Any charges of sexual abuse that ultimately emerge from the ongoing investigation will, of course, deserve the most vigorous prosecution. Meanwhile, the case raises some thorny questions, both about how we as a society regard religious "others," and about the role anti-cult stereotypes play in public decision-making. These questions center on the treatment of those mothers and children.

Legal experts are divided on the legitimacy of what Barbara Walther, the presiding judge in the case, off-handedly referred to as the "cattle call" that removed those mothers and children from their home on April 3. The closed federal warrant authorizing the raid relied heavily on phone calls, subsequently alleged to be a hoax, from 16-year-old "Sarah." Flora Jessop, formerly a member of a Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) community in Utah and now an anti-polygamy activist in Phoenix, had told Texas law enforcement that she had received similar calls from a "Sarah." Arguably, the raid was spurred more by negative stereotypes about FLDS and members' practice of polygamy than by a thorough investigation of evidence.

The Mt. Carmel parallel

It isn't the first time this has happened to a religious group in Texas that diverged from the norm on the issue of plural marriage. The YFZ Ranch raid resembled, in some respects, what happened 15 years ago to David Koresh's Branch Davidians in Waco. Then, as in the FLDS situation, alarmed and alarming reports from disaffected former sect members fueled media "exposes" which, in turn, whipped up popular antagonism.

In 1992, CPS had investigated Mt. Carmel and found no indications of child abuse. Yet the following year, after a 51-day standoff, then-attorney general Janet Reno authorized the "dynamic entry" and use of tear gas against the Davidians out of concern, she said, for the children's welfare. The outcome was lethal: 80 Davidians, including Koresh, died in the resulting conflagration on April 19, 1993. When women didn't escape with their children, the FBI blamed the children's deaths on their mothers' failed "maternal instinct."

A similar dynamic was at work in the raid on YFZ Ranch, although it was, as a spokesperson for the Texas Public Safety Department phrased it, more "diplomatic" than at Waco. "Not a shot was fired."

Appealing to anti-cult stereotypes, Time magazine quoted Eldorado Mayor John Nikolauk's description of the women being herded off the so-called compound looking like "zombies, with no expression in their eyes." This description doesn't square with what we subsequently saw of these women on the evening news. Perhaps their glazed expressions had something to do with being rounded up at gunpoint by SWAT teams, backed up by an armored personnel carrier and K9 dog units.

According to Marci Hamilton of the Cardozo Law School, the raid was justified because "There is nothing in the First Amendment that says that any religious group has the right to exist, no matter what they do."

This is true enough. Criminal prosecution is certainly appropriate when, in the name of religion, a clear violation of the law has occurred ? as happened in Jeffs' conviction for facilitating the rape of a minor last year. (Koresh was likely guilty of statutory rape. We will never know for sure.) But the First Amendment does not sanction government repression of religious activities about which no clear harm has yet been proven ? quite the contrary, in fact.

The FLDS women maintain that no child abuse occurred, that their relationships are spiritual and modeled on being "clean and pure," that they were at YFZ Ranch by choice. All of this is in line with FLDS's theological claim that it is merely adhering to the original Mormon tenets over which the sect split from the larger church (Latter Day Saints/LDS), when it abandoned polygamy somewhat over a century ago.

However, once again the authorities seem to suspect a failure of maternal instinct. A "tip sheet" issued to CPS workers dealing with the case ? one source for which is Carolyn Jessop, who is hawking a book about her "escape" from FLDS ? warns, among other things, that FLDS mothers may exhibit "learned and enforced helplessness," and a limited cultural mentality. As to the apparent hoax that spurred the raid, CPS spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner says that once authorities were convinced that abuse had occurred, the phone caller's actual existence became immaterial. "Sarah," Meisner explains, is a metaphor for young women subjected to abuse in the compound. "What we did," Meisner told CNN, "was warranted and in the best interest of the children. This is not about religion ? this is about keeping children safe from abuse."

A flurry of press releases from CPS notwithstanding, the precise extent of the alleged abuse nonetheless remains unclear.

What gives me pause

What is clear, however, is that there is no objective justification for brushing off the mothers as a bunch of prairie-style Stepford wives, let alone for leaping to the conclusion that mounting an armed raid to take their children away was indeed proper to do on the strength of a metaphor grounded in a religious stereotype.

The feminist in me cringes at rising to the defense of a group so patently patriarchal as FLDS. But it isn't much of a stretch to defend the religious rights of groups with whom one mostly agrees, is it? I, personally, find the kind of spirituality practiced on the YFZ Ranch deeply troubling. I find the pop-romanticization of polygamy in HBO's Big Love equally problematic.

But, both as a feminist and as a scholar of religion, I also recognize that we as a society can applaud the YFZ raid and its potentially dire consequences for hundreds of women and their children, only if we blind ourselves to some other salient facts:

* Across the USA and across class, race, ethnic and religious divides, adolescent girls are becoming more sexually active, at ever-earlier ages. A recently released government study found that one in four teenage girls in this country has a sexually transmitted infection.

* Monogamy may be our societal "ideal," but given the American divorce rate, "serial polygamy" is closer to the norm ? often culminating in precisely the pattern practiced by FLDS, whereby the older a man gets, the younger his newest wife is, the pattern originally advocated by Joseph Smith.

* Historians acknowledge a pragmatic link between the revelation that led the Mormon Church to renounce polygamy, and Utah statehood. On this ground, in religious terms, FLDS members are as legitimate in claiming to be "true" followers of Joseph Smith as are, say, those traditionalist Catholics who reject the authority of the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church.

* Gay marriage advocates have long pointed to parallels between anti-gay marriage and anti-polygamy laws: Both offer privileges to heterosexual monogamy.

* Meanwhile, polygamy and/or adolescent sexual intercourse are socially and religiously sanctioned in a variety of cultural contexts around the world, for example, in some Islamic communities, among the Maasai of Africa and in Papua New Guinea.

Maybe, rather than focusing on the family arrangements of an isolated Texas religious sect, we should be asking ourselves what was wrong with this picture: Even as CPS was herding the last of the FLDS girls off to distant foster care facilities late last month, American Internet users were so eager to see Annie Liebovitz's revealing Vanity Fair photos of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus that the magazine's website crashed.

Mary Zeiss Stange is a professor of Women's Studies and Religion at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.