Joseph Farah keeps up his quasi–defense of polygamist cultists in his May 16 WorldNetDaily column. This time around, he’s defending the idea that refusing to immunize one’s children is a good thing. This is a major WND hobbyhorse; it has long engaged in anti-immunization scare tactics.
In railing against an apparent decision by Texas officials to have the children of the cultists that they have taken into custody vaccinated against the usual diseases, Farah asserted that the parents are “mothers and fathers made conscious and well-informed decisions not to immunize their kids because of the potential for dire health risks.” Really? How does Farah know this? Indeed, he offers no evidence that the parents “made conscious and well-informed decisions not to immunize their kids”; in fact, one can plausibly argue that, given that they are members of a polygamist cult, they have a demonstrated history of not making “well-informed decisions.”
And, like before, Farah refuses to offer any meaningful criticism of the cult, even though they have acted in ways he purports not to like: “Again, I don’t like some of the things that went on in that community. I don’t approve of them. There may even have been some laws broken. But there is no evidence being made public to suggest every single mother in the compound abused or neglected her children – or to suggest these poor kids would be better off with the state of Texas as their parent.”
Again, as we’ve noted, it’s more important to Farah that parents have the right to do what they want to with their children — including pawning them off into an illegal polygamist relationship — than actually punishing said illegal behavior. Farah is willing to condone the abuse of the cult’s children to make an anti-government argument, just as he ignores the abuse of children in the Phillip Long homeschooling case in order to make Long a martyr to the homeschooling cause.