The news was simply too good to hide under a bushel.

Arrow Child and Family Ministries, a foster care and adoption agency with headquarters near Houston, “found out today that they will be receiving 80-100 permanent placement children,” exulted the sister of an assistant to Mark A. Tennant, founder and head of the agency. “More than likely, the parental rights of their parents will eventually be terminated and they will be placed in foster homes and/or adopted out.”

That letter was set adrift in the blogosphere (scroll down to comment number 71 et. seq.) sometime around April 22-23 — that is, at approximately the same time that Judge Barbara Walther issued a “placement order” that resulted in hundreds of children being torn away from their mothers and sent away in buses.

Walther has a lot to answer for, beginning with the fact that she didn’t compel the State to produce the anonymous “victim” whose call produced the original search warrant for the YFZ Ranch. It’s also quite likely that she was aware of the fact that “Sarah” didn’t exist, and that the original call was a demented hoax, at the time Walther issued the original search warrant; she had to have known as much when she issued the April 22 “placement order.”

So it’s clear that Walther, like most people who wear the habiliments of the judicial profession, is guilty of serious crimes against the Constitution. But she hasn’t yet issued an order to “terminate” the parental rights of the FLDS mothers. The obvious import of the letter cited above is that this development is a foregone conclusion, since provisions have already been made for long-term custodial care for the abducted children by Arrow and other foster care/adoption agencies.

“These children will be in a wonderful Christian environment,” gushes the author of that letter, who goes on to explain that the Arrow Center was in need of volunteers to help clean the facility and perform other routine tasks “over the next couple of years.” Furthermore, “it looks like CPS [Child “Protective” Services] is coordinating with the University of Texas to have a charter school on site at the retreat center. This will take place in the fall. Therefore: Arrow will have to build several new buildings for the school.”

Immediately after the children had been removed from YFZ, the Arrow Center “sent a staff of 15 over a two week period to assist the Department [of Family and Protective Services] and other providers on the ground in San Angelo to help with activities and supervision of the children and families from the compound.”

How thoughtful of them.

Mental health workers assigned to help CPS have testified that the conditions for FLDS children and mothers in state custody were akin to those of Nazi “concentration camps.” So the role played by the good Christian people from the Arrow Center was to help with “activities.” You know, sort of like organizing games of Red Rover and Ring-around-the-Rosy at Ravensbruck.

Obviously, a great deal of planning and preparation went into all of this. The initial raid on YFZ Ranch took place on April 3; within less than a week, Houston’s NBC affiliate KVUE reported that Arrow’s staff was preparing to receive scores of children.

“The Arrow Retreat Center was built to be just that — a retreat center,” reported KVUE. “But after Hurricane Katrina, they turned it into a shelter. Now that, once again, hundreds of children are being forced from their homes in West Texas, the center could be used to house them.”

Rex and Patricia Childress, foster parents of five boys, were presented by KVUE as potential foster parents for girls ripped from their home at YFZ Ranch.

“You’ve got to show [the children] that people do care about them, and that there are people out here that are willing to help,” Rex Childress explained.

The typical passive consumer of the officially sanctioned lies we call “news” was thus invited to perceive the scores of children taken from their mothers as victims of some tragic caprice of inscrutable nature, rather than the victims of armed abduction by a state-sanctioned criminal syndicate called the CPS.

There’s no evidence at all that the children of YFZ Ranch had been abused or neglected in any way, or that they had been deprived of affection from the people who mattered the most to them. And now that those kind, caring, self-described Christian people have “helped” them by terrorizing them at gunpoint and breaking up their families, at least some of these children will be left hurting, confused, and probably susceptible to whatever mind-rape the CPS sees fit to inflict on them in the course of creating “evidence” to justify this entire abominable enterprise.

After being silent about the matter for a month — he was busy; it takes time to find the right shade of Just For Men to keep one’s youthful thatch of hair a preternatural chestnut brown — Texas Governor Rick Perry finally commented about the El Dorado affair. By way of an intermediary, Perry defended the honor, such as it is, of the CPS and promised a full investigation of the allegations of CPS mistreatment at San Angelo. That investigation of the CPS will be conducted by the CPS, of course.

“The Governor is very proud of the work being done by CPS,” Perry said via spokeswoman Krista Piferrer. “CPS has handled a very complex situation both professionally and compassionately. ” Perry also “applauded” the CPS for promising an “internal” inquiry into the charges, which amounts to the Governor granting the agency plenary authority to conduct a cover-up.

