Rape cults and the state
The news coming from the FLDS compound is Texas is pretty awful, but this in particular made my stomach turn:
The caller told authorities that her 50-year-old husband would force himself on her sexually, beat her, punch her in the chest and choke her. He once broke several of her ribs, she complained. And while he beat her, one of his six other wives would hold her baby.
That did not come as a shock to Flora Jessop, a former child bride who was returned to the sect when she ran away.
"I spent three years in solitary confinement with them trying to beat Satan out of me because I stood up against God's commandments," Jessop told "Good Morning America."
" I know first-hand that what this little girl is saying is the absolute truth, that she is in imminent danger. They do lock you up. They beat you. They whip you. They brutalize you and they psychologically destroy you. Most of the children would not be able to withstand the psychological torture that they put you through."
[emphasis mine]
This is a cult dedicated to rape, abuse, and systematic dehumanization even after that. At long last the legal authorities broke up the rape cult, but not before they became accomplices in the rape and abuse.

The Patriarchy loves the State; the State loves the Patriarchy
Given the choice between liberty and rape, the State will always choose rape. Whether it's in a State-preserved cult, a State prison, a military base, or a police station, the State wants you to know your place; the State will always make room for rape.
Questions that beg to be asked
I haven't been following this. I'll look at the first two articles on this I grab via Google News.
First article
Saved? Isn't this jumping the gun? Do we know that every single one of these 400 was abused?
So they were taken by the authorities. What do we call it when a private individual forces his way into the home of another private individual and takes his child? There's a name for this and it starts with "k". Just for laughs, let's apply a single moral standard to private individuals and the state.
One teenage mother called to complain about abuse by her husband, and in response hundreds of co-religionists were forcibly removed from their homes? How do you suppose the government would have responded to the same complaint, made by a Catholic living in a Catholic neighborhood?
Texas changed a law in order to make the sect's practices, which had been legal, now illegal? And the trigger of the raid just happens to be a girl whose marriage breaks the new law but not the old law. Hmmm.
In the language of the government, sex with someone below the age of consent is ipso facto sexual abuse, so the above can be read simply as, "girls as young as 13 were getting married and having sex." The "groomed for sex" bit seems to be nothing more than the expression of a judgment that marriage to a 13 year old is "for sex" as opposed to, say, marriage to a 19 year old, which is, one imagines, "for love".
In other words, the abducted children are being held captive at an old army fort.
So the children were indeed forcibly taken from their mothers, who must in effect withdraw from their religion in order to retain their children.
Let's try another article on this.
There's another title that jumps the gun. Who reading this has children? How would you like it if I "freed" your son or daughter from you by breaking into your home, forcibly removing your child, and holding your child captive in an old army fort? How many of you think your children would like it?
So, at the point in time this article was written, a woman had complained of spousal abuse, and in response the government forcibly removed 200 other women and children from their various homes, but not her.
Laws which, according to the other article, were created specifically to target that father's religion.
Some of those same questions
Some of those same questions occurred to me.
Wendy McElroy
also has questions about the raid.
Rape cult update
Rape cult update:
Why are Cults able to
Why are Cults able to practice such things when they clearly violate constitutional rights such as the Right to not be harmed?
Where is the State that can protect the abuse of so many constitutional rights with the excuse that they have Freedom of Religion?
Where is the State that can
Where is the State that can protect us from the abuse of so many constitutional rights performed by Cults with the excuse that they are protected with Freedom of Religion?
Is freedom of religion, freedom to rape?
Post-mortem
Funny you should revive this by commenting on it now. Shall we do a post-mortem? Let's, for example, reconsider this line:
"This little girl" was in fact a fictional character created by a hoaxer. "Absolute truth" turned out to be something that this hoax was not. One can wonder why it was the state was not able to "break up" this "rape cult" except by grossly overreacting to a phone call which turned out to be a complete fabrication made by an outsider hostile to the group.
Anyway, the bolded line here is that Flora Jessop was returned when she ran away. That has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the state's treatment of children and parents. If an underage child runs away, it's returned to its parents. That's what the state does, and it has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with cults, everything to do with standard practice concerning parents and children. If you want to critique this practice, fine. Let the state stop returning underage runaways to their parents. If an underage child falls in love with a middle-aged man she met on the Internet and leaves her parents to be with him, that's her business and her right, and the man must not be charged with kidnapping.
Or maybe you want to reconsider. Maybe the practice of returning runaways to parents isn't so bad after all. Whatever you decide, try to be consistent, and try to avoid rationalizing an incoherent position whose only consistent goal is to crush people with lifestyles and childrearing practices that you disapprove of.