Tag: Polygamy

What Is He Thinking?

It is the weekend and as usual I found a story in the media that I just feel like I must comment on……and this one comes from the Reuters, which by the way have some amazingly odd stories……we at Info ink enjoy finding those stories that make us ask…WTF?

The more, the merrier is certainly true for Ziona Chana, a 66-year-old man in India’s remote northeast who has 39 wives, 94 children and 33 grandchildren — and wouldn’t mind having more.They all live in a four storied building with 100 rooms in a mountainous village in Mizoram state, sharing borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh, media reports said.

What is he thinking?  Or is he high on opium?

May I see a show of hands…..how many have been or are married?

Now knowing what you know about marriage, would you want another one or for that matter 38 more?

It is virtually impossible to make a wife happy all the time….and now this dude wants to try and make 39 happy….what is he thinking?  This guy has got to be a masochist!  Why else would he want to subject himself to this type of torture?  And to beat all…they all live in the same house…..39 women (wives)…… Oh My God!  This guy is just plain crazy!

FLDS Kids Back In Custody

How many times will Texas continue to play this game?

Some of the children taken from a polygamist sect’s ranch, placed in foster care and then returned to their parents could be headed back to foster care again.

Texas child welfare authorities are asking Texas District Judge Barbara Walther to put eight children, ranging in age from 5 to 17, back in state custody, alleging their mothers have refused to limit contact with men accused of being involved in underage marriages.

Individual hearings for the four mothers involved are scheduled to begin Monday.

None of the children currently live at the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado, where authorities swept roughly 440 children into foster care in April. Officials said at the time that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which established the ranch, was forcing girls into underage marriages and grooming boys to be adult abusers.

In the new CPS petitions seeking foster placement for the eight children, the agency detailed alleged underage marriages involving the children’s fathers or stepfathers, though only one faces any criminal charges.

Rod Parker, a church spokesman, said that even though the families are getting individual hearings this time, the argument that they shouldn’t be allowed to retain custody of their children remains unfair.

LDS Church Distance From FLDS

After recent occurrences and raids, the LDS Church is trying to distance themselves from the polygamist practices of the FLDS.

As confusion continues worldwide about the connection between the Salt Lake-based LDS Church and the FLDS polygamist group in Texas, LDS officials ramped up their efforts Thursday to clarify that their members have nothing to do with plural marriage.

The frustration that LDS leaders are feeling over the confusion also was detailed in a letter to more than 80 major media outlets nationwide from the church’s attorney, and in a public statement from one of its apostles — also an attorney — about the importance of protecting the church’s identity.

The two documents were part of a package of videos and statements of clarification posted on the church’s Web site at www.lds.org in the “newsroom” section.

The letter reminds editors and publishers that the LDS Church has obtained legal registration, trade and service marks for the term “Mormon,” among other terms, and asks journalists to refrain from calling the FLDS polygamous group “fundamentalist Mormons.”

But at least one religion scholar said trying to enforce such a distinction could be problematic.

“We are confident that you are committed to avoiding misleading statements that cause unwarranted confusion and that may disparage or infringe the intellectual property rights discussed above,” says the letter from Elder Lance B. Wickman, who is identified as the church’s “general counsel.”

Distinguishing the 13 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the few thousand members of the Fundamentalist LDS Church in both Texas and the Utah-Arizona border towns of Hildale and Colorado City has proven to be an ongoing challenge for the LDS Church, which has issued at least three other public statements distancing itself from the FLDS group in recent months.

The survey seeking to determine how widespread public confusion between Latter-day Saints and the FLDS Church shows, according to the LDS Church statement, that:

• More than a third of those surveyed (36 percent) erroneously thought that the Texas compound was part of the LDS Church.

• 6 percent said the two groups were partly related.

• 29 percent correctly said the two groups were not connected at all.

• 29 percent were not sure.

Still, asking media to refrain from using the term “Mormon fundamentalist” could be problematic for the church, according to Jan Shipps, professor emeritus of history and religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, who has long researched the LDS Church

The LDS Church banned the practice of polygamy in the late 19th century and excommunicates any of its members who practice it.

FLDS Children Go Home

A spokeswoman for the Department of Family and Protective Services, Marleigh Meisner, said the investigation into possible sexual abuse would continue. The judge in the case also imposed a lengthy list of caveats pending the conclusion of the investigation, including surprise home visits by caseworkers, possible psychiatric evaluations of the children and a ban on travel outside Texas.

Confusion has been a constant in the case, ever since state officials took action on April 3 — prompted, they said, by a call to an abuse hotline from a girl who said that she was 16 and that her 49-year-old husband was abusing her. The girl was never found or identified.

Two court rulings last month — including one from the state’s highest judicial panel — criticized the Department of Family and Protective Services, concluding that the seizure order had been too broad, and that a threat to the safety of all the children in the group’s compound, called the Yearning for Zion ranch, in Eldorado, could not be proved.

This is still, in my opinion, a civil rights issue and those rights were violated. This will most likely go down as the biggest faux pas, for lack of a better word, in civil rights history. But unfortunbately, it will probably NEVER be written in the history books in Texas. Why? IT IS TEXAS!

New FLDS UpDate

The Texas Supreme Court affirmed yesterday that state officials should not have seized scores of children from the ranch compound of a polygamist sect, agreeing with an appellate court that the group’s beliefs were not, by themselves, proof of abuse.

The decision, issued yesterday afternoon in Austin, did not immediately bring the release of the more than 460 children of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints compound near Eldorado, Tex. But it did seem to make that outcome very likely. Child-protection authorities said yesterday evening that they would comply if the trial court judge ordered the children returned.

