Mormon Update – Mental Health Staff

I know that this is no longer monitored by the media, they’ve since moved on (probably to something about Britney or one of the other single name celebrities), but there is still action on the Mormon children front:

Mental health workers sent to emergency shelters in San Angelo last month to help care for the hundreds of women and children removed from a polygamist sect’s West Texas ranch have sharply criticized the Child Protective Services operation, telling their governing board it unnecessarily traumatized the kids.

…

All nine reports by employees of the Hill Country Community Mental Health-Mental Retardation Center expressed varying degrees of anger toward the state’s child welfare agency for removing the children from their community, separating them from their mothers or for the way CPS workers conducted themselves at the shelter.

…

All the MHMR workers described themselves as impressed by the mothers they worked with. Many of them described child welfare workers as high-handed, rude or uncaring toward the mothers and overzealous in their concerns that they might escape or harm their keepers.

Two reported that the CPS workers were friendly and compassionate.

Three reported that CPS workers lied to the mothers; one described it as a tactic to make separating them from their children go easier. Several said the mothers were denied access to their lawyers.

Some of the MHMR workers said the crowded conditions at the shelter allowed upper respiratory infections and chicken pox to spread rapidly and many noted the shelter’s other discomforts. One described it as deliberate, a form of coercion to aid the investigation: “The more uncomfortable they were the more CPS thought they would talk.”¹

The CPS had no right to do what they did.  I’m sure that to some extent they thought they were doing the “right thing”, however, I wonder how long before these people are released since there are no charges being made.

Musicguy, on another thread, likened this to GITMO, and while there are similarities there are also differences.  The similarities are that there are a group of people being held without being charged with a crime.  They were taken because of their religion or who they were associated with, and they may or may not know of a crime.  They are also similar in that the government believes that holding them will get them the information that they seek.

Only in the case of Texas, they aren’t holding the people that are the ones committing a crime– they’re holding children whom they know to be innocent.  They’re keeping these children away from their mothers, who no one suspects of guilt, and they may even be victims themselves.  Let alone all the other permutations (like the monogamous marriages and the divorced single parent)…

1. Hat Tip: Vox Day [↩]