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Protect Children or Religious Freedom?
Thursday's court ruling on the raid on the polygamists' ranch in Texas comes as authorities in three states struggle with how to protect children when constitutional safeguards for religious liberty are involved.
Part of what makes these complex and contentious cases in Texas, Oregon, and Wisconsin intriguing is that they involve religious practices – polygamy and religious healing – that have generated heated legal controversies in the United States since the mid-19th Century.
On April 3, authorities in Texas conducted a massive raid on the Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado, operated by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Responding to reports that the sect had coerced dozens of underage girls – some of them as young as 14 – into engaging in polygamy and bearing children, officials took 463 children into custody. This was an unprecedented maneuver, and it most likely will take months, if not longer, for courts to sort out the ultimate fate of the children and the adult men who allegedly mistreated them.
On Thursday, a Texas appellate court ruled that child welfare officials had no right to seize children living at a polygamist sect's ranch. The court ruled that, under Texas law, the grounds for removing the FLDS children were “legally and factually insufficient." The court did not immediately order the children to be returned.
Polygamists are no strangers to the courts. A succession of 19th-Century polygamy cases played a crucial role in determining the parameters of the First Amendment’s protections for religious liberty. In United States v. Reynolds (1879), which centered on the constitutionality of the federal government’s efforts to ban polygamy in Utah Territory, the U.S. Supreme Court held that while religious beliefs were inviolable, religious practices could be brought under the rubric of state control when they posed a significant threat to public welfare.
Although the Reynolds opinion continues to influence American constitutional law, it failed to squelch the practice of polygamy. The main body of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) officially renounced the practice of “plural marriage” in 1890, but renegade sects such as FLDS have continued to engage in it in isolated areas where they can evade state oversight. Their isolation might be short-lived, as the Texas raid and the conviction of FDLS leader Warren Jeffs have shown. (In 2007, a Utah judge sentenced Jeffs to two consecutive prison terms of five years to life for his conviction on two counts of being an accomplice to rape.)
Religious healing practices occupy a somewhat murkier position in our legal landscape. In the United States, adults always have been free to treat themselves with prayer rather than medicine or surgery, and many states have put in place legal safeguards for parents who wish to address their children’s illnesses and injuries by spiritual means alone. Time and again over the past century, these religious-healing exemptions have complicated the efforts of prosecutors who hope to hold parents legally accountable under manslaughter or child abuse statutes after their children die for ailments that could have been treated successfully by medicine.
The recent deaths of children in Oregon and Wisconsin have highlighted how tricky these spiritual healing cases can be. After 11-year old Kara Neumann died from diabetic ketoacidosis on Easter Sunday, the district of attorney of Marathon County, Wisconsin, charged the girl’s parents with second-degree reckless homicide because they had eschewed medical treatment for prayer. Several observers of the case have suggested that prosecutors might face an uphill battle because of the presence of a religious healing exemption in another part of the Wisconsin criminal code. The prosecution of faith-healers Carl and Raylene Worthington in Oregon might be somewhat more straightforward, given that the state removed its exemption for religious healing almost a decade ago.
All of these recent cases are complex because they require the legal system to reconcile a variety of interests. Treasuring religious liberty, most Americans recoil at infringements on the faith-based practices that help to define our religious lives. And, too, we generally believe that parents should have wide latitude in directing the upbringing of their children. But those sentiments are challenged when the physical and emotional welfare of children – the most vulnerable members of our society – is at risk.
Shawn Francis Peters’ latest book, "When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law," was published in October by Oxford University Press. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
By Shawn Peters |
May 22, 2008; 2:26 PM ET
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Posted by: William Drury-Turnbull | July 19, 2008 3:44 PM
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I have always been very torn over this issue. In my beliefs, if a parent is raising a child to be anything but a Christian, then he is actually doing that child more harm than if he were physically abusing the child. The former has eternal consequences, while the latter is temporary. However, it isn't so simple (even if everyone shared my beliefs exactly, which of course they most assuredly don't). Spiritual abuse can be overturned in adulthood, while physical abuse may prevent the child from ever reaching adulthood. Plus, the latter is likely to cause spiritual harm that may have eternal consequences. So, abuse doesn't usually conveniently distinguish itself into neat categories of "bearable" and "not to be borne." And where people draw the line will invariably be influenced by their religious beliefs. In the end, all law enforcement comes down to imposing the moral beliefs of the majority on the minority of people who do not share those beliefs.
Posted by: dmm | May 23, 2008 11:56 AM
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I find your article interesting and common practice here in New Zealand.
But I can't help wondering that if the state were to see people as a creation of God as scritpure tell, and that healing come through faith, then is that not part of the argument that giving our children over to God for healing and because we are created in His own image then suring if He chooses to heal he will or if He doesn't then our children are in a better place.
It is all about what is right and what is wrong and it depends whose lenses you look through.
For the record I am not for a moment discounting that God also allowed for doctors but again an arguement could be is western medicine better than say Maori medicine again it is all about whose lenses you look through.
For me the scriptures hold the answer to worldly problems and here we could get into an arguement of total absolute authority.
Just some thoughts.
William