Investigators determined that there is

a widespread pattern and practice of the (YFZ) Ranch

in which young, minor female residents

are conditioned to expect and accept

sexual activity with adult men at the ranch

upon being spiritually married to them

Once again, the media rake over the salacious details of 'underage' sexual 'abuse' and use usual scare tactics regarding young girls having sex with older men.

Why are the media obsessed with the subject? It's titillating and at the same time evokes fear in parents. They love to work up stories that appeal to the prurient reader.

The entire Polygamy sect story has revealed the American media, more than ever, to be engaged in one conscious, ceaseless effort to pollute public sensibilities. It deliberately appeals to and encourages the worst instincts in the population.

In obsessively covering stories like this one, the media personalities are not, in any sense, betraying themselves.

Wealthy, narcissistic, self-involved and uninformed, they tend to be fascinated by the prurient and salacious.

This is their ‘meat,’ this is what gets them going, and they assume the same holds true for the general public.

The American political establishment, more broadly, increasingly feels called upon to feed the population stimulants—scandals, sex crimes, celebrities on trial and, of course, terror scares—on a daily basis.

As the glue that tenuously holds the one-party state together - the prosecution of the “global war on terror,” the supposed success of “free-market” policies - threatens to give way, the ruling elite turns ever more hysterically to the politics of diversion and debasement.

The media create a need for artificial excitation. A preoccupation with all that is prurient and sick has reached grotesque levels. The hysteria surrounding the "Girls forced to wed at puberty" story indicate the onset of a new stage in the media feeding frenzy.

Typical Headline: Children Groomed for Sex by Texas Polygamist Sect

A Texas polygamist compound emptied of more than 400 children was the site of pervasive sexual abuse where girls were groomed to accept sex at puberty and boys were indoctrinated to perpetuate the cycle, officials said in court records released Tuesday.

Girls as young as 13 were "spiritually married" to men who claimed several wives and were forced to have sex with their significantly older husbands "for the purpose of having children," according to an affidavit by an investigator with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

Children were deprived of food and locked in closets as punishment, and severe beatings were also reported on the sprawling YFZ (Yearn for Zion) Ranch outside of Eldorado, Texas owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The Last Taboo: Sexual Desire for Pubescent Children

Study after study of so-called sex offenders - as well as the countless media exposés - insist that most sex offenders are ordinary men and women from all walks of life, indistinguishable from others in every way except their sexual desires or orientation.

The New York Times recently published a sensational story about a teenage boy who went on line to entice more than 15,000 customers to watch his own pornographic images of himself.

The Times reporter, acting less like a reporter and more like a crusading cop, coaxed the boy away from his life of debauchery, reminding him he would instantly switch from "victim" to "perpetrator" when he passed his 18th birthday.

(Actually, those under 18 may be treated as perpetrators, too.)

He helped get the boy to the FBI to close in on many of his key customers, whom the Times had further investigated on its own. These customers included police officers, lawyers, ministers, rabbis, social workers—and especially those who work with children and adolescents.

Many also were parents and grandparents with ostensibly happy families of their own. Surely one sign that something is wrong with this picture is that the "heinous criminals" are otherwise law-abiding, decent human beings with successful careers and "normal" personal lives.

No. With scapegoating, such apparent normalcy is just one more sign of devious perversity.

The key ingredients of this scapegoating campaign are of course sex and children. "Nowhere," wrote Linda Williams in Children and Sex (1993), "is sexuality more feared in America than in the lives of children."

(Williams has spent her professional career assuring that these ingredients produce repression.)

The core demon in the campaign is the recently created category of "pedophile" (which does not predate the 1960s as a so-called scientific construct).

Although defined by the American Psychiatric Association as persons with a dominant sexual desire for pre-pubescent children, the pedophile tag now applies to any person who every entertained a sexual desire or had a sexual incident, however minor, with anyone under 18.

In some circles, the term pedophile is now used to put down any older person who has an affair or shows interest in younger persons—35-year-olds, for instance, who "prey on" 20-year olds.

By the early 2000s, pedophile had become morphed with the still broader "sex offender," with even mainstream media free to refer to the feared and hated class as "pervs" and "perps" and "deviants."

This scapegoating also requires public exposure and shunning, even of those who dare defend the civil liberties of pedophiles and sex offenders or challenge attacks on them.

In particular, public wrath is displayed against those who would challenge "age of consent" laws, which are higher in the United States (now effectively 18 in all states due to Federal statutes) than in most other societies.

(Mexico's age of consent is 12 in most cases; Japan is 13,; Spain is now 14—raised recently; France, 15; and Germany 16 and under 16 with parental consent.)

Although as of the 1880s, common law age of consent was 10 in England and its former colonies, and zero in many other societies—where child-brides were common—it has been increasingly raised until there is today, within UNESCO's campaign to protect children, a call for a universal age of 21.

All sex between persons under 18 and those over 18 (or 21) thus becomes "abuse," since there is the myth that underage persons are simply not capable of consent.

