The ongoing Texas polygamous cult saga — or, those clothes! That hair!

Warning: Following rant, not about writing.

Ladies, can we have a consensus here? Basically, if some guy tells you you can’t get to heaven unless you have sex with him and his buddies and have their babies, oh yeah and dress the way he tells you, and then marries off your teenage daughters to his buddies, well, no.  He’s not a prophet, he doesn’t have a direct line to God, he just wants to get laid, and the younger the better.

Don’t you also love the way this particular cult manages to get rid of the young men too so as to not have to compete? When you read what these poor kids go through, both the young women and the young men, it is just boggling to me that a mother would do that, or allow such crimes to be committed, to her daughters and sons. And so I am really angry at these mothers, and say mean things at the television when I see them on the news. How could you do this to your children?!

  At the same time, I really feel for these women. Their kids have been taken from them and they look pretty shell-shocked. I also think that once again, the way the authorities have handled the case has been Keystone Kops at best. At worst, I suppose we’re back to the Waco conflagration, so maybe this is the best we can get. But it looks like the tip was a fake and we may never get to the bottom of who that woman is who called it in. Maybe she thought she was doing the right thing. Instead, we’ve got 400 kids separated from what appear to be loving parents even if they belong to an insane cult and it doesn’t look like the authorities are going to let the kids go back any time soon.

So what happens next depends on people keeping their heads. Warren Jeffs is already in jail, no one can find the tipster, and the Texas courts are putting the children in foster care. No one likes cults that force teen girls to get married when they are younger than the age of consent. Nor do we like cults that discard teenage boys (some as young as twelve, apparently) as cavalierly as this one does. I don’t know how we put the genie back in the bottle. With luck, there will be minimal damage to these children’s lives, but I am betting that there’s more to come.

As for why women just give up their lives like that for guys who are manipulative liars, well … that’s another rant for another time.