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EDITOR'S NOTE: This week's Early Returns was co-authored by Political Writer Roy Maynard and Religion Editor Patrick Butler.

The photos are surreal, and the footage is heartbreaking. Women and children, seemingly out of another century, are removed from the Yearning for Zion compound where the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints held itself aloof from modern society.

The calls for compassion are understandable; no one wants to separate children from their mothers, especially when - from all indications - the mothers are loving and attentive.

But there are some important public policy questions surrounding the 437 children from polygamist families who are now in state custody. Welfare fraud, the issue of "Lost Boys" and