Yearning for Zion
Benjamin Gayed“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
- United States Constitution, 1st Amendment
Last Friday, a judge in Texas ruled that 416 children taken from their parents should remain in the State’s custody. The children were originally separated from their parents after accusations of polygamy and sexual abuse in the community where these children and their parents lived, known as Yearning for Zion (YFZ).
“Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner said her department is in the process of finding “temporary placement” for all the children.” What we did was warranted and in the best interest of the children,” she said. “This is not about religion — this is about keeping children safe from abuse.”” -CNN.com
Granted, Ms. Meisner is not the voice of the State, and the judge’s ruling may not have been based on presumptions of the children’s best interests; it may have stemmed from impartial interpretation of the state’s statutes regarding polygamy. But Ms. Meisner’s comments do highlight the tension inherent in balancing due process with existing abuse.
The events unfolding around the YFZ ranch raise issues of 1st amendment protections as well as right to privacy and due process. Classic anti-anti-polygamy law arguments appeal to the language of the first amendment to say that a statute which encroaches upon any citizen’s expression of religion is a violation of a fundamental right. I find this argument less persuasive because U.S. anti-polygamy laws apply broadly and are not restricted to any particular religion (though they were created in response to LDS-sanctioned Mormon practices in the 19th century). In addition the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal that Utah’s anti-polygamy laws are a violation of the 1st amendment in Reynolds v. United States.
Questions of due process are underscored by concurrent issues of same-sex marriage and state-by-state definitions of marriage. It seems only a matter of time before someone tries to transplant precedents allowing same-sex marriages and protection of private, mutually-consensual sexual acts to the polygamy legal proceedings. I do not know what evidence was procured before the raid on YFZ, but I can only hope it was overwhelming and accurate. It is frightening to think that the State would be given the authority to separate parents and children on the suspicion of, or un-validated reports of some illegal activities.
More generally, Ms. Meisner’s comments illustrate the fragile balance between freedom and centralized power. It is not well understood that the freedom to succeed is also freedom to fail. It only takes one or two traumatic events for people to rush power into the hands of the government. We are still dealing with violations of privacy made possible by the Patriot Act, and we likely will continue to do so for years to come.
This story also illustrates the importance of de-centralization of power. It is my hope that judges who preside over cases like this one keep in mind the sanctity of privacy and due process as protectors of freedom. And I make that statement with the full knowledge that there will be children who are taken advantage of in awful ways just like these children reportedly were while law enforcement agents try to gather enough evidence to intervene. I prefer this to avoid finding ourselves in an environment where a government official might walk into any house and remove children from innocent parents without justification. Not only is it not the government’s (primary) job to monitor family interactions such as these, it would take resources far beyond what is affordable to do so effectively.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:39 pm
To the best of my knowledge, freedom of religion is protected to the extent that it does not lead to harm of others, especially children. Is this not why children of Jehovah’s Witnesses may be legally given blood transfusions against family wishes?
If there was no evidence of child-harm, the idea of supplanting the right to privacy and due process is indeed disturbing. Many people nowadays have a hard time w/ parental rights, you know? Parent’s have the right to spank their children whenever they see fit. Does anyone else, say– in any other adult-relationship– have the right to spank another person whenever they see fit?
Homosexual parental rights seem to me, antithetical to parental rights. For homosexuals to be parents, they must adopt or use gestational surrogacy+adoption. But adoption for the sake of adoption is an evil. It’s value only lies in its redemptive-quality: i.e. to resolve a bad situation. When the state allows children to be created and then adopted, this is not in the interests of child’s rights, or in the interest of the state, the progeny of which ought to have, as far as the state is involved, biological relations w/ parents. Thus the state perhaps has a responsibility, even in instances of poor parenting or borderline abuse, to maintain biological relationships. DCFS must keep this in mind. However there are progressive-minded people all in DCFS, who have deterministic-psychological theories of upbringing. In the case of polygamy, there are plenty of biological relationships, but those relationships are perhaps skewed by feminine jealousies, & the sheer multitude of children-per-father.
