Re: Texas Polygamists--sf in real life?

In article <fur3f3$qqu$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Paul Ciszek) wrote:

> In article <ddfr-C1EA9E.21193921042008@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> David Friedman  <ddfr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >
> >So far as I can tell, none of the young women in the Texas compound
have 
> >made such claims. Also, as far as I can tell, there is nothing to keep 
> >women from leaving the FLDS, aside from their unwillingness to leave 
> >everything familiar and plunge into a strange world. 
> 
> They must also leave their children behind.  Is that legally recognized
> as a form of coercion?

If they leave because they object to being forced into marriage, they at 
that point don't have any children yet. At the moment, if some of them 
said they were renouncing the FLDS, do you think there is any chance 
that the court system would give their children back to the FLDS instead 
of to the mothers (or keeping them in foster care)? Yet, so far, none of 
them have done so. 
> 
> >The case which resulted in Jeffs, the head of the sect, being convicted

> >of being an accessory to rape involved a woman who, some noticeable 
> >while after she was married, decided she had been pressured into it. So

> >far as I could tell, there was no claim of rape in any literal sense of

> >the term.
> 
> She was 14 at the time, the man she was forced to not-quite-marry was
19,
> and since no legal marriage was ever performed, he didn't have the
> marriage defense against statutory rape.
> 
> She was opposed to the "marriage" from day one.  

Evidence? Opposed as in "had to be dragged to the altar?"

> She didn't have access
> to any sort of legal recourse.

It occurs to me that this gets us to a different but related issue--the 
rights of parents over children. In my first book, I argued that 
children ought to be free to leave their parents fairly early--certainly 
as young as fourteen--without being dragged back by the police. Do you 
agree?

-- 
 http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
 Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
 Published by Baen, paperback in bookstores now