Your Opinion Please

I’m not a big newsie. I’ll scan a couple of web pages and read the local and living sections of my daily fish wrapper, but all in all, I don’t care much for the news. It’s usually bad news anyway; someone was murdered, someone was raped, a storm here, a car wreck there, all pretty depressing stuff. But every once in a while I follow a news story closely and (gasp) read everything I can.

All of which is amusing considering I think the media is bought and paid for and they report what they are told to report. It’s all about a person’s worldview, baby. But that’s another rant.

Like thousands of other people I’ve been following the Texas polygamist story. Before I go much further, I should mention that I am not a Mormon of any shade and I do not condone polygamy (nor does the mainstream Mormon Church). After all, polygamy is just a man’s dream come true, right girls? Nor do I condone underage marriage (I have a niece who married at 16 and yes her mother is an idiot, thank you very much). As far as abuse of any kind against children, I am a mother bear. I think people who intentionally and willfully hurt a child deserve strict punishment. For all those pedophiles out there, I know how to cure your problem: it’s called the death penalty.

As I’ve followed the story of the mothers and children who have now been separated by the state of Texas, I cannot help but feel that something is not ringing true. Having been a foster parent I’ve made some observations about the “system”. One thing I learned and learned quickly was that social workers lie. I am not an ostrich whose head is stuck so firmly in the ground that I do not realize that people do tell lies. Heck, I’ve lied (not good, but true).

Yet, I find it disturbing that people, whose job it is to investigate and protect children, lie and apparently they do so a lot. A friend of mine who had worked as a foster parent and then Department of Human Services volunteer phoned me to give me the real deal concerning social workers.

“They aren’t like people you know Ann. They lie. They’ll lie if the truth is sitting two feet away from them ready to bite. Be careful.”

With that bit o’ news we continued with our application and soon became the foster parents to the Z-Monster and The Destroyer. It was at our first court hearing, just two weeks after the girls came to live with us that we learned that social workers do indeed lie. In fact, they are so brazen; they’ll even lie to a judge, in court, with the court reporter ticking away. All I could do was sit there, mouth hanging open, and blink. Its called perjury, isn’t it?

But, back to the topic at hand; should the mothers in this case be treated as criminals without due course of law? Their children have been removed from their custody into an already overly full foster care system (there are over 500,000 children in foster care across the country at this time). Most of these children, if the judge deems it necessary will be placed in intake centers, because there is simply no way there are enough foster homes in the surrounding areas.

The question is, have the mother’s rights been trampled upon? They say they’ve been lied to, which in my experience is a complete possibility.

So? Tell me, what do you think?