The commissioner of the agency that oversees CPS in Texas repeated the promise: If another case like the FLDS case arises, Texas CPS will deliberately break the law.
She didn't put it that way, of course. But, just like her spokesman, Patrick Crimmins, Anne Heiligenstein, commissioner of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services said Friday that, were the same kind of case to arise again, her agency would respond in the same way. And that "way" was found to be illegal by Texas courts.
In fact, Heiligenstein went further. According to the Houston Chronicle, Heiligenstein said her agency, in the story's words "made no mistakes" during the entire FLDS raid and its aftermath. No mistakes at all. Not a one.
Those wretched conditions in which the children were interned in the first days – according to CPS' own therapists? Not a mistake. Taking away huge numbers of children from families the agency now effectively admits were innocent? No error there. The enormous emotional trauma inflicted on the children? Somebody else's problem, I guess.
And what is it that outweighs all this harm? (Assuming for the moment that Heiligenstein even understands this harm at all?) The fact that "we educated FLDS mothers and children about abuse, what it looks like and how to report it." So that's why they took all those children. I'd sure like to know how they conveyed these lessons to the infants and toddlers.
Of course, odds are that's not really what these children learned at all. From all accounts, these children lived in a world where their self-proclaimed "prophet" told them the outside world was a terribly dangerous and frightening place, where people were out to get them. So chances are, what they really "learned" was to believe their "prophet" was right.
