The FLDS fiasco and the lust for power

I've been following the FLDS fiasco at Jeff Culbreath's blog. His latest post on the subject is here.

I admit to being the kind of person who fantasizes about making the world right. From time to time I realize that this is not really a healthy habit of mind. But sometimes I get exceedingly upset about people who, for example, raise their children to hate Jews so much that they idolize suicide bombers and hope to grow up to be like them. Some of the things coming out of Palestinian media are beyond depressing. I've got a whole file of the links, including interviews with and Palestinian media depictions of the children of Rim, a woman suicide bomber. "How many Jews did Mommy kill?" and so forth. It's almost too much to bear, watching these children's minds be corrupted. LGF sometimes has stuff about Hamas children's television. It's just about beyond belief. And I have sometimes toyed with the idea that people who are going to teach their children these twisted ideas could, quite justly, have all their children taken away from them so that they couldn't poison their minds like this anymore. The children could be raised by, I don't know, Mother Teresa's nuns or something.

But even though I would stand by the idea that Hamas's Jew-eating bunny (they had a Mouse and a Bee, too, but in the TV show's imaginary world the Israelis killed them), the various horrific inciting commercials, and the school curricula and school programs that glorify murder to the children may and should justly be suppressed, the terrible mess caused by Child Protective Services' power trip in our own Texas, U.S.A., has caused me to realize that you have to let parents mess up kids' minds. That is to say, it is not just cause for removing children forcibly from their parents that the parents are teaching the children pernicious ideas, even if they really are pernicious ideas. Most of the time I'm sufficiently sane to realize this and am, indeed, something of a parental rights watchdog, but sometimes (after I've been reading too much about Muslims and Palestinians), it's good for me to be reminded.

I have no doubt that the CPS workers were sincere. That's part of the problem, isn't it? Lawrence Auster is always pointing out that conservatives should take liberals more seriously. What he means is that liberals aren't just doing what they do to aggrandize themselves. Many of them are true believers. I suppose I'd say that self-aggrandizement and sincerity are compatible. The CPS workers decided that this cult was just bad, bad, bad, that children shouldn't be raised in it, and they went in with no deference to the rule of law and grabbed over 400 children of all ages, every single child down to the infant born yesterday, in one fell swoop! By their own representation, what was supposed to be so bad was that underage girls were being married against their will. Even granting this, what the dickens does this have to do with newborn babies? Since when do the laws of the United States or the State of Texas permit the confiscation of infants on the grounds that they may be raised to sanction or participate in underage or even forced marriage? But all the indications are that the CPS just decided that this whole sub-society had to be brought to an end. Finis. Done.

Frankly, if I had breathed a word of the idea that Palestinian children should be taken from their death-cult-teaching parents so that they would not be raised in that fashion, the word "genocide" would not have been long in coming to the lips of readers. But oddly enough, the fact that CPS was trying, by the confiscation of the next generation, to wipe this weird polygamist sect from the face of the earth was not called this by anyone that I know of. Fortunately, though, there still is a rule of law in the state of Texas, and it looks as if CPS and Judge Barbara Walther may get a bit of a slap-down from the higher courts over their abuse of power.

Lord Acton was undoubtedly right: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." And the power to snatch children is somewhere pretty high up on the scale towards absolute power.

So I don't want it, and I'm glad I don't have it. And perhaps we should pray for the souls of the CPS workers who think they do have it, and who think they can wield it to wipe out bad ideas. For it is surely a corrupting thing.