In the wake of previous compound breeches gone terribly wrong, I'm not bothered by photos of the armed police and personnel carriers that accompanied the raid -- but what I keep rolling over and over in my mind is the fact that they removed all those children on such scant evidence.

I'm not saying I agree with marrying off 14-year-olds by any means, and certainly if abuse is taking place children need to be protected. But it seems to me the governmental action in this case went incredibly overboard, especially if, as I read somewhere, they had a spy in the compound for four years and were unable to collect enough evidence to bring charges.

So now 400+ children are camping in a stadium, many separated from their mothers, as they await the long, arduous legal process that will decide their fates. And from the looks of this article, it will be even more long and arduous than usual.

Of course I would have no way of knowing if any abuse was actually taking place, it just strikes me as incredibly over-the-top, painting all those families with a broad stroke if you will.

To me, the bottom line is this: a government agency was suspicious enough of a group of people choosing to live out their beliefs in a non-standard way <I'm talking about removing from modern life, not marrying off children!> that they put a spy in their midst. That didn't work so they took the first break they got, a possibly prank phone call, to swoop in and remove all the children.

Why is this troubling? Let me give you a brief bullet point list of stories I've read over the past year:

• Richard Dawkins' much-beloved book The God Delusion saying that raising your children with a Biblically-centric worldview is child abuse.
• Rosie O'Donnell <among others> saying conservative Christians are as dangerous as Jihadists.
• A woman who left her partner and the lesbian lifestyle to become a Christian forced into a legal battle to determine whether being a Christian and teaching her child those values makes her unfit.
• A couple in California has their parental rights challenged because they want to homeschool their children with Christian values rather than enroll them in a public school they find morally distasteful.

It troubles me that the government would take such a large action, even though when all is said and done -- I freely admit -- it may very well have been justified. But what is most troubling is that this raid in Texas against a group of religious folk whose beliefs are considered harmful might very well turn out to be precedent-setting.