Re: the religious child abuse case in Texas

Editor's Editor's Note:  I received this from a friend of mine in Dallas who is a well-connected retired District Judge (who now runs an informal list-serv called Joe's Joke Exchange).  My friend's comments are in blue, everything else is the work of the gentleman identified at the end of the post.  Interesting insider's view.  Interesting contrast and compare with the news coverage.

Editor's Note: This is a letter from attorney Gregg Gossett of San Angelo sent to his sister who is a member of Joe's Joke Exchange. Because of the very interesting legal situation that has recently occurred in Texas, I am forwarding this letter to members of the exchange for your information. Since Attorney Gossett wrote the letter, the Thursday hearing to which he refers has been held and the judge has granted the State's Motion to keep the children in state custody and has ordered DNA testing to determine parenthood. That would appear to be the only orderly way to proceed since parents have a right to be involved when their children are taken away. But who knows who the parents are? 

Folks, 

  

I thought I would give you an update on the polygamist crisis here in San Angelo. About 5 years ago, some business men from Utah came to Texas to buy a ranch for a hunting retreat. They purchased a 1,700 acre ranch about 45 miles south of San Angelo, near a small town named Eldorado. It became known that it was owned by a break away sect of the Mormon church which practiced polygamy (the leader of this group is Warren Jeffs, who is serving time in a federal pen for arranging a marriage with a 14 year old girl). 

  

At first the people of Eldorado were concerned that the Mormons would register to vote and take over the county. Instead the Mormons kept to themselves. They commenced building a temple complex which can be seen from the county road. They even began to get into the good graces of the citizens of Eldorado as they came into town once a week to patronize the local merchants, paying with cash (no charge accounts or credit cards). 

  

Then a week ago one of the local social service organizations received a telephone call from a young girl at the compound alleging she had been forced to marry a 50 year old man, who abused her. The state then raided the compound and began to take into custody all of the minor children under 18 years of age. In addition to the Temple, there are many large dormitory styled homes around the complex (this will make a nice hunting retreat when it is all over). When the agents would go into a house, they might find 20 children which they would take into custody. When they would come back several hours later, the house would again be filled with children. Apparently the houses were all connected by tunnels and like prairie dogs they would move from house to house via the tunnels to escape child protective services. Regardless of girl who made the initial call, child protective agents with Texas Rangers observed many young girls under 18 with children and who were pregnant. 

  

They first began moving the children to the Baptist church in Eldorado, but it was quickly filled. So they began moving them to San Angelo. The city emergency management department was activated (usually their only responsibility is to set off the tornado siren alert). The number grew to 100, then 200, then 300 and to just over 400. In addition to the 400 something children, there are about 150 mothers. Currently they are housing them at Fort Concho and at the fair grounds. The San Angelo city staff went into crisis mode, arranging not only bedding, clothes, but food and other services. 

  

I had to go to Fort Concho to visit with DPS regarding the possible closing of a city facility next to the fort. I was very impressed with the efficiency of the Department of Public Safety. One room looked like the control room at NASA during a moon launch. They had 20 or 30 computers, each manned by a DPS agent, as they kept track of each of their wards. 

  

The next major problem is the legal one. Each child is entitled to a court appointed attorney and a hearing within 14 days. Under state law only lawyers who are certified in child protective cases can represent a child in this type of proceeding. Some of the local attorneys have already been hired by the Mormons, thus reducing the pool of available lawyers. Many local lawyers have volunteered to represent the children. The state bar scheduled a special seminar last Friday so that local attorneys (like myself) can become certified to represent these children. The state bar also brought in an attorney from Utah to educate us on the culture of this sect. 

  

This sect of Mormons is really just producing babies so older men can have sex with young girls.  When a child is born, usually they take it away from the mother and have a surrogate mother raise the child. Thus children really do not know their biologically father or mother. This is a very major problem for Child Protective Services as they are having a difficult time identifying children and the names of their parents. When the mothers hold their babies, they hold them with the face turned away so as not to become too attached. The children have never seen television, have no toys and their idea of fun is picking weeds (Leslie and I want to invite them over to play). When the boys become 13, they move them to the dairy barn where they are worked from sun up to sun down; and more importantly they are away from the girls. 

  

Now push is coming to shove. Beginning today the local courts must appoint over 400 certified attorneys to represent the over 400 children. There is a mandatory hearing scheduled for this coming Thursday at 10:00 pm. After 400 orders making the appointments are signed today, the court must get notice to each of those attorneys, who should make an attempt to visit with their client before the Thursday hearing. Additionally, when this operation began, the DPS and Texas Child Protective Services sent in hundreds of persons to assist, booking up all the available motel rooms in town. Now there is no room in the inn for hundreds of lawyers who are to descend on San Angelo for the Thursday hearing. The churches in town circulated lists yesterday asking people to volunteer bedrooms in their homes to house the attorneys. 

  

The Thursday hearing is now scheduled for the city auditorium, but they may need to move it to football stadium. At the hearing, I assume each child will appear, together with the lawyer, the guardian ad litem appointed for each child and the social worker. Additionally, the mothers may well be there together with any attorney for the mothers. 

