Kidnapped by the government - Vox Day

Kidnapped by government

Posted: April 21, 20081:00 am Eastern© 2008

Given that Mormon readers will probably recall my past references to a former candidate for the White House as Capt. Underoos, it's not exactly a secret that I harbor little respect for Joseph Smith's little cult. While all of the Latter Day Saints I've ever met have been fine, upstanding individuals, I nevertheless tend to view "The Book of Mormon" as being, for all intents and purposes, the literary and religious equivalent of L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth."

But despite my admitted lack of sympathy for Mormonism, not since the Waco massacre have I been so completely appalled by an American government action. The recent kidnapping of 416 children from their Fundamentalist LDS parents by Texas Child Protective Service agents is a unconscionable abnegation of not only the United States and Texas constitutions, but a rejection of the very meaning of what it is to be an American. For as P.J. O'Rourke rightly declares: "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please."

Contrary to what a disturbing percentage of the voting population appears to believe, "protecting the children" is not a legitimate function of government. The concept appears nowhere in any constitution, and the very idea that the most lethal institution in human history, an institution that has killed more children than any other, can even be used to protect children is inherently oxymoronic. The state does not own the children whose families happen to reside within its boundaries and it does not possess the right to dictate what is and what is not a proper way for a family to raise its children.

Consider this absurd justification for the mass kidnappings offered by Angie Voss, the CPS kidnapper in chief, offered as an explanation for the mysterious preference of the abused women to remain with their supposed abusers instead of availing themselves of government shelters: "This population of women has a difficult time making decisions on their own." If a distaste for decision-making is legitimate grounds for removing children from their mothers, then there won't be a woman in America left with a child to call her own! For what man has not had a conversation that went like this:

"Where do you want to eat?"
"I don't care. ... You decide."
"OK, let's go to that new Chinese place."
"No, I don't want Chinese!"
"Well, what do you want, then?"
"I don't know, whatever you want."

Sound the sirens, send in Ms. Voss and her Sturmtruppen, and seize those at-risk kids!

The disingenuous bigotry of CPS' action is perhaps best revealed by comparing the pregnancy rates of the supposedly abused teenage girls at the FLDS compound with the rest of the teenage Texan population. Voss stated that five of the 416 children were pregnant or had given birth; assuming that half of the 416 are female, that is a pregnancy rate of 24 per 1,000. The Texas pregnancy rate among women 15 to 19 is 101 per 1,000. It's also worth noting that the "numerous" pregnant 13-year-olds hypothesized by one government worker mysteriously transformed into five "under 18s" when Voss testified.

If the family lives of hundreds of American citizens living peacefully can be brutally invaded and destroyed on the basis of a single anonymous phone call that, as WND has reported, increasingly looks to have been a fraud, then every American family is at risk.

How you raise your children is between you and God alone. It is not a matter for the state or anyone else; it never has been. As this mass kidnapping of FLDS children and incredible violation of due process will almost surely demonstrate over time, government is a ruthless and power-maddened institution that is the very last one capable of serving the interests of the children. No conservative and no religious individual should support this outrageous action, even if adult members of the FLDS community are found to have violated Texas law as well as Texas social norms, because to accept this terrible precedent is to guarantee that future violations of family rights will be committed.

And as history has shown, the next time it may not be some weird and heretical Mormons in the government's gun sights, but Jews, homeschoolers or evangelical Christians.