Pine Belt Progressive

Those of you who are starting to get to know me through my writing should understand why I just can’t stay away from this. It has implications for most of the issues I write about: authoritarianism, civil liberties, religion in politics, regressive social practices, human rights, media issues. But first and foremost, it has implications for the rule of law.

The mainstream media should be writing stories like this (must-read) about FLDS instead of engaging in this stupidity, which hardly qualifies as writing at all. The issues Sara raises in her post today are chilling, and they have a big-picture significance to the political problems we’ve been wrestling with in the U.S. at least since Bush took office.

Even though some people are trying to make this about religious freedom and dismiss it by saying it’s all based upon consensual relationships, there are much more important issues at play here. Like so many other issues that plague us today, there’s a point here about the rule of law that needs to be made repeatedly.

We cannot afford to allow any group, religious or otherwise, to set up its own police departments, courts, and healthcare systems and use those institutions to hold our public laws in abeyance and impose their own laws on large numbers of people. That’s tantamount to forming a state-within-a-state, and it’s dangerous. If FLDS can do this, Dominionist groups and separatist political groups can do it, too. This is precisely the sort of thing that has the potential to bring down the system if it becomes widespread enough.

It’s a direct challenge to the state’s monopoly on the use of force within its borders. Since the monopoly on violence is what backs up the laws we use to maintain civil order, that makes it a threat to the legitimacy of the laws and by extension, a threat to our domestic tranquility. This is not the place to have an argument about whether the state ought to use violence to back up our laws. The fact of the matter is that it claims sole authority to do so, and this claim is the single most important factor in maintaining the rule of law (to the extent that we are actually maintaining it at the moment).

If there was ever a case where the government has security and public safety interests that outweigh individual rights to religious liberty, this is one. That said, I think this situation is fraught with peril. Here are the two most significant dangers I see.

First, the politics are not easy to navigate. This gives the national government an incentive to use the First Amendment as a shield to stay out of it, even though the government rarely considers the First Amendment on a host of other issues with First Amendment implications. It’s going to be all too easy for faux-libertarian state and local authorities to do the same, especially in states which don’t have experience dealing with similar groups. This means that absent real public pressure, FLDS is going to continue to operate around the country, and they’re going to keep doing the same things they have been doing in Texas. It’s foolish and dishonest to take a “bad apples” approach here. It’s clear that these people have erected an interstate institutional system and are using it to regulate the behavior of a massive number of people outside the reach of the law.

Second, when officials do attempt to deal with FLDS as Texas is doing now, there’s a danger that people on either side might get out of control and touch off a violent encounter or a mass murder/suicide. When that happens, the people who die are going to be viewed as martyrs and it’s very likely the media will feed that perception. Plus, the authorities who are struggling to deal with this are going to take a hit, even if they’ve done everything reasonably possible to prevent the violence from occurring. The failure to deal proactively with this group has practically guaranteed that the authorities who deal with them on the ground when necessity dictates that they do so will face a no-win situation. Smarter people than me need to be figuring out ways to minimize the risk of violence on all sides when dealing with this group and similar ones.

I am very sensitive to the fact that we must preserve a high degree of autonomy for people who live beyond the boundaries of what passes for “mainstream” in our society. I don’t expect everyone to live the way I do (or anyone to, for that matter). I want to be left alone to make my own choices as much as the next person, and in most cases, I strongly support the rights of others to enjoy the same freedom. That said, there is a mountain of evidence already that this group has engaged in practices which meet our accepted legal definitions of child abuse and human trafficking. They’ve set up institutions to facilitate this behavior across state lines and international borders. These institutions have been paid for in part with public money.

When you view it that way, you can easily see that this is a localized form of authoritarianism (or fascism if you prefer), and it has the infrastructure in place across the country to go national in a big way. FLDS has compounds in Mexico and Canada as well as the U.S. The fact that they have some religious views that a lot of people find strange does not make their operation any less a criminal enterprise than organizations which smuggle slaves purely for profit. The government should take steps to: 1) Give the alleged criminals in this case a fair trial and punish them if convicted; 2) Help the victims recover; and 3) Impose sufficient regulations on this group to prevent them from engaging in criminal behavior in the future.

With all due respect to people who have genuine questions about the implications of this case for individual rights, I must write this. Making this issue all about freedom to worship in one’s own way or about the right to engage in non-conformist family and sexual practices, while failing to deal with the issues I’ve laid out for you here, is concern trolling of the most pernicious sort. We must not give our tacit consent to this behavior. We need to strip away the religious and ideological content of this issue and examine it long enough to understand that these people have developed an organizational blueprint. Any group with enough money and social cohesion can apply this blueprint to their own enterprises. This situation is too dangerous to ignore. It’s one more canary in the mine that those of us who are looking at trends which encourage the breakdown of public order need to be paying attention to.

To me, FLDS’ religious views are not the controlling issue here. Their behavior is the controlling issue. I’m aware that one informs the other; but it’s sometimes helpful to stay away from ideological content when we discuss these issues in the context of law and individual rights. I haven’t said much about the religious content of this issue here for precisely that reason. However, the religious implications are important to the social and political context that everyone caught up in this situation is forced to operate in. It’s important to the media narrative. I think the religious views themselves need to be discussed thoroughly, too. So I’ll have a follow-up post later in the week for my readers who are religious, or who are interested in the perspective of a religious person on the actual religious views of this group.