And maybe, as I said, this is an overreactive comparison. But the question I have for you is this: if you see a tidal wave coming, when do you warn people? If you see the winds changing, when do you batten down the hatches? I'm just a little bit floored by the government's reasoning that I've read in several different places -- basically, that the girls are being groomed for marriage to older men. Now I certainly don't believe forcing underage girls <or any age girls for that matter> to marry is protected Constitutionally, nor is it morally defensible. But setting that aside for a moment, what gives the government the right to say that the traditional families don't deserve to keep their children? Why are they lumped into the same category simply for choosing to live apart from modern life?

Let me tell you a story. It's about a small religious group who deliberately chose to live outside the cultural norms of their fellow citizens. They educated their children in a privately set-up school so that they could exert more control about what was being taught. One day the local government decided the children were being abused by not receiving public education; they were not being taught more traditional subjects like evolution and respect for the lifestyle choices of others. That same local government ruled that the religious group needed to change their curriculum, enroll their children in public schools...or face losing them to foster care. The community refused the three options the government gave them, instead pulling up stakes and moving to another jurisdiction.

Those were Mennonites living in Canada, and that is a true story.

It seems to me that there's a deeper agenda at work in Texas, something just a touch more sinister along the lines of viewpoint discrimination. And the biggest problem is that this is a difficult issue; that there are good logical and moral reasons for preemptively removing some of those children from their homes. After all, those 14-year-old girls could be married off at any time so the usual legal standard of an imminent threat of harm is met. The boys aren't being abused, but they're being trained to believe wrong things so maybe we should go ahead and remove them too, get them into foster care where their minds can be retrained. And, well, gosh while we're at it, we might as well take the toddlers because if we don't they'll grow up to believe wrong things, but if we get them right now we can educate them to fit in with the real world. If we take the children away, the sect we all agree is not quite right will fold in one generation.

Let me tell you another story. It's about a small religious group who deliberately chose to live outside the cultural norms of their fellow citizens. They educated their children in their homes and in groups with their neighbors so that they could exert more control over what was being taught. One day the local government decided that the children were being abused by not receiving standardized public instruction. They weren't being taught traditional subjects like evolution and respect for the lifestyle choices of others by certified professionals, and therefore, would not be able to mix with society once they left the homes of their close-minded parents. Lawsuits were filed, subpoenas were issued, and suddenly an entire community of homeschoolers in small town California had their homes raided. The government acting preemptively, removing the children for their own safety.

What do you suppose your average German was thinking when the government started rounding up the Communists?