It's an interesting theoretical point but how much did receiving government funds really increase the spotlight on them in this particular case?

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

That reads like I should have known something. "It also included all the boys, who were never the subjects of any alleged abuse." At the time that was written in the write up it was correct. To quote the newspaper article: "The disclosures are the first suggestions that anyone other than teen girls may have been physically or sexually abused." Having said that, there had been allegations that young teenaged boys were being expelled from the ranch and forced to make it on their own; a situation I would characterize as abuse.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

Originally I was inclined to agree with you, joshv, and say that this should be a matter where we should separate out the religion and look at this without that context.  However, in reading futher about FLDS, there is real cause for legal concern for the children, both male and female.  Here are legal reasons why the children should be in foster care:

1) The parents, both mothers and fathers, are willing to endanger their children on the advice of a religious leader who is in prison for conspiring to rape a minor.  This endangerment includes allowing young male teenagers to be excommunicated from their religion and homes, leaving young male teenagers homeless, and allowing young female teenagers to be raped, married or to be sent across the border to Canada to be raped and married.

So, outside of religion, you have parents who are willing to allow their male children to become homeless teenagers and who go along with statutory rape of their teenage daughters, and possibly allowing their teenage daughters to be taken across borders for the purpose of statutory rape.

2) It seems possible that the children are not being educated.  Children are withdrawn from schools to be "homeschooled" and potentially not taught anything.  Of course, this would make them more compliant members of the religion.

So, again outside of the religious context, parents who aren't sending their kids to school nor homeschooling them adequately, therefore depriving the children of education and future opportunities in life.

3) As wetkarma points out, this is a religion that actively advocates that the illegal wives should bleed the state out of money for welfare.  Welfare fraud?

It's funny to me that we have opposite views on both this and the NYC police shooting case. In the police shooting case you come down for the government, I against, and here you are against the government and I am for it. My justification for supporting the government here is that I believe that while the state is never justified in stopping individuals from doing whatever they want to themselves (i.e. if you want to neglect yourself to the point of causing personal injury, so be it), when it comes to other people I find state intervention more than justified. While it may be true that not all the children were subject to abuse, the fact remains that all evidence indicates that one of the central tenets of this "religion" was to groom young women to be brides and to force them into marriage. A free society cannot tolerate a religious culture that so pervasively enforces itself upon the choices of adults. In a conflict between freedom of religion and absolute individual freedom, individual freedom must always triumph. I don't see how it's logically possible to be free to give up your freedom of choice. Religions like Scientology and the many religions that practice shunning of one form or another (here's looking at you, Amish folks!) are bad enough, but there's generally a fundamental understanding of a freedom to leave in most of those cases, even if there are consequences vis-a-vis contact with the rest of the community. Also, recruitment focuses are often on adults, which at least have the initial freedom to choose whether to join or not. Here it seems that leaving wasn't much of a choice, and having children who were never given a choice about membership was the preferred means to "grow" the religion. Hence I think the state has a defensible obligation to remove all the children and at least give them some indication of what their rights are and will be as free citizens.