Texas Authorities Raid Polygamist Compound(400 kids taken from a polygamist compound)

I will have to repeat something I wrote, quite early on: what innocents? what crime? What specific circumstances? What actions in the face of evidence taken, and when should those actions be taken? If the alleged crime in question is, say, a multiple kidnapping and possible multiple murder - say, one sibling from a family from whom two kids have disappeared is found dead, in a field. Authorities find the alleged kidnapper, with the other sibling. Both state nothing is wrong. The alleged kidnapper is "innocent," until proven guilty. Should one just say, 'kay, thanks for the coffee, we'll be going now...sorry to bother you?

The abstracts of your statements must be looked at under the prism of what we are actually talking about, Gworld. In this instance, we disagree as to what we are actually talking about, so we have no concord.

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I will repeat it, and then will have to leave it be: the district court, and the dissenting opinion of the Supreme Court, found evidence that it is the way these children were raised that posed imminent danger to all the children. The appellate court disagreed, and the Supreme Court refused to overturn the appellate decision. Further, the Supreme Court affirmed that not only do these children require relief, but affirmed the right of the state child welfare authorities to exhaustively and routinely oversee these children, for precisely the reason that there is evidence of future harm. The statute rests on immediate harm, and so the action failed.

I say that is a sad thing for those kids, and you say that is a good thing for the mothers and fathers raising them. You believe one way, and I believe another, for reasons gone over now for far too many pages. I have myself posted the court decisions, as have you. Trying to convince the other is, as it actually ever was, actually, useless.

 

More physical threats.. were you bullied in high school, or were you the bully? Grow up.

I said nothing about pedophilia. I was referring to plural marriage, the doctrine given by Jesus himself to Joseph Smith.. That one.. That's a real teeth knocker outer there...

Practice anything to its literal end and again, you're practicing what is preached. The truth is, Joe liked to screw... He liked to screw a lot of women, and ironically, liked in Islam, like them young.

This does not mean your brother does, nor does it mean every mormon does either. Hell, every Catholic does not abstain from pre-marital sex, and every Catholic does not adhere to the Popes birth control no nos...

What it means is, literally, there is no difference between one or the other, fundamentalist or not, if the literal and true testament is followed too the letter.

Apparently your brother and many others have chosen not to follow the literal. I never said they did. What I said while you were getting all bent out of shape thinking about how you'd like to beat me up was say that in principle, there is no difference, if what is preached is practiced.

I know you still won't get it so this is a usual an exercise in futility on my part.

Well, the "true church" never taught that.. A man did.. On the other hand, the original mormon doctrine defines plural marriage and encourages it.

Nothing in the "Bible" I know of talks about no sex before marriage. A mortal man came up with that on his own.

While you will no doubt claim Joe Smith was a mortal too, the difference here is that this was his original doctrine, not something handed down, and then re-interpreted into something else.

They only one with a narrow world view is you my friend. You'll never meet a more open and understanding person on the webby..

 

Drink much?

No, to speak truthfully and cut through the crap, you said the difference between Mormons and the FLDS comes down to semantics. And you further equated your bias to that of your bias against Muslims, generally - all Muslims are fundamentalist terrorists, in so many words:

And, the bottom line, Jeremy, is that you've been caught in the trap of your own making, and your own words. Your tapdancing does not take any of it away. Deal with it.

Yes, to be sure.

By the way - if you have a serious concern that I'm physically threatening you, Jeremy, I'm not. You've nothing to fear from me, but my disappointment.

 

The appeal court mentions 5 teenage pregnancy cases and in reality as it is mentioned in court paper some of these teenagers could have been legally married by their parents consent according to Texas law, but there were over 400 children removed, so I am talking about at least 395 innocent children who had to go through this ordeal and spend time in Texas famous state care system. I am talking about at the innocent parents of these children who saw their lives turn up and down and their children being taken away from them without knowing if they get them back or not. It is funny that you talk about abstract while rambling about kidnappers and murder which has got nothing to do with this.

Can't you see how absurd your argument of future danger is? Let's develop this a little further.
The children of Catholics should be removed from their homes since they will take their children to church and some of them can become a choir boy and be molested by priests.
The children of KKK members should be removed because they learn to hate other races and when they grow up, they can either kill some one and end up in Jail or they can be killed by other races when they fight them.
The children of military personal should be removed because they encourage their children to join military and they can go to Iraq and get killed or come back as invalid.

 

Gworld, respecting this, it was a long, heated, and emotionally charged discussion. You have brought me to think on things more deeply, and to ask myself questions I wouldn't have asked before. Sincerely, well done. That said, I do not think there is an easy answer to any of this, because balancing the rights of individuals isn't easy, if those rights are in conflict - which is what I think we have here.

 

If this has brought you to think more deeply about these questions then I am happy since this is true and ultimate point of a discussion.
On continuing the discussion, I must say what you mention about balancing the rights of individuals is a logical fallacy. There is no balance and there should never be a balance since what it really means is that we remove the rights of some individuals in favor of the rights of other individuals. The rights should not and could not be removed and should be always respected since this is the true measure of a civilized society.
I once mentioned before, the more we hate the suspected criminal and the more heinous the nature of the crime which absolutely disgusts our every sense, the more we have to respect the right of suspect in order to insure that we are punishing the person for his crime and not because of our prejudice.

 

Gworld, and with respect to your views and your right to make them, this will have to likely near the end of my involvement here - I can't agree it is a logical fallacy. Let us take the example of one alleged criminal, and one alleged victim. The alleged abused has the right to protection from harm, and the abuser has the right to the rule of law. Deciding exactly where those rights lie with respect to each other is, I would say, the difficult task of everything we do in society, everyday.