Journalists and scientific researchers who challenge this construct—or who defend some relationships between adults and minors as not being abusive—face severe consequences.

In the only instance of a U.S. Congressional resolution against a scientific paper, the House of Representatives, with only minimal opposition, denounced a study by Dr. Bruce Rind & others, published in the scholarly review, Psychological Bulletin, in 1998.

This "meta-analysis" reviewed several research protocols about adult-child sexuality, and summarized them as showing that relationships in which force was not used did not appear to cause harm, and sometimes might be beneficial.

Rind and his co-authors have been systematically ostracized and excluded from many scholarly journals.

Salacious Coverage: Sect Accused of Marrying Pubescent Girls

The scared girl, already a mother at 16, whispered into a cell phone: she wanted out. She'd been forced to marry a man more than three times her age, becoming his seventh wife.

Her husband sexually assaulted her, and when he was angry, he would beat her while other women held her infant, she told a family violence shelter in a series of secret calls that triggered an investigation of the polygamist sect here.

The girl had looked for opportunities to escape before, but she was warned that outside the double-gates blocking entry to the Yearning For Zion Ranch, in a world completely foreign to her, she would be forced to cut her hair and wear makeup, and to have sex with many men - all damning transgressions in a faith where modesty calls for women to wear long underwear year-round under pioneer-style dresses.

At the end of one call she began to cry; she wanted to take it all back.

But child welfare officials allege in court documents released Tuesday that the compound built by leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was rife with sexual abuse, with girls spiritually married to much older men as soon as they reached puberty and boys groomed to perpetuate the cycle.

The documents detail the hushed phone calls, but days after raiding the West Texas compound, officials still aren't sure where the girl is. She is not named among the children in initial custody petitions by the state.

Texas authorities have legal custody of 416 children, all of those believed to have lived at the ranch, Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner told reporters in San Angelo, about 40 miles from the compound in Eldorado.

Court documents said a number of teen girls at the 1,700-acre compound were pregnant, and all the children were removed on the grounds that they were in danger of "emotional, physical, and-or sexual abuse." Nearly 140 women left on their own.

"Investigators determined that there is a widespread pattern and practice of the (YFZ) Ranch in which young, minor female residents are conditioned to expect and accept sexual activity with adult men at the ranch upon being spiritually married to them," read the affidavit signed by Lynn McFadden, a Department of Family and Protective Services investigative supervisor.

McFadden said the girls were spiritually married to the men as soon as they reached puberty and were required to bear children. A spiritual marriage is one recognized by the FLDS church, but lacking a state marriage license. Texas law prohibits polygamy and the marriage of girls under 16.

Attorneys for the church and church leaders have filed motions asking a judge to quash the search on constitutional grounds, saying state authorities didn't have enough evidence and that the warrants were too broad. A hearing on their motion was scheduled for Wednesday in San Angelo.

Church lawyer Patrick Peranteau did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment Tuesday.

An unknown number of men and women were at the ranch while authorities completed the search of the gleaming 80-foot-high temple, a cheese-making plant, a cement plant, a school, a doctor's office and housing units.

Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, said Tuesday the adults were not being held, but if they left the compound, they could not return while the search continued.

At least two FBI agents were seen entering the back entrance of the temple on Tuesday.

Spokesmen for the FBI and DPS declined comment.

The compound was raided Thursday after the girl called a local family violence shelter March 29 and 30, using someone else's cell phone and speaking quietly to avoid being overheard, McFadden's affidavit said.

The girl said she was not allowed to leave the compound unless she was ill. She told the shelter that her husband would "beat and hurt" her when he got angry, hitting her in the chest and choking her while another woman in the house held her baby. Once, he broke her ribs, she said.

The girl also said her husband sexually assaulted her, and that she was several weeks pregnant. The girl told the shelter her husband went to "the outsiders' world" but she didn't know where.

The girl's husband was not identified in the court documents released Tuesday. But authorities have issued an arrest warrant for church member Dale Barlow, a 50-year-old believed to be in Arizona.

Authorities were looking for documents, family photos or even a family Bible with lists of marriages and children to determine whether the girl was married to Barlow, who was sentenced to jail last year after pleading no contest to conspiracy to commit sexual conduct with a minor.

He was ordered to register as a sex offender for three years while he is on probation.

Authorities were trying to determine the identities and parentage of many of the children; some were unwilling or unable to provide the names of their biological parents or identified multiple mothers.

The boys were groomed to be ready to marry underage girls upon adulthood and engage in sexual activity, resulting in them becoming new "perpetrators," the affidavit said.

Children in the sect were deprived of food and forced to sit in closed closets as a form of discipline, a warrant said.

An FLDS member now living in the Texas Panhandle, Samuel Fischer, objected to the raid.

"It's religious persecution," said Fischer, who moved to a ranch near Lockney with his two wives and 12 of his children from Hildale, Utah, last year.