and "falsehood" and "good" and "evil" actually are. And if that happens (yes, I'm almost done here), A. I'll be displaying some signs of maturity and B. I might have to start having compassion not only for the human monsters in my own life, but (Buddha forbid!) for my own stupid self. I mean, yikes. What's a person to make of that sort of thing?

I'm gonna talk about the polygamous thing again.

Playing on the iPod: William Eaton and Friends, "Far East Mid West"
Meters swum today: 1700

So skip this if it's boring. An Idaho TV Station is running a short but telling story about the four hundred plus kids seized from the ranch in Eldorado. In it, a guy calling himself "Rulan" says that "the sect members are reconsidering whether girls under 18 should be having sex with adult men." Um, how convenient. It's not like that's against the law in most states or anything. What's next, a divine revelation from "The Prophet" that "because his people have been unfaithful, God will no longer allow girls under 18 to marry"? Don't laugh. When Utah's statehood application was being held hostage by Congress back in the 1860s, "The Prophet" (I forget who it was then) conveniently had a "revelation" that God had ordered "his people" to abandon polygamy. Which they did, on the surface at least. In practice it continues to this day, and not just in isolated communities of multiple women and children. See this book by Deborah Laake. Mormon men can be divorced and remarried multiple times and not lose their status in the community. A divorced woman, on the other hand, is automatically suspect.

Look, I think the whole having more than one wife thing is just weirder than weird (I can barely keep up with one wife), but hey, if everyone's a consenting adult, I'm not gonna argue. A lot of good Muslims have more than one wife and as long as they are able to support them, it's not an issue. Gay couples live together around here in the States (gasp! I'm one of them!) and I actually know a couple that was once a group of four; her, her female sweetie, her female sweetie's husband and the husband's female slave. Weird? Yes, absolutely. But. We have split families and blended families and all types of families. Again, as long as everybody involved is a consenting adult, I don't have a problem with it.

In case anybody's wondering, polygamy in the history of the Mormon church actually started out as a thing of near-necessity. By the time the LDS got to Utah, they'd been burned out of their homes about five times by their good Christian neighbors in New York, Missouri, Illinois, and two other places that escape me at the moment. Lots of the men had been killed in the violence. The church members tended to have large families, and there were scads of widows and orphans around. Somebody had to support them and they weren't supposed to remarry outside the faith. The obvious solution? Marry somebody else's husband. A lot of tribal societies where men were frequently killed off in hunts, wars or other kinds of violence had similar practices (and some still do). The idea is to take care of your own. Unfortunately, in this case some of the men seemed to have gotten a taste for the multiple wife thing (Joseph Smith was said to be a bit of a pervert who preferred young girls, and some records show he had over a hundred wives; Brigham Young, another somewhat less than stellar historical figure, had twenty-four.) When everybody was farming and lots of bodies were needed just to get all the work done, having this many people in a single household made sense. It kind of doesn't anymore.

As economic necessity may have started polygamy, it may also end it. Many of the polygamous wives are on some kind of public assistance, as they're unwed mothers, legally speaking. Crack down on that and the church has lost much of its income. It's already lost the land it supposedly owned in the Short Creek community, which, under allegations of fraud, has been taken over by the state of Utah. If the men in these relationships had to actually generate enough income to support all those wives and kids, the polygamous lifestyle would probably die out all by itself.

DNA testing is underway out Eldorado way to find out what kids belong to what mom and dad. Can state actions to collect child support be far behind?

The Kids and Kids And Kids Are Alright

Playing on the iPod: Steve Roach, something from "World's Edge"
Meters swum today: 1600

Okay, gang, we have the largest child custody case in the history of Texas about to start down San Angelo way. In case you've been hiding under a rock again, here's a quick recap: Child Protective Services raided what's being called a "polygamous compound" in west Texas and bused out 416 kids, along with some undetermined number of mothers. Most of the mothers have since returned, some have gone to a domestic violence shelter, and the state of Texas goes to court today to argue that the kids are in imminent danger of harm if they go home. The state is asking the court to grant temporary custody of the kids to Texas, and unless something seriously weird goes on, the state will probably prevail. If so, kids and parents alike enter a murky twilight zone of family law for something like six months to a year, where much hand-wringing will go on as to where, exactly, the kids will be growing up.