Because the case involves state law, not federal statutes, legal experts said the Texas Supreme Court was as high as an appeal could go. That court agreed with a decision last week by the state Court of Appeals for the Third District, which rejected arguments at the heart of the state’s case.

“On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted,” the nine-judge Supreme Court ruled. The court found that the protective services department had removed all the children after an April 3 raid, disregarding less-drastic options. “The Family Code gives . . . broad authority to protect children short of separating them from their parents and placing them in foster care.”

As I have said in the past, I am not a follower of the FLDS, but I also see this as a civil rights situation and IMO the Texas Supreme Court has made a good decision.

Yet Another FLDS UpDate

Texas has been ordered to return the children detained after the religious compound raid  within 10 days or file an appeal to the ruling……well they filed an appeal….go figure!

A day after an appeals court ruled that the children were illegally taken from their homes in West Texas, lawyers from the State Department of Family and Protective Services planned to file for an emergency stay of the court’s request that the children be released from state custody, a spokesman for the Texas Supreme Court said on Friday.

The spokesman, Osler McCarthy, said he did not know how long it would take for the court to rule, or whether the court would hear oral arguments.

Although that court did not explicitly order the children’s immediate release, it raised the prospect that many of them would be reunited with their families, possibly within 10 days. The children have been in foster homes scattered across Texas since early April, making their parents travel hundreds of miles to visit them.

In a statement after the ruling on Thursday, the Department of Family and Protective Services said: “Child Protective Services has one duty: to protect children. When we see evidence that children have been sexually abused and remain at risk of further abuse, we will act.”

Now it will fall into the lap of the Texas Supreme Court….since it is a civil rights thing, and Texas is not the best place for civil rights…it will be interesting to see how it will rule…..

Court Rules Against Texas In FLDS Raid

Texas overstepped its authority when it removed some of the 460 children taken from a polygamist compound last month, a state appeals court ruled on Thursday.

Texas Child Protective Services last month raided the isolated compound in west Texas and removed the children in response to allegations of abuse.

But the court said that the state had not proven that the children were in immediate physical danger, and therefore were improperly separated from their parents.

“Essentially this decision from the Third Court of Appeals said that Child Protective Services had absolutely no evidence that would justify them going in there and removing these children from this household,” said Cynthia Martinez, who represents 48 of the mothers whose children were removed.

How will this effect the children and the parents…time will only tell, but the track of civil rights has been returned to…..maybe now the rights of the children will become more important than the harassment of a religious sect.

Yet More On The FLDS Situation

Yesterday I saw a report that there may not be as many under aged mothers as first thought. It appears that the whole case is falling apart before the law’s very eyes. But the disturbing part of the report was that they were separating children from their mothers. If a mother was under 18 she was aloowed to stay with her child, but over 18 they were separated.

The report continued with a part that stated that some of the women were told that if they left the compound and made a life away from it, their children would be returned.

Sorry, this whole situation is a bit disturbing to me. Whether you agree with their lifestyle or not, how do you justify separating children from their mothers? This whole thing smells like some sort of set-up. I have yet to see a report on the massive abuses that was first reported.

Forcing people to abandon their religion or beliefs is just not right. I agree with one of my commenters from an earlier post…….smells like something an authoritative regime would do.

More On The FLDS

This is a list compiled by Carolyn Jessop.

•Members believe polygamy is a requirement for salvation.
•Sex is power in the FLDS.
•Sex is scheduled among wives.
•A woman without children has no power or status.
•Women are supposed to be in complete harmony with her husband.
•Wives can discipline another woman’s child.
•Wives are extremely competitive with one another.
•Women in the FLDS give birth in the local clinic.
•Women are expected to be perfectly silent during childbirth.
•Other wives are expected to be present during other wives’ childbirths.
•July 24, Pioneer Day, is the FLDS’s biggest Mormon holiday.
•The Harvest Festival is the FLDS version of a county fair.
•Birthdays are rarely celebrated.
•Working wives hand over their entire salary to their husbands.
•Many members receive government benefits.
•Members believe the second death happens in the afterlife when a spirit is killed off for the rest of eternity.
•In the FLDS, refusing to have siex with one’s husband is considered to be adultery.
•It is a sin for a woman to talk about abuse, if she is being abused, it is because she is not in harmony with her husband.
•Members are taught to fear the outside world.
•Men are not allowed to interfere in another man’s family.
•Childhood immunizations are not allowed.
•Water is considered to be the devils’s doman.

I realize that one’s religion is a private thing and should be none of anyone’s business, but with all the news about the sect in Texas, I thought I would let my readers know what some of their beliefs are, besides polygamy, that is.

More On The FLDS Controversy

I have a problem with this whole situation.  Polygamy is a crime…..but where does the state get off taking children from their mothers, no matter what age they are?

Louisa Jessop’s children were among the more than 400 who were taken from the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints compound raided early last month by Texas law enforcement and CPS officials. She says she’s 22 and has presented authorities with a driver’s license and birth certificate to prove it. But CPS spokesman Chris Van Deusen told NBC that the department has classified her as a “disputed minor,” the term used for FLDS women whose age has not been established to the department’s satisfaction. Until her age is established, they are treating her as if she is a minor.

“They said I looked like I was under 18,” she said.

And so Louisa Jessop is stuck. She’s been told she can leave, but she has to leave her newborn son and her other two children in foster care. Or she can stay with her newborn son, but can no longer be with her other children.

These children committed no crime and the mother’s have done nothing that would lead to them losing their children.