Now that the children of the FLDS cult are going home, we can expect the story to recede from the front page for a while. It will be back, however, when the state begins individual prosecutions for sexual abuse. When it does, there will be those who claim that those cases retroactively justify the state’s stunning removal of all the children. We should point out now that they will not.
According to the Texas Court of Appeals, no more than five children have been shown to be at risk. Those children should be protected and their abusers prosecuted, but that endeavor is wholly separate from what they did: remove 430 children (and some adults) from distinct families and dump them all in foster care. Moreover, he state’s precipitous action may end up tainting its case when it does bring individual prosecutions, thereby further harming those children.
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