by Dr. Larry Moses
No one asked me but… I have been watching the news coming out of Eldorado, Texas dealing with the FLDS church. A number of questions have come to mind.
Do the local Texas officials have a clue as to how to deal with the four hundred children they have confiscated? Since the issue is child abuse, why have none of the abusers been arrested? Can you really take away the children of neighbors of child abusers? Are all the families at the ranch engaged in child abuse? If you are worried about fourteen year old girls, why remove infants? Why remove the boys who have committed no crime, but leave the men among whom the guilty could be found? Why is it that the only people appearing before a judge are the children who have committed no crime?
Do not misinterpret what you read here. I am in favor of prosecuting any child abuser to the full extent of the law. I cannot in my wildest imagination understand why anyone would want to marry a fourteen year old girl. It is tough enough raising teenagers; being married to one must be a nightmare. Marrying a child under sixteen is a crime in most states and most surely a violation of Texas law. If any such thing has taken place anyone involved should be held responsible.
If child abuse has occurred, there should be no leniency; for no religion can excuse that. But the handling of this case takes on the tapestry of the keystone cops.
Whose idea was it to use the buses from the First Baptist Church to remove the women and children from the ranch? That was a stroke of real genius. Are there no commercial bus companies in Texas?
The local sheriff said he did not base the raid on the lone phone call from a young girl who said she needed help, but he had an informant in the compound for over four years. This would mean from the establishment of the compound. You would hope, in that time this informant could identify the men involved in the abuse, and that arrests could have been made. Apparently this is not the case. The authorities will be questioning children as young as five years old in hopes of determining who the child abusers might be.
While you may find the lifestyle of these people repugnant, stop and think about the underlying thing that has happened here. An anonymous phone call was made charging some unidentified adult with child abuse. As a result of this call, Child Protective Services has taken 416 children away from their mothers. Do you realize that if your neighbor gets mad at you and makes a call alluding child abuse, the neighbor does not even have to identify themselves and the state can take your children from you and place them in a holding tank while they determine whether the accusations are true or not? Under present law the accused are denied their Constitutional right to face their accuser.
The Texas authorities have carried this even further. In this case someone reported an abusive situation and all the children in the neighborhood were taken from their parents. Take away the fact that what has happened in Texas has happened to a strange people and realize that it could happen to you; then maybe you can empathize a little better with these mothers.
The Texas authorities said they removed the children because there were men in tanks carrying automatic rifles on the compound. Hello! The only ones there with tanks and automatic weapons were the Texas authorities.
The head of Child Protective Services stated the children were removed to save them from possible abuse. This brought back memories of a video shot of an American officer in the late 1960s talking to a news reporter outside a Vietnamese village. While they were talking, two Phantom jets flew over and dropped napalm destroying the village behind. The reporter asked what happened. The officer replied, “We had to destroy the village to save it.” Let us hope the Texas authorities have not destroyed these children to save them.
No one asked me but…I read where the president has decided to send $200 billion worth of aid to underdeveloped countries because their food prices are rising very rapidly. Hey, George, go to the local grocery and see what is happening to food prices right here at home. I truly believe that every President, Senator and Congressman should have to shop for themselves, both for food and gas. I wonder when the last time George went to the store. Now I have never been accused of being real good with money, but how does a country $9 trillion in debt come up with $200 billion to give away? It has been stated that the reason food prices are rising is that America is using corn for fuel rather than as a food product. I understand how that works. But surely America is not obligated to supplement the income of countries all over the world when we as a nation are not breaking even economically.
I wonder how many billions of dollars Saudi Arabia has sent to these third world countries since the rise in their oil prices has sent Americans to the corn fields for fuel. Maybe the world needs to understand that as happy as they are about the economic woes of America, they too, will suffer due to our economic misfortune. Those countries revealing in the devaluation of the American dollar may see the effect of that on their economy as well as ours.
All of this leads me to wonder when we are going to wake up and begin to take the actions necessary to protect this country. We have enough coal, oil and natural gas in this country. All we need to do is take the time to develop it. If we were to go totally independent, we could spend time developing an alternative energy program that would make it possible for us to never be dependent on foreign oil again. Undoubtedly this would require telling Al Gore and his buddies to take a hike, but it may be the only alternative short of a major depression this country has.
Oil has now hit $112 a barrel. That surely would make it economically feasible to harvest oil from shale in Colorado and from coal throughout the United States. We could then maybe invest in America instead of Saudi Arabia and the rest of those Middle Eastern terrorist centers.
No one asked me but…the Governor has determined that the state will suffer from a $900 million short fall. However, the state’s short fall has been held under $1 billion by the State Treasurer who has found $60 million, part of which is unclaimed property.
Are you aware of the fact that if you have a savings account that you have had no activity on for three years, the state can confiscate that account as unclaimed? If you have a bank box you don’t look into periodically, the state can confiscate the contents as unclaimed. I hold a number of small accounts for my grandchildren with a credit union and I periodically get a notification that I must deposit or withdraw from the account or the state will take the account as unclaimed.
I remember as a child finding a bicycle that had been in a vacant lot for two days. I took the bike home and my father asked me where it came from and I explained that someone had left it and had not taken it for two days. My father had me take it back and leave it there because no matter how long the bike was there, it was not mine.
By law, the first $7.6 million of unclaimed property goes to help fund the Millennium Scholarships. While the Millennium Scholarship is a commendable cause, confiscating unclaimed savings is still stealing. You may write a law that says that it is legal, but that doesn’t make it right. That property and money belongs to someone and if they never use it, it still does not belong to the state.
Thought for the week. One should not judge folks by their relatives.
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