This is the same Governor Perry, of course, who has presided over a foster care system rife with abuse — including murder and the sexual molestation of children as young as three years of age. It is the same Governor Perry who promised a “top-to-bottom review” of the Texas Youth Commission (TYC) following revelations of widespread physical and sexual abuse of teenage detainees by guards, staff, and other inmates within that juvenile correctional system. In the year that’s passed since the TYC scandal went public, the agency has been through five chief administrators without seeing any serious improvement.

Given the near-ubiquity of criminal violence and abuse directed at children in Rick Perry’s Texas, I’m starting to wonder if the YFZ Ranch was the only place in the state where children were safe from such treatment.

So far there is no evidence that anyone living there was ever mistreated in any way. And since the only witnesses to any alleged abuse are going to be in the custody of an agency with every reason to taint their testimony, it’s difficult to see how any abuse allegation could be free of reasonable doubt. But with the children securely in their possession, the CPS can either manufacture the needed “evidence” after the fact, or simply hold on to the children while legal proceedings grind on interminably.

Uh-oh: FLDS women under CPS detention are seen waving at friends and family members, a gesture they were told was forbidden to them.

Like the war on Iraq, the war waged by Texas on the women and children of the FLDS community may turn out to be an immaculate deception.

Everybody knows that the reasons behind it are utterly spurious, and that innocent people are suffering needlessly, but nobody is willing to do what is necessary to end it and punish those responsible. So people just pretend as if the truth is either infinitely malleable, or entirely inconsequential.

And we can see good Christian people playing roles similar to those they’ve essayed where the war in Iraq is concerned. Christians have been enablers, facilitators, and supporters of official crimes, eager consumers and diligent regurgitators of official propaganda, sanctimonious sanctifiers of the State’s criminal aggression, and pious profiteers when presented with the opportunity.

If those who profess to worship Jesus can’t become principled opponents of the lawless Regime ruling us, the very least they should do is stop volunteering to be the ice cream every time the State feeds us a helping of cowpie ala mode.

Update: The Ice Cream’s All Gone…

… and this is what’s underneath:

“Abandoning their religion and husbands may be the only way that FLDS mothers will be reunited with their children,” reports Rod Decker of Salt Lake City’s KUTV news. “Texas officials issued new rules Thursday that dictate what the mothers will have to do before the state will return the 464 children. The plan says that the mothers will have to prove that they have provided the children with `a home free of persons who have, or will abuse the children.'”

Does the State of Texas now have a fully functioning Department of Pre-Crime? Or does it merely expect the mothers to exercise some form of precognitive gifts?

Neither is the case, of course. As Decker surmises, the People’s Republic of Texas is demanding nothing less than a full and unconditional repudiation of the FLDS religion by the mothers, and the rat bastards are using their children as blackmail leverage to extract this concession.

“To hammer their point even harder,” continues Decker, “Texas officials told FLDS communities that if they don’t cooperate, the court could `terminate parental rights’ and `appoint a conservator with authority to consent to each child’s adoption.'”

None of this will come as a surprise to the supernally sweet Christian folks at Arrow Child and Family Ministries, who were advised weeks in advance of Judge Walther’s April 22 “placement order” that FLDS members would have their parental rights terminated.

Among the nastiest things former FLDS leader Warren Jeffs did to rebellious members of the sect was to “reassign” their wives and children to more faithful members. He did this with the help of a state-sanctioned police force.

How, exactly, does this differ from what the State of Texas is now threatening to do to the FLDS mothers?

And of course, the most effective way for the FLDS mothers to ensure an abuse-free environment for their children would be to keep them out of the hands of the State of Texas by whatever means necessary.

It bears repeating that all of this is being done without so much as a particle of evidence that abuse has ever been committed by anyone at the YFZ Ranch. From the beginning, this entire undertaking has been carried out without probable cause, and in defiance of every principle of due process known to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberty under law.

It’s not just that the CPS has delivered this ultimatum without bothering to prove its case; that ultimatum has been issued without the CPS even bothering to make a case of any kind. This is straight-up mass child abduction and extortion devoid of even the pretense of legal authority. And if the perps are successful, the atrocity in El Dorado will be just the beginning of sorrows.

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Dum spiro, pugno!