USA Today: 4 Questions That Need Answers:

Three weeks after Texas authorities removed more than 400 children from a polygamist compound, the facts remain distressingly murky.

1. Did Texas have any option short of taking the children from their families for weeks?
2. Did the state infringe on the group’s right to practice its religion?
3. Did anyone inside the compound violate statutory rape, child molestation or other laws?
4. What is in the best interest of each child?

facts:

* this is the largest child custody case in Texas and U.S. history - 437 children seized
* FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) mothers have appeared on TV wearing prairie dresses and old-fashioned hairdos.
* FLDS practices polygamy
* child welfare officials, tipped off by a phone call, said they saw several teenage girls who were pregnant or with young children. That prompted them to remove all the children.

Fox News Interview:

Those ladies are as close to Stepford Wives as we’ve ever seen. Listen to the one on the right when she says “I feel like the most free woman in the whole world!” The one on the left says “We are free!”. Somebody please check to make sure they aren’t robots. Also check under their dresses to make sure there isn’t some puppeteer’s hand under there.

Art of Bleeding has a nice remix of the interview:

Remember, it’s not a compound! But it does seem like a madhouse.

Texas tries to ease polygamist kids’ culture shock:

Many of the children have seen little or no television. They have been essentially home-schooled all their lives. Most were raised on garden-grown vegetables and twice-daily prayers with family. They frolic in long dresses and buttoned-up shirts from another century. They are unfailingly polite. The 437 children taken from the polygamist compound in West Texas are being scattered to group homes and boys’ and girls’ ranches across the state, plunged into a culture radically different from the community where they and their families shunned the outside world as a hostile, contaminating influence on their godly way of life.

Children raised on the FLDS compound wear pioneer-style dress and keep their hair pinned up in braids, reflecting their standards of modesty. For the same reason, they have little knowledge of pop culture. They pray twice a day. They tend vegetable gardens and raise dairy cows, and eat fresh food. And they are exceedingly polite, always saying “please” and “thank you.”

“Please” and “Thank you”. How quaint!

In contrast, many other children in foster care have a certain worldly swagger, and are there because they have used drugs or committed other crimes. Experts and lawyers say foster care will change the sect children. “These children who have lived in a very insular culture and are suddenly thrust into mainstream culture. There’s going to be problems,” said Susan Hays, who represents a toddler in the custody case. “They are a throwback to the 19th century in how they dress and how they behave.”

Ken Driggs, an Atlanta, Georgia, lawyer who has long studied and written about the FLDS, said if kept away from their parents’ culture long enough, the children may begin to emulate those around them. Pulliam said the temporary foster care facilities have been briefed on the children’s needs. “We’re not going to have them in tank tops and shorts,” she said. Authorities will try to obtain the youngsters’ traditional clothing from their parents, and also arrange for visits from some of the adults, state attorney Gary Banks said. In addition, CPS has sent instructions to the foster homes to feed the youngsters fresh fruits and vegetables, chicken, rice and other foods that may have been grown on the 1,700-acre ranch. “They don’t eat a lot of processed food and we’re not going to encourage that,” Pulliam said, but noted that if the children want to eat processed or junk food, no one is going to stop them.

The children have been educated in a schoolhouse on the compound using a home-school curriculum and may be ahead of public-school students their ages, lawyers said. Hays and Pulliam said the children will continue to be home-schooled by the temporary foster-care providers instead of being thrown into big schools, where they could be bullied because of their differences.

The way this article reads, it almost seems like they were better off in the compound. Good food, good education, tolerance. It would be awesome if it wasn’t for the forced marriage part.

“We recognize it’s critical that these children not be exposed to mainstream culture too quickly or other things that would hinder their success,” agency spokeswoman Shari Pulliam said. “We just want to protect them from abuse and neglect. We’re not trying to change them.”

What’s this “we” stuff? The world will change them. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Oprah, Fox News, crime, government bureaucrats, cheese doodles and Pepsi, hours and hours of mindless television, shitty public schools, and finally, the presidential election coverage. These kids are going to get changed, good and hard.