Christian Leftist

There are now 462 children, some of whom are young mothers in their teens and others no older than five, who are in temporary foster care in Texas today after acourt in San Angelo ruled that their parents cannot have the children back until DNA tests are done.

The Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a breakaway Mormon sect that practices polygamy and marrying off its girls when they are underage or barely legal, has its own batch of lawyers. What sounds like a “class-action child removal” may bring about legal challenges to the state’s right to remove children based solely on the treatment of a smaller number of girls and women from the Yearning for Zion Ranch.

The Washington post has an article about the Constitutional challenges Texas may face when the case splits into individual child-custody hearings. There is no question that were the children to be returned to their parents, they would be forced to conform to the sect’s religious and sexual practices. What is not so clear is whether or not the government has the right to take children away from their parents if the abuse has no yet occured. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld the freedom of religious expression in previous cases.

In my opinion, practising your religious freedoms is one thing; forcing a teenage girl to conform to them is not. Hoever, it sn’t difficult to say that there is no clear line in the sand as to how much religion one is allowed to insert into a child’s life.