I do agree with you that it shouldn't matter how heinous the crime - the rule of law is the rule of law. My calls in this thread - and I am hopeful once the heat truly dies down, we come to better understand each other here (and I am admitting my errors in this way, and apologizing for them) - were never out of a moral judgment on the faith of the FLDS people, but rather my perception that these children were in serious, irreparable harm. I have said this before, and I do mean this, despite my being an atheist - so long as ye harm none, do what ye will. A basic wiccan creed, and I agree with it.

 

Ironically, this segues brilliantly into my argument against an income tax.'

Nice post.

 

May be I am naive but honestly, I cannot understand what is the difficulty in your example to protect both rights.

 

Well, for instance, protecting the right of the accused to privacy - he or she is, for instance, innocent until proven guilty - while protecting the alleged victim's right to be given any information she or he would need to reasonably protect him or herself. Say, the alleged perpetrator is released on bond. Should the alleged victim be told of the alleged perpetrators whereabouts, and his or her comings and goings? The right of freedom of movement and association - should the alleged perpetrator be free to pay a visit to the alleged victim?

And so forth. Unfortunately, it is often a zero sum game between different people, and their respective rights. Hence, it isn't an easy answer, in many cases.

 

There is a difference and there is no "balancing". I'll try to explain. There are certain rights given to individuals and with it comes certain obligations including not breaking the laws. When individual breaks those laws, society can step in (as long as it respects all the rights and give the accused the full opportunity of hearing or court) and limit those rights or remove it. An extreme example of this situation is when someone is send to prison and his right to freedom is removed. As you notice there is no balancing and it is all about individual action. Now if we get back to your example and let's say a white man attacks black women, as long as that guy is identified and processed through the system, a court can make a decision that some of his rights has to be limited until the trial. We still are dealing with individual and the responsibility of his actions independent of balancing the woman right.
Now let's assume that we decide that in order to protect the black woman safety, we should exclude every white man from that area (because the attacker is not identified), there comes the idea of balancing which removes the right of certain people without due process in order to protect the right to safety of women.
This is not acceptable and in fact this is the same type of reasoning which is the base of ticking bomb scenario and justifying torture in order to "secure" the safety of others.

 

I absolutely reject this. Generally, you are right in this discussion, but the notion that man's natural state is one of obligation is utterly incorrect.

 

What we're moving onto now is the zero-sum game between the rights of the individual to pursue his or her life unimpinged by anyone or anything in a society and the right of society to protect itself - necessarily, a zero-sum game.

Constitutionally, in the States, at least, this has been a cyclical phenomena, swinging between the two. Agreed, under this administration, the swing has radically moved to at least the propaganda of "society protecting itself," egregiously so. The same existed under the '50's, with the '60's response to a swing the other way. Human, imperfect societies have not come up with a way to deal with this unfortunate razor's edge - balancing the right of the individual to do what he or she would with the right of the collectivity called "society" to ensure its health and survival.

 

I only see the society as the sums of it's individuals. I see the rights and obligations of individuals which are protected and enforced by the organizations formed by individuals. I see no extra ordinary right for the society over the individual rights and that is the reason I don't fall for ticking bomb scenario.

 

I am confused, then, by your statement:

Which is why I was saying we are moving into a zero-sum game between the two - individual and society. Perhaps you can explain what you mean by:

Who or what is this? It isn't an individual, it is a collective notion, though made up of individuals - and it limits the individual's freedoms, as it deems necessary, in order to preserve the collective good. This is the zero-sum game I spoke of, and it is a balancing act between the two poles.

 

I see the society, only as an organizational tool that exists because of necessity. Obviously we can not all get in our cars and chase a car thief when he steals a car and therefore we have a police force. I do not designate any special rights or privileges to the society as a being outside of the individuals. Therefore society can not have any greater good that removes the individual rights. I will give an extreme example to clarify which is exactly the other side of ticking bomb scenario. Individual have the right to life. Now imagine that there are many handicapped individuals and babies who are consuming the resources. Should the society be able to kill these handicaps in the name of greater good and improving the life of others in the society? Here, exactly as ticking bomb scenario, we are giving rights to the collective which is above the rights of it's members and this kind of "good intentions" is exactly what paves the way to the hell.

 

This is a real hodge podge. The right is not a right to life. There is no right to life or freedom. It is a property right, the right of self-ownership.

That is why murder is illegal and immoral. To take another's life is to take their property. Or in other terms, to take by force that which does not belong to you.

 

When every natural phenomena is crammed through the grinder of market-anarchy, even one's life becomes a notion of private property, as opposed to...one's life. Priceless. What I would call a classic example of forcing phenomena through a theory, rather than developing a theory from and applying it to phenomena.

 

damn it! lived for so many years without earning any interest on ... myself

 

This is my point, Gworld - everyday, we make these kinds of decisions, and it is a zero-sum game. In both of the examples you have provided, it is a choice between rights, which compete with each other - one wins, one loses.

In the above example, we do choose the individual's right to life, although it detracts from "the greater good" and the betterment of the collective. The individual's right to life is the loss of spare resources that would be used to "better" society and help it to realize a "greater good." (We can go into metaphysics, in which I would argue that under such a scenario, there isn't any greater good to be had by such actions, as, to borrow from John Donne, we're all connected - but another time, likely).

If life weren't such a zero sum, the individual could do whatever he or she wished, absolutely free; and society would thrive apace, with absolutely no relationship - no inverse relationship - between those two realities.