Interfaith Religious News Service

By The Editorial Board | Saturday, April 12, 2008, 05:20 PM
Copyright 2008 The Austin American-Statesman.
Freedom to worship as one chooses without government interference is a fundamental tenet of the U.S. Constitution. It is right there in the First Amendment. All constitutional rights, however, have boundaries.

Americans have been wrestling with the issue of religious freedom since the republic was first conceived. It is often a challenge, but it goes to the heart of the rule of law that is our national foundation.

In his Notes on Religion, founding father and America’s third president Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If anything pass in a religious meeting seditiously and contrary to the public peace, let it be punished in the same manner and no otherwise than as if it had happened in a fair or market.”

In other words, what is proscribed in law cannot be allowed under the banner of religion. If it is against the law to torture animals, then animals cannot legally be tortured as a form of worship. If it is against the law to rape children, it is against the law to rape them anywhere, even in a church that condones it.

That is the difficult intersection at which Texas authorities found themselves when a teenage girl inside the Yearning for Zion Ranch compound called to say she had been abused. At that point, Texas state troopers had to investigate whether child abuse was occurring at the compound.

The ranch was founded by leaders of a breakaway sect of the Mormon Church called the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints that is widely believed to practice polygamy. Its founder is Warren Jeffs, now serving a prison term for abetting the rape of a 14-year-old girl who was forced to marry her cousin.

According to members who have left the sect, young girls are pressed into “spiritual marriages” with older men when they reach puberty. In any state in the union, an older man having sex with an underage girl is a crime, even if a religious group decrees it.

It is a reprehensible belief system that pushes young teenage girls into sex with older men and grooms young men to do the same. Such behavior has little or nothing to do with religious beliefs or spirituality. It is, at its core, a cult of child abuse.

Texas troopers did not raid the ranch near Eldorado because state officials and local residents don’t like the sect members’ religious practices. The Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints have the right to practice religion in the way they want - until that right crosses the line into criminality.

The staunchest defenders of religious freedom have to be chastened when they see pictures of the 416 children removed from the ranch last week. Some were pregnant and others were already mothers. Those are not pictures of morality and spirituality but pictures of something else altogether, something unhealthy and wrong.

Those children and the women who accompanied them must be terrified after being removed from hermetic isolation to a world they barely know and little understand. But Texas authorities had a legal obligation to investigate the ranch after allegations of abuse. Crime cannot be excused in the name of religion.