Child welfare in Texas

The Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the state's Child Protective Services exceeded its authority and broke the law when the department seized more than 460 youngsters from a polygamist community near the town of Eldorado last month.

Actually, they seized many more people than that, but authorities -- supposedly child welfare experts -- have since had to concede many of the people they hauled away, believing them to be "children," actually turn out to be adults.

Authorities staged a massive raid on the 1,900-acre Schleicher County ranch on April 3, saying they had received a tip from someone claiming to be a pregnant 16-year-old forced into marriage with an abusive 50-year-old member of the church. But officials were unable to identify the tipsters even after they herded all the children away, and now acknowledge they may have been duped.

The Fundamental Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- to which those at the Yearning for Zion Ranch belong, and thought to number some 10,000 followers in total -- broke away from the Mormon Church after the latter renounced polygamy in 1890.

The ruling set no timetable for returning the children to their homes, and legat wrangling over the weekend left that matter up in the air.

Richard Wexler of the Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection reform has shown statistically that children are more likely to be injured or even killed in foster care than when left with their birth parents -- even in extreme cases where that parent turns out to be a lone, unmarried prostitute selling herself for crack.

Yet no one has accused the mothers of the YFZ Ranch of being mothers nearly as unfit as that.

So why have they and their infants been thus traumatized? Why didn't these bureaucrats -- as the court now instructs -- use less intrusive and disruptive means to investigate any individual charges of abuse?

For "child welfare" authorities to seize hundreds of healthy, happy children -- half of them under the age of 5 and hardly at any immediate risk of being married -- out of loving homes, without any required "probable cause," simply because they disagree with a church community's religious beliefs and practices, and then to distribute those children to far-flung foster homes like inmates being kept away from their lawyers and families via "diesel therapy," is the height of arrogance.

About 20 percent of the workers in this state agency need refresher courses on the pre-existing liberties of conscience and religious practice guaranteed by the Bill of Rights -- and the Constitution they have individually sworn to protect and defend.

The other 80 percent should be dismissed; their desks and cell phones and "company cars" sold at auction. For clearly this is an agency so overstaffed that -- like the BATF at Waco -- they had to go inventing new "needs" to justify their burgeoning budget.