SHADES OF SHORT CREEK

A Texas court last week rebuked authorities for seizing more than 450 children from a polygamist compound. Texas authorities raided the ranch and removed the children after an alleged phone call from a 16-year-old girl reporting sexual abuse at the Yearning for Zion ranch. A Texas appeals court said there was insufficient evidence that the children taken from the ranch faced imminent danger and is likely to require that the children be reunited with their families.

The collapse of the case against the polygamist sect brings to mind another raid that backfired and stifled law enforcement action against polygamist groups for decades.

In July 1953, Arizona authorities prepared to storm into Short Creek, home to a group of polygamists who had moved to the remote area along the Arizona-Utah border after the Mormon church banned polygamy in 1890. Tipped to the raid, the roughly 500 residents sang hymns as the officers arrived. Men were arrested and women and children were sent to foster homes. Newspapers condemned the raid as an authoritarian interference into family matters, and the public largely viewed the Short Creek residents as minding their own business and not hurting anyone.

Gov. J. Howard Pyle, who said authorities had stopped “the foulest conspiracy you could imagine,” was defeated the next year.

The group that lived in Short Creek grew and was officially called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints beginning in 1991. Beginning in the late 1980s, the group was led by Rulon Jeffs, who was said to leave 75 widows when he died in 2002.

His son Warren Jeffs, apparently fearing that the growing population in the towns now known as Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, were mixing too much with the outside world, moved some residents to Texas. As he built the Yearning for Zion Ranch, he demanded absolute obedience.

Charges of sexual abuse soon arose. Mr. Jeffs went into hiding when the FBI placed him on its 10 Most Wanted List. He is now in prison, convicted of being an accomplice to rape for performing a wedding between a 14-year-old and her cousin. After Mr. Jeffs’ conviction, authorities shed their hands-off approach to polygamy with their April raid of his ranch.

Last week’s court ruling does not mean that life within the Yearning for Zion Ranch conforms to legal standards. It does mean that authorities have to do more to determine whether underage marriage and sexual abuse is occurring. If it is, they must methodically build a case to stop it.