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A statewide political action committee serving home schoolers for more than 20 years
May 24, 2008
Month Year
In This Issue
Around Texas
Presidential Election
National News
Miscellaneous
Appeals Court Rules Texas Had No Right to Seize Sect Kids
Around Texas
 
FLDS Child-Custody Case Under Way in San Angelo Amid Confusion, Delays
Judges and attorneys grappled Monday with a sprawling, contentious first day of YFZ Ranch status hearings that included nonexistent children, children with identical birth dates and numerous delays.
 
It was the call for help that launched one of the largest raids on a religious compound in U.S. history. But on Monday, a Child Protective Services attorney asked for the case involving a 16-year-old known as "Sarah," who claimed sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her husband, to be dropped.
 
Child Welfare Workers Try Twice to Search Texas Polygamists' Ranch for More Kids
State child-abuse investigators returned twice to a polygamist sect ranch Wednesday to see if additional youngsters, not yet swept into state care, are living there.
 
Sect Children Not to Hear Leader's Name, Texas CPS Says
Texas child welfare officials acknowledged today that the agency has isolated the children it removed from a polygamist community from any mention of the group's spiritual leader, who was convicted as an accomplice to rape last year for arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl.

CPS Hears There May Still Be Children on FLDS Ranch
Texas Child Protective Services tried to access a polygamist sect's ranch Wednesday to verify new reports that other children may have escaped detection during a state raid last month.
With the price tag of providing care for more than 400 children seized last month from a polygamist ranch in West Texas expected to reach the tens of millions of dollars, a legislative panel suggested Tuesday that the state explore garnisheeing the religious organization's assets to recoup the costs.
San Antonio Express-News
James Lee Woodard walked out of a Texas prison last month a free man. At age 55, he had served 27 years for the 1980 rape and murder of a Dallas woman. It was a crime he didn't commit.
 
The Senate's top social services policy writer says she fears that Child Protective Services is so strapped because of its raid of a polygamist sect last month that horrific child abuse in other parts of the state may go undetected.
Child Protective Services will not let a polygamist sect's children keep photographs of the group's spiritual leader, Warren Jeffs, or any of his instructional materials because he's a convicted sex offender, a CPS spokeswoman said Tuesday.
As status hearings continue for child members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the number of children in state custody continues to drop.

Lawyer: Sect Boys Denied Due Process
While the courts try to sort out which kids can be returned to their parents after being removed from their homes at the Yearning For Zion Ranch near Eldorado, a local attorney representing five of the removed boys said the system is not operating in the children's best interests.
 
Presidential Election
 
Obama Trying to Shut Up Clinton and McCain
by Robert Novak and Tim Carney
Sen. Hillary Clinton's landslide primary victory Tuesday over Sen. Barack Obama in Kentucky is cause for at least a little Republican cheer in a bleak political landscape, despite Obama's healthy win in Oregon.There is substantial voter rejection of Obama, with half of Kentucky's Democrats (as reflected in exit polls) saying they cannot vote for Obama in November.
National News
 
GOP Cancer: Party Could Lose 20 More Seats
For the past 18 months, ever since the 2006 elections, congressional Republicans have been like a hospital patient trying to convince visitors that he is not really all that sick: a bit under the weather; actually feel better than I sound; should be up and about any day; thanks for asking.
 
Miscellaneous
 
Why Doctors Are Heading for Texas
When Sam Houston was still hanging his hat in Tennessee in the 1830s, it wasn't uncommon for fellow Tennesseans who were packing up and moving south and west to hang a sign on their cabins that read "GTT" - Gone to Texas.
 
Appeals Court Rules Texas Had No Right to Seize Sect Kids
gavel 
 
Lisa Sandbert  and Terri Langford

A Texas appeals court ruled today that a San Angelo judge exceeded her discretion when she ordered the state to take custody of children from a polygamist sect.

The order by a panel of the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin gave State District Judge Barbara Walther 10 days to vacate her order, which applied to more than 460 children.

It wasn't immediately clear whether the decision means the children will be returned right away to the custody of their parents, followers of a breakaway Mormon sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

A spokesman for Texas' Child Protective Services said attorneys were reviewing the order. "Any decision regarding an appeal will be made later," Patrick Crimmins said.

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