April 26th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Part of the modern problem with YFZ-type situations for Christians or conservatives is the importance of culture and tradition. Our modern society tends to view culture (especially traditional American culture) with disdain, preferring the illusion that a society is a collection of relatively interchangeable individuals (sort of like mass produced spare parts) who simply require the right mix of material benefits or motivations to find happiness. This is also why so many people have problems with other issues, such as children’s “rights”.
First of all, polygamy was made formally illegal in America largely because America was founded on Christian principles, including traditional Christian sense of marriage and the family. Christianity was somewhat peculiar among religions in its insistence on monogamy. Polygamy has never been part of the (small “o”) orthodox Christian tradition. America didn’t have laws against it because most Americans were Christians, and those who weren’t didn’t practice religions which advocated polygamy. Once a noticeable religious tradition advocating polygamy sprang up, the government officially enforced the hitherto unofficial laws of the land (i.e. the Christian tradition on which American society was based). The ban on polygamy was consonant with American tradition, however, and hence applied to everyone (avoiding possible 1st Amendment concerns, as Tom has noted).
It’s important for people to remember that affirming traditional American culture isn’t biased or illegitimate. (Or, if it’s biased, it’s biased in the same way other countries are biased.) America has a tradition and a culture. They founded on particular principles by particular peoples. Affirming those principles is a legitimate defense of American culture. Monogamous heterosexual marriage is one of those traditions. (As an aside, homosexual marriage — which, historically speaking, is a contradiction in terms — doesn’t even pass the test of other countries’ traditions. Polygamy is a lot easier to understand, both culturally and historically, because marriage has always and everywhere been heterosexual. It’s only in traditional Christian societies that marriage also means monogamy.) Opinion makers in society (especially in the schools and the media) have worked hard to make Americans feel at least uneasy, and at worst immoral, by affirming their own culture. We must not only understand our own history and traditions — we must feel proud of them. The hand-wringing over the YFZ kids, gay marriage, and parental discipline (the last because we’ve been encouraged to forgot the tradition of parental authority) is clear evidence that we have neither understanding of nor pride in our tradition or culture.
April 28th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
So where is the right to parent on the totem pole of freedoms? I’d presume the founding fathers assumed it was a given…
April 29th, 2008 at 9:51 am
I don’t know about any totem pole of freedoms, but I’d say it ranks quite high. But it’s not an absolute right. If a man has children on his daughter (with her consent), we call that a crime, even though doing so contradicts his “right to parent.” The question we must ask is: Does disobeying society’s centuries-old prohibition of polygamy represent a similar justification for violating that right?
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:02 am
The Supreme Court has held, consistently, that certain rights are so fundamental and assumed that the founding fathers thought they needn’t be mentioned by name in the Constitution. Among these are the right to interstate travel and the parenting rights. This is part of the reason the Amish, for example, cannot be forced to send their children to school, regardless of compulsory education laws.
One of the troubling things about the YFZ case is that the Texas government didn’t–and apparently didn’t see any need–to distinguish between any of the families in the compound. Some of the families were likely monogamous couples with healthy, unabused children. Some of the families probably didn’t have any female children, or any children of sufficient age to be force into early marriage. The very least the Constitution, and basic precepts of a free society, require is that the state of Texas limit its intrusion to instances where it had probable cause to believe that danger to the child existed. Giving our Lonestar friends the widest possible benefit of the doubt, this would include, at most, families with daughters in the 12-18 age range.
That Texas instead took ALL the children, male and female, old and young, shows that they weren’t defining abuse as conduct–they were defining it as the state of living with religious “freaks.” There are plenty of people out there who approve of what Texas did, and their rationale. After all, why should we defend the religious freaks? I’m sure it’s the same reasoning a lot of citizens in Third Reich Germany used to shrug off the legal persecution of Jews.
I say we try to avoid the moral failing of the German citizenry. I say we defend the freaks. I’m going to write a letter to my federal representatives, and to the Governor of Texas, and thank God that we’re still at a point where letter writing may do some good.