There is no doubt that someone needs to go to jail for the improper and illegal treatment of minors, particularly women and girls, and that is why we have laws to protect innocents. I am sure there are a select group of men in that compound that have broken several laws and need to be removed from the situation by the authorities. What struck me is that our government at some level decided to assault this compound and remove children from their mothers to place them in foster care. I can't help but think this is not in the best interest of those children, or the mothers that have done nothing wrong. This smacks of a heavy handed attempt on the part of our government to establish their own sort of dominance over innocents and those people that they do not understand. Who's next?
I do not in any way condone the LDS lifestyle, and count the movement as a fringe cult that attempts to maintain a weak tie to Christianity in order to maintain some level of credibility. This faction is even more fringe than the LDS church in general, but other than the polygamy laws that can trace their origin to an attempt toward eliminating this cult, I cannot see where any laws were broken other than by the men who pushed the young women into something they did not want to do. They should be punished for their actions, but what of the innocent children in that compound? Their lives are forever marked by this incident, one that they had no part in creating.
What will be next? I'll tell you, more and more religious groups will be"raided" for their aberrant beliefs, today which are quite contrary to law and general accepted standards of living, but tomorrow it will be mainline Christian groups that propose lifestyles that are deemed aberrant by the general population and our government as a result. This country was founded on religious freedom, an escape from government that chose to force its view on those who place faith before anything else. In this country, our ancestors escaped unbelievable persecution in Europe because they placed their personal heirarchy of importance in this order:
1-God (Faith)
2-Family (In the order of spouse, children, grandparents, others)
3-Government
Our founders attempted to place this order into the form of government they created, and our basic rights as citizens. We fought the Civil War over these basic rights, and whether they reside in the governed or the government, that was the beginning of the end for individual rights whether you agree with their legality or not. The only positive outcome of this Civil War was the immediate freedom of the southern slaves, all else signaled the loss of our individual freedoms in favor of centralized government. Our real disagreement in the social order and political arena boils down to a disagreement, or re-writing, of the original intent of our society. This order has eroded to its present day form, which looks something like this:
1-Government (intended to replace self-determinism as the main support of the people)
2-Family (expanded to mean life partner in support of whatever feels right" to me)
3-God (Faith)
Many people today claim to be spiritual, but not religious. The modern church has done a poor job of making faith relevant to people today, and has provided a wall of separation between people that believe there is something else out there bigger than they are and the institutions that provide a very strict and rigid means of finding that "something." The result has been a rebellion of sorts against foundational doctrine, toward church as defined by people searching to ease their spiritual curiousity. We have the Oprah church, the "Black" church, the New Age church and many others variants that take our focus away from the real church, which Christ established for those that place their faith on belief in Him as the Risen Son of God Himself.
There is no Black Church, only one church that devotes its energy toward fulfilling the commands given by the Savior, to love one another and to go and make disciples of all nations. Anything other than that introduces a human element and dilutes the salvation message of Jesus Christ. We need to introduce more people to Him as the means of their salvation, once that relationship is established we can move forward toward teaching more about His manner of living and how we can emulate that in our lives, and lastly we can determine what kind of life choices are acceptable given that relationship is intact. I think our Christian churches today make a mistake of reversing the order I just gave you, we tell others if you act a certain way, don't smoke, drink and have sex then we will be able to introduce them to Jesus eventually. By doing so we lose the connection toward the person of Christ as the first and only focal point, which people like Oprah and social movements like the civil rights movement are all to willing to step in and replace in "their" church. If we kept our focus on Christ, as He said, there would be no need for laws because we would be operating at a level far above their reach, and these fringe cults would be no more because people would find their spirituality within the church.
Many people today also believe that government is the source of their salvation, their keeper and their provider. We have lost the self-determinist drive that resulted in America becoming the greatest nation on the earth, to be replaced with a needy people that turn to politicians and the government program for their welfare. We are even re-defining the term "family" to mean any person we want, and any situation that we choose to live in that feels right to us. We see business as a means to exploit people instead of the machine that drives us forward into prosperity, soon this process will leave us with scarce few self-determinists forced to pay for those who choose to sit and let the government take care of their needs. The family, church and community should be taking care of those needs in the first place, not the government. This single issue alone will ultimately drive us from poverty into oblivion within a few generations, the replacement of the dollar with the Euro will be the first signal of that ultimate transaction of power and wealth. I suppose that may be a good thing, as we are forced to face our problems through the crises that will develop from our socialism and faithlessness, then we will be forced to return to limited government and people that can take care of themselves, which will lead to a resurgence in faith. This is the most important element of our lives, how we get there is not important. Making feeble attempts to separate church and state are just not possible, they are intertwined for people just as much as spirituality, in a much more complicated issue than just establishing "separation."
For now, that "revolution" has yet to take place, we have slid along for years toward the path of socialism, replacing our faith in God with faith in a government that meets our needs. Because government meets our needs as a replacement for our own courage and conviction, we have allowed it to usurp our freedoms to the point where armed men assaulting a compound of mostly women and children, separating them as wards of the courts, no longer alarms us. We just count that sort of action as warranted to preserve society and its laws, and go about our business. Were we still a nation of self determining Christians, that action would have been condemned, lest we see that very government on the horizon ready to assault our own individual rights.
