Just wondering why the Suds and kids think the local authorities all hate them while Mark Wardle is getting a new license.
If you haven't looked into it, do look into the death of Ian August at Skyline Journey. There's a whole lot of material on that on this site, including a pretty detailed account in an appeals ruling.
Whatever bad blood there may be between the Utah authorities and the Suds, it's probably not just because they may be abusing kids. The Utah authorities have demonstrated over and over again that they either approve of or don't care about child abuse.
So it must be something else. And what I'm trying to explain is that I've seen something very similar to this before. When The Seed came under scrutiny and lost their federal expansion funding, Straight, Inc. sprang up in their place claiming to have solved all those awful problems w/ The Seed. Then when Straight came under fire, they held up Miller Newton and Hugh Burns as the bad guys, kicked them to the curb and pretended that
that had solved all their problems. 10 years later and many investigations and lawsuites later, finally the last Straight, Inc. branch in St. Pete closed down. All the other branches just changed their names (pretty much the way Mark Wardle has changed his program name from Skyline Journey to Distant Drummer) and continued on, business as usual.
So now Whitmore seems to be at odds w/ the authorities. Or maybe not. The investigation may well turn out to be yet another Utah whitewash.
But if it does turn out to be real and if the authorities do actually run them out of town, I wouldn't take that to mean that Utah has turned over a new leaf and we can all quit worrying about the thousands of kids held against their will in Utah programs. I would expect it to turn out more like the way I've seen it happen before. They may have to find another location or something. And there will be them others pointing to Whitmore as "the problem" that has now been solved and pretending to be oh so much better than that. But it won't be true.
Does that make sense? Call me jaded, I've been called worse (hell, probably within the last hour or two) but I really have to take it w/ a grain of salt when I hear about a Utah investigation into child abuse.
I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
--Abraham Lincoln
