Yet another religious cult raided

[Occhidiangela]

Witness: Teens at ranch said any age OK to marry.

Married off and pregnant at 13. 13! Yes, let's save these children from the state.

News flash: the human race survived nicely for centuries with such customs in operation. Where is the danger in this? (See your subsequent post on the topic)

Granted, it's not how I go about raising my kids. I'd like them to mature a bit before going to the next stage in life, but that view is in part due to my own cultural indoctrination within our mainstream culture.

Some of that cultural norming has been codified, by the statutes that define, for whatever reason, what the generally accepted minimum age is, or ought to be, for marriage, breeding, and so on. These are inconsistent with biological development, but that is not the sole consideration in the mainstream society. (A mitigating factor in teen pregnancy is that it isn't always society's problem to solve. Families sometimes solve it by accepting that it's not the baby's fault, and the extended family raising the teen birthed child as part of the family. Indeed, my own in laws were faced with, and are doing, exactly that. Read carefully: the family handled it, not CPS. )

Given the above, these norms now have the force of law. Breaking that law has consequences, as we see in this news story. Conform or go to jail. Look at the FLDS as an extended family, or clan, (perhaps a dysfunctional one) and some of what they are doing isn't all that odd, nor out of the norm, nor particularly dangerous. What it is is archaic, and as noted above, in some details, illegal.

So here comes the fifty dollar question: should my sister in law, whose brother in law is a cop, have pressed charges against the penis wielder who impregnated her not quite sixteen daughter? (Who willingly had sex with him multiple times before the seed was fertilized. Indeed, she was a bit of an instigator in the whole deal.) Said cop and I did the math the day the baby was born.

She chose not to, and for a good reason. He, and his family, quite readily agreed to provide X child support for an extended period of time. They have remained true to that agreement for the last six years. Neither family was endorsing, nor urging, the two to get married, for a host of reasons. My sister in law, not her daughter, has legal custody of the child, and is raising her.

No CPS required. No arrest required. No one needed to go to jail over stupidity and sex mixing.

Now look once again at what an extended family, a clan, has done as a pattern of raising their families without interference from all of the busybodies of the world. That, IMO, is what any number of the adult members of that society view as an appropriate way to live their lives.

You can call what they, the FLDS, are doing a manifestation of Future Shock. What they are doing would fit in very well in the southern parts of Iraq, and a variety of other places on the globe.

Maybe they should have moved there first, before they started their colony of anachronisms.

WIth three hundred million people in the US, I have a hard time finding a small colony of backward thinking whack jobs dangerous.

DR