I used to work at a general-practice law firm and did a couple of family-law cases, some in which CPS was involved, some not. Here's how CPS works. They can't just show up at your house and grab your kids because, say, you didn't buy Suzie an iPod for Christmas. They have to have some kind of complaint, which usually comes from a teacher, doctor, neighbor, or someone else who sees the kid often enough to know something's not right. Sometimes one parent rats out the other one, or a stepparent does. On rare occasions the kids themselves ask for help. CPS investigates, and if warranted, it goes to court and says, "Here's the evidence we have that this kid is at risk of serious harm. What do you think?" Nine times out of ten the court agrees, the kid is picked up, usually placed in a foster home (though there's some talk that most of the younger kids in this case will be kept together, possibly at a local summer camp, which may be the best thing for them), and the court sets out another hearing for six months to a year away.

Then what happens? Well, for the kid, hopefully nothing. Hopefully they keep going to school, see their brothers and sisters often, maybe meet with social workers or therapists, but to the greatest extent possible, the idea's to let them live a normal life for a while. For the parents, on the other hand, this is where it gets hard. Unless the abuse is sexual or otherwise so egregious that both parents are likely going to jail, the judge or caseworker will set up what's called a "reunification plan" by which the parents, after meeting certain conditions, can get the kids back. Usually that means anger management or parenting classes, sometimes counseling, psychotherapy, whatever. If the household itself is dangerous, say, a house in a poor state of repair, they'll have to fix it up and provide evidence it's been fixed. If there's a dangerous person, like a mentally ill older sibling or something living there, he or she will probably have to move out. If the abuser is showing reluctance to change, the other parent may have to divorce him or her, or at least he/she will have to move out. The common denominator here is that something major has to change. The court won't return kids to their parents if everything's exactly the way it was. If you're a parent, your kids were taken away by CPS, and you want them back, probably the very worst thing you can possibly do is stand on your front porch in front of rolling TV cameras and sob that everything was just fine fine fine.

So guess what a bunch of the mothers did on the news the day before yesterday.

Yeah. And here's where we're at. These moms, and probably also dads, are going to be told they have to get counseling, attend classes, sit down with a social worker and draft a reunification plan, and subject themselves to periodic CPS inspections pretty much until their youngest kid turns 18. This in a community that deliberately shuts itself off from the rest of the world, thinks outsiders are evil, is apparently in the habit of marrying off its female children as young as twelve or thirteen, and claims everything it's doing is the Lord's work. Hands up who thinks this is likely. Uh, right, that's what I thought.

So what does this all mean? Well, um, it probably means Texas has 416 more foster kids from now to who knows when, not counting the ones on their way (several of the older girls are thought to be pregnant) and the ones who turn 18 (the term is "aging out") in the meantime. That's okay, taxpayers have been raising these kids anyway (most of their moms were on welfare, and there's some evidence that the community was even getting multimillion-dollar government contracts.) But besides that, it means this community is screwed. History. Finished, at least in the state of Texas. And once again I'm not so sure that is a good thing.

Look, it's a big country. (Hm, familiar guitar strains, how odd.) We're all reasonable people. Isn't there some way we could compromise on this thing? Couldn't we make some agreement whereby nobody under the age of 18 is getting married in that community? (Come on, people, it's four more years, not a lifetime.) Where the parents agree not to beat kids with sticks, starve them or lock them in closets for minor offenses? Where social workers got to go in and check on things every so often, and let the young people know if they don't want to stay in the community, there are options? I mean, the Amish are clannish and insular, they don't trust outsiders either, you could sort of call them religious fanatics (they'd probably object), they don't even send most of their kids to school past the eighth grade, yet they've somehow managed to avoid child abuse since the 1600s, approximately. Oh, and they don't marry their daughters off en masse to older men before they're old enough to like Britney Spears. Not that they've heard of Britney, of course.

Jen defends polygamy. Good God, lightning is striking the building.

Well, anyway, only one thing is certain about this whole mess. The kids will be all right. Kids usually are. Get them away from a scary environment, let them be kids, and they usually recover from just about anything. Sometimes they need a little help, but that's what CPS is there for. It may be a flawed system (may be? Almost certainly is) but there's so much scrutiny this time. Nobody wants to screw this up.