  

The issues continue to grow. The hearing Thursday will be a collective hearing for all the cases. But within the next 60 days, each of the children will be entitled to a separate, individual hearing. That means not only bringing back the attorney who represents that child, but a judge and court reporter to hear that particular case. 400 separate trials within the next 60 days. 

  

Lastly, I do not have a good feel for what the final solution will be. Child Protective Services is NOT seeking to terminate parental rights. That means, when all is said and done, I assume we will provide counseling to the mothers and then send them back. 

  

Greg Gossett 

Gossett, Harrison, Reese, Millican 

and Stipanovic, P. C. 

2 South Koenigheim 

P. O. Box 911 

San Angelo, Texas 76902-0911 

325-653-3291 

This country may not be ready for Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I challenge any of you who regard yourselves as fair-minded, educated, and tolerant to watch the entire Bill Moyer's interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and tell me that you can agree with Maureen Dowd's epithet "wackadoodle."

What I saw was a remarkably wise, compassionate and genuine spiritual leader who loves this country and takes his job seriously enough to tell the truth. I am very comfortable with the notion that Obama listens to this man. I think the country would do well to have a leader so inclined.

I have been on the road for the last couple of days and therefore been bored enough to watch the news-tainment channels on TV. I've seen those clips that have been replayed and replayed and replayed from this interview. I cringed. I was angry at Rev. Wright for doing this interview, particularly at this time.

I was wrong.

Guess what? The news-tainment industry (CNN, CBS, NBC, FOX, MSNBC, et al.) is taking *those* comment completely out of context. Why am I surprised?

If you can handle the truth, watch the whole hour. I learned something, you will too.

One year after my father's death

Whenever I sit to write about something like this essay, the first thing that occurs to me is most people have parental situations substantially different than mine. But, that's just a belief I have, I haven't done a survey. Still I normally write in this venue to share things that I believe others may find helpful and I am left with this nagging doubt that my musings about the first year after my father's death are going to apply to anyone else's situation.

I was unable to appreciate the reach that my relationship with my father had into my life until after he died. Before he died, I regarded myself as something of a psychological orphan, i.e., a person who grew up with an absence of paternal presence. In some sense that is quite the truth. What I failed to appreciate until this last year is that this presence of absence was a powerful force.

In many ways I am thoroughly his son. His life was a story of serial personal tragedy. He was a Navy man, he intended to make the Navy his career. He rose rapidly through the officer's ranks to Lieutenant Junior Grade. He served in both WWII and the Korean conflict, not in combat but in ferrying men and supplies to combat in the Pacific theater.

In 1953, he received a promotion to Senior Grade which required a physical. They discovered in that exam that he had a congenitally malformed kidney and the other one was chronically diseased. He was "processed out" of the Navy from his hospital bed (he died of kidney disease).

Out of The Navy, he became an aerospace engineer before the speciality existed (he was trained as an electrical engineer) and worked on the nose-cone of the A7 Corsair-II (video sim), the plane that became the carrier work-horse of Vietnam for Navy Aviation, and the first with a "heads-up display," that teleprompter style instrumentation that allows the pilot to see his instruments while looking out the front window. Specifically his focus was on the radar for the plane, but he worked on a lot of different things that rode in the nose of that plane.

He rose through the ranks in his civilian job until he was caught sleeping one day during a presentation that a very self-impressed Marine General was giving. At the time, he had a reputation as a hard drinker and this incident was attributed to related misbehavior, i.e., being at work less than prepared after a hard night of partying. He was transferred out of this job to another much less involved position with relatively few opportunities for advancement as punishment for embarrassing his employer with a major player (the Marine General) in a contract they were working to get.

30 years later, 10 years after he retired, he was diagnosed with narcolepsy. He had always fallen asleep easily. I'm not sure I ever went to a movie with him where he did not fall asleep. We always thought this was due to his drinking, too. The truth was that he had a disability he could do nothing about (other than take stimulants, which he did after he discovered what was wrong).

His marriage to my mother and my family was tragic. I was conceived as a way to keep them together. They divorced and remarried each other 3 times while I was growing up. He had a girlfriend whom could not marry him because of an unreasonable prejudice by her father against men raised in rural areas. They continued to see each other after he was married to my mother.

He had a son, me, who had an idiopathic (meaning they couldn't figure what was wrong) grand mal seizure disorder the first six years of his life, who had a potentially crippling bone disease right after that, who turned out to be fat, and a stutterer, at a time when such things were seen as evidence of malformation and inferior pedigree.

Finally, he has a widow who has not kept the promises she made to him on his deathbed regarding the distribution of his property to me. His last wife was a con artist and a thief who could hardly wait for him to die so she could assume control over his money, who continues to refuse to provide me with information I am legally due as his son, for which I am going to have to go to the expense of suing so I can enjoy my rights as a beneficiary of his trust.

