There was just one minor part of the post that struck me:

while the Texas authorities condemned the ranch for its “culture,” it also was at pains to demonstrate that it was respecting the children’s religious freedom and accommodating what they termed their “unique” cultural needs.

Perhaps my thinking has been too influenced by Richard Dawkins’s latest book here, but do children really have “religious freedom”? Dawkins seems to equate all religious indoctrination/socialization with brainwashing, which I would consider a bit overboard. But there is a point there: Just how much freedom of/from religion do children have? I know Bruce Hunsberger found the average age of “dropping out” of religion to be around 14 in some of his research on Canadians, but what do we mean by “children”? If we mean pre-teens, then children, arguably, don’t have much religious freedom.

If this is too much of a tangent from the main point of the article, no need to respond. I just think this is an interesting issue.

“All of you are friends of the Tibetan People, even the small children here, all with the same blood and DNA. Religion is a matter for each individual. But culture, including the precious Tibetan culture, is for the whole community.”

This is part of the reason I critique modern liberals who deem “health and safety” nicely separable from the issue of multiculturalism, which they also claim to value.