Women and Children and Children and Children First

Playing on the iPod: Bach, Prelude and Fugue in H Major (okay, I don't know which the heck one it is)
Meters swum today: None. I did 1700 yesterday, though.

In case you've been hiding under a rock lately, there's been this big news story about Child Protective Services going into a "polygamous compound" and hauling away 400-plus kids in Eldorado, Texas. Bunch of their mothers, too, apparently, some of whom were barely older than kids themselves. Seems a 16-year-old girl with an eight-month-old baby (you do the math) called CPS to complain that she was forced to marry a 50-something guy. When CPS went to court to get an order for their investigation, the judge suddenly decided every single kid that lived there was either being abused or was under immediate threat of abuse, and said, "Get every child under 18 out here to be interviewed." Hours later, there were still children coming. Something like 500 people are being housed in a Babtist church and a local fort, and the investigation goes on. Since then all 400-plus children have been placed in protective custody, and each one is apparently going to get his or her own personal private lawyer and child advocate.

These folks, the Fundamentalist Church of the Latter-Day Saints, are sometimes called Mormons. That's kind of a misnomer. The real Mormons are pretty ordinary people, go to church, live in cities, interact with the rest of the planet. I used to know a bunch of 'em and apart from some of their children, who can be horrible, their one distinctive characteristic is that they're all really, really nice. So darn nice you get sick to your stomach from the sheer quantities of saccharine. Okay, I exaggerate, but really, they're nice folks.

The FDLS might also be nice folks, but they're often referred to as a strange cult with Mormon roots. They think the world's going to end any second, they prefer to live apart from the rest of the planet and of course they do this multiple-wife thing. One guy might have four or five or even as many as eleven wives, a range of ages, and scads of kids. This made a lot of sense when they'd been burned out of their homes four or five times on their way from Missouri to Utah, and a bunch of the men had been killed, leaving plenty of widows and orphans. These days it's kind of hard to pull off unless you keep marrying younger and younger women, which is what Child Protective Services is in such a dither about. It's illegal in Texas for a girl under 16 to marry, have sex or breed with any man of any age, much less a 50-year-old. I mean, ew. Hence the "raid" on the Eldorado Ranch.

I'm gonna raise my paddy skyward here and get ready to duck. I'm not so sure going in there and grabbing all the kids was such a hot idea. Okay, 50-year-old men and 15-year-old girls, ew, I agree, ew ew ew. Definitely should NOT be going on. But, does it make any sense to charge in there and haul away families? We're talking about kids here who have never seen TV, probably never been to school, don't know what an iPod is, think their fathers are the next thing to God and that everybody outside the compound (ie, the entire rest of the planet) is damned, evil, untouchable. Yeah, I want four or five kids like that (they're trying to keep siblings together) living next door to me in one of Texas's great foster homes. What makes CPS think they're gonna be any safer in that environment? They're probably better off where they are, under guard at an old fort and a Babtist church. Trouble is, hanging out like a refugee in a public building is kind of no way to live, as all the Hurricane Katrina survivors who were bussed to Dallas and Houston after New Orleans went under could probably tell you.

So what would I do instead, you ask. Well, my first thought is, why not haul away the men that are doing the abusing, and let the women and children stay home? I have a live or let live thing about other people, so I guess if you can't haul away the men, I'd have some precautions in place to protect the kids. Like, for example, CPS gets to go in there whenever they feel like it to check on the kids and make sure there aren't any pregnant tweenagers. Marriages would have to be registered and all the brides would have to be 18. In my humble opinion it's no less creepy to have a 50-year-old marry an 18-year-old, but it's technically legal, at least in Texas. As for the multiple-marriage thing, though, I think I'd be fine with leaving things alone. If these folks are freely choosing to live this way, what's the problem? Gay people live together in relationships approximating marriage (Joan and I are domestically partnered). I have a good friend who lived for several years with her significant sweetie, a female, the sweetie's husband, a male, and their "slave", also a female. I didn't ask and they didn't tell but it worked for them, I guess. (I know. Ew. Ew. But there weren't any kids involved.)

Am I too flexible? Maybe. But consider: The king of Saudi Arabia, with whom we have at least a friendly relationship, has three wives. (I think. Maybe it's four._ We don't call him a weird cult member. We call him "a fine example of the United States's positive influence on the Persian Gulf region." Money and morality start with the same letter. I'm just sayin'.