The Political Inquirer

I was thinking of Quasimodo when I heard that another Waco was brewing last week. The sad old hunchback grabbed the condemned Esmeralda off the gibbet, and fled back to Notre Dame shouting “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” Back in Texas, a couple of morally hunchbacked ogres were likewise crying “Sanctuary!” as the Texas Rangers were rounding up the women and children and knocking on the local Holy of Holies with a search warrant.

The cops got their way and desecrated the temple, which is a good result in the short-run because nobody got shot. More troublesome in the long-term is the precedent set by such a large police action, the equivalent of rounding up a small town, based on a single and anonymous phone call. The police still don’t know if the caller, self-identified as a pregnant teen, is among the over four hundred children now in state custody.

Court dates are being scheduled to begin sorting out the fates of these individuals and their parents, with a hearing yesterday to rubber-stamp the state’s authority. As I write this I am waiting for news from that hearing, but just as Quasimodo learned when the Parliament of Paris voted to deny Esmeralda sanctuary, the state will always give itself precedent over the church.

Sanctuary was written into English Common Law during the rule of Aethelbert, the first christian king of England. It survived some thousand years until the reign of James I. Of course, in those days to say “the church” meant Rome, a supra-national authority, and, as God’s embassy, church property was not subject to the king.

Not that the people of El Dorado don’t think the folks from FLDS (Fundamental Latter Day Saints) aren’t “other”. Ever since the YFZ (Young Female Zombies) Ranch opened up there has been a paranoia in El Dorado, summed up nicely three years ago by Pamela Manson of the Salt Lake Tribune with these quotes:

Johnny Griffin, the county’s chief administrative officer: “We have absolutely no clue what’s going on.”

Mary Leigh Dunagan, Rancher: “When anything is a mystery, you get apprehensive.”

And my favorite, from Randy Mankin, publisher and editor of weekly The Eldorado Success: “They’re watching us (referring to a guard shack inside the ranch gate). That’s OK; we’re watching them.”

And, Indeed they are. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, “Public Officials and others” are taking “frequent plane rides to check out the ranch.” Of course, being a bit paranoid myself, my first reaction to the over-flights was, “who are the ‘others’?” Tourists? Voyeurs?

With such heightened interest in seeing what happens up on the ranch, could the anonymous call that kicked off this whole circus been a fraud? It took a single child to start the “Witch Hysteria” in Salem, and now an entire community of children have been removed from their homes on the evidence of a single phone call.

To the outsider, they are mis-shapen and perverse, but they are still people. Some of ‘em probably aren’t saints, latter or otherwise, but that’s a pretty tough standard to set for yourself. All I know is, our rights as citizens, developed over millennia and writ into history, must stand for the hunchbacked as well as the straight, or they are debased and without meaning.