Need I mention that when I visited my father's grave on Sunday, the anniversary of his death, near sundown, that there were no flowers on his grave, no one but I had visited it? They bury people in the chronological order of their death at the National Cemetery, so all of the graves around his were decked out with flowers and flags. His stood barren of remembrance until I arrived, burned some incense and chanted a buddhist blessing in observance of the first anniversary of his passing.

How fitting that the inscription his widow choose for the head-stone was "Forever in our Hearts." I suppose that means she need not go visit the grave.

I am not going to complain about it, since it is only my view, but my life can certainly be seen as a similar series of tragedies. First my family, then having my education financially abandoned by my family during my sophomore year (which led to a six year break). Then my near-miss at marriage and a family as my partner made a different choice, then a litany of other failed opportunities, unmet expectations and squandered talent since then. I am nearing 50 now and the clock has run out on most of the things I wanted to do in life. I work now at a job where I am underpaid and under-appreciated, my advancement held back by jealous executives unwilling to let my light outshine theirs. It is very remarkable that this pattern holds up between our lives, particularly in light of the fact that we hardly knew each other.

We only really got to know each other in the last six months of his life. Only then did I think we began to peek under the tent of all this we had in common. He was too weak at the end of his life to sustain the kind of conversation I would have liked to have had. We never really leveled with each other. There is a lot unspoken, unfinished business between us, but I think he did figure out at the end of his life that his son is a worthwhile and exceptional man.

Now that he is gone, I see a lot of things a lot more clearly. As Dad would have put it, I've been "locking the barn door after the horse is gone" with a lot of issues--things I wished I had said, things I wished I had seen before. We shared an appreciation for wine, women and food. We both liked to travel. We liked to read, talk and think. We can both be assholes without really seeing it at the time. We share an seemingly innate talent for cooking and technology.

So, what strikes me at the close of my first year with him dead is how much I have learned about him since he died. I have learned more new things about my father this last year than I knew while he was alive. I feel much closer to him now.

So, as I sat on his grave on Sunday, leaning up against the headstone of the grave in front of his, I felt a very comfortable sense of peace and good-will, like this was a space I was welcome to and to which I belonged. The country around the grave is much like his native land further south in Texas--low hills and scraggly Mesquite trees lining irregular open fields. I think it fits him as a place to rest, and being there refuels something in me.

Maybe next year I'll know more about that.

Being a little bit Jewish: Passover

In my on-going efforts to help you greet (and not offend) your Jewish friends and colleagues during Jewish holidays, let's talk Passover!

Passover starts at Sundown on Saturday (first full moon in April) and goes for seven or eight days, depending on who you talk to. It is an observance of the story of the Jews leaving Slavery in Egypt. They were in such a hurry they couldn't wait for their bread to rise, so they had to eat crackers. It is roughly analogous to the American holiday of Thanksgiving in that it doesn't have the profound significance of Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur (which are like Christmas and Easter), but people still want time off from work to prepare and be with family.

If you've seen "The Ten Commandments" with Heston, you know the story of Passover.

Ecumenically, it concerns freedom from boundaries. The eating of unleavened bread confers the urgency that the forces of liberation sometimes bear down upon us.

Some very orthodox Jews don't work for the first and last day, some specific groups have other specific guidelines for behavior. Almost all Jews observe it with a ritualized meal called a Seder, which is cool because you down two glasses of wine before you get any food at all, and four throughout the meal. There are readings, the story is told, specific foods are eaten at different points to confer meaning to the readings. It's a hoot, if you ever get invited to one, go.

The Hebrew greeting is "Chag Sameach," which I remember, ironically as "hog sammich." Don't embarrass yourself, say "Happy Passover!" A nice gift is a floral table centerpiece.

Sprung

I saw my first just-completely-over-the-top mini-skirt today--the kind which remind me that my conscious control over my attention is not, well, much.

It's been warm enough to go without a jacket during the day outside in NYC this week. The trees are budding. It's becoming a lot more fun to walk around the City these days. I walk around a lot, I spend a lot of time as a pedestrian. The sidewalk cafes are open and busy, the people in the City are spilling out into the street again. The City is regaining it's urbane charm: polyglot, dynamic, and lively. From now until it gets so fuggin-hot-you-can't-go-out, Manhattan feels like that risky on-going human experiment in having all of the world's peoples live together That makes living here worth it.

Two good friends have had healthy babies, George Bush won't be President this time next year, it's morning in America.

NCAA BB: 2007-2008 Tar Heel Season RIP

You have to show up ready to play.

In retrospect I think Bill Self (Kansas coach) picked up on something about the 07-08 Tar Heels that was hiding in plain sight. They start slow. I can remember a number of games this season where the opponent got out to an early lead.

So, what do you do? Hit them in the soft spot, spend the first three minutes playing like it was the last three minutes, get out to a good early lead, see how far you can push it.

It was 40-12 with 7:32 left in the first half.

40-12.

How do you explain that? You can't. I'm sure it shocked Kansas fans only a little less than it shocked Tar Heel fans. I'm still shocked.

Kansas deserves to be there.