btw people, in the state of New Hampshire the minimum age limit for marriage with parental consent is 14 for boys and 13 for girls. in california there is no legal min limit with parental consent.
So it's legal to molest an innocent helpless child (thereby scarring her for life), as long as you get all the paperwork right... but enjoying a harmless narcotic high afterwards is a serious felony, punishable by years of hard time locked up alongside dangerous real criminals (but not child molesters with proper marriage certificates, since they get to remain free men).
not my point at all and you know that. what kind of shit comment is this? at what age are the girls "having sex" and not being raped? what is the magical number? 16? not if the boy is within 3 yrs of age in some states. i just notice the media has certain agendas in certain cases. there is a case in georgia with a black athlete. the media was falling all over itself to blame the girl. hollywood even got in on the act.. not to mention marc cuban.
Chuck.ells, my response was not to claim what god is the true god. I was not responding in defense of catholics verses polygamist church. What I was responding to was the poster who made a very good point about the catholic church and the crimes against children that have been proved...and yet we don't see anyone rushing in for a takeover and taking people in custody. My point was catholics are accepted and mainstream and it takes a lot of abuse before something is done about it...but the polygamist church is not mainstream and viewed with caution because of the secretiveness. I'm looking at that point. I am not catholic..just pointing out how catholic is mainstream and accepted therefore no alarms go off right away when a crime against children is committed. It is has been brushed under the rug in the past, and only recently has the church been made to pay for their crimes. The point is people use god as a front to hide their own agenda...like men having sex with underage girls, and breeding a cult of women who have never been exposed to anything outside their compound. So they know nothing different..all seems normal to them. They have never been shown any different, and they have never been given a choice. And these women grow up and bear more children, and their children know no different either. It is a violation of their freedom and civil rights. But these women don't even know that much, and they defend the actions of ths same people who have kept them sheltered and ignorant. All these women want is their children back, and they feel violated by the police who are trying to help them. They don't understand why, they have been kept ignorant.
Please don't misstate my posts. I did not say this was "most likely a situation where counsellors coerced statements.." I said it had happened in the past, and there is abundant proof that it did happen. Clearly the state is interviewing these children and trying desperately to get something to justify this raid. Otherwise, why are they being held separately from their parents? As I suspected, you have no evidence about these particular people, just some guilt by association. It wouldn't surprise me if there were some underage sex going on there and some common law polygamy, but as others have pointed out, that is becoming pretty common in a lot of communities and we don't feel the need to send in SWAT teams and arrest entire communities on no evidence. I don't really understand your point about jahidis. Do you think people in gittmo who were caught on foreign battlefields are in an analogous situation? The courts have disagreeed. Those arrested in the US have been given full blown trials. We certainly have not seen a case where 400 muslims were rounded up just because there was some unconfirmed complaints.
Sure, consensual underage sex happens all the time in communitys, and often it is teens experimenting. The difference with the polygamist cult of people and the average american teenager is simply the fact that they are groomed at early age to be given to older men for the mens pleasure. These young girls do not know any other way of life. Therefore it becomes normal to them. They are conditioned. They are not given the opportunity to know they do not have to have sex with old men. They are unaware of their own rights as human beings to make their own choices in life. Their life is planned for them...and that life is to be the young sex partner and baby bearer of old men. All for the the benefit of these men to have many young female sex partners. All in the name of god. Its all about controlling women for the benefit of men.
Well, that's the way it is done in plenty of societies, but I certainly am not condoning it. The problem I am having though is I am not hearing these women complaining. I hear them worried sick about their children. I don't want to get too far out on the limb here because I just don't know much about these people. Maybe they are as evil as some think. Maybe they want to live a traditional life, sheltered from the modern world. All I'm saying is there is a big jump between unorthodox and criminal, and the state here seemed to make that jump without much in the way of hard evidence.
Statutory rape is predicated on the supposed fact that underage women do not have the wisdom or experience to make this choice. The clear implication from your post is that this implication is true in this religious compound, but not in the inner cities of our country. That the inner city girls have all made this choice uncoerced. That is contradicted by the plain definition of statutory rape. So do you support taking millions of children away from their parents in inner cities?
Where are the old women and the young men in this compound? All I keep hearing about is old men and young women, which sounds more like Washington, DC.
The two situations are very dissimilar. Here we have serious suspicions of systematic failure of a group of people to protect their children - and even more, a cult that raises girls to become sex slaves to older men. The State has the right and the obligation to intervene, see what's happening and act accordingly. I don't say that some places in the inner city are much better, unfortunately... Yet, because we understand the root cause for its problems (poverty, loose social structure, limited opportunity) and are working hard at addressing those, I can see hope for the inner city, while I see none for FLDS - they look like a bunch of perverts, hiding behind freedom of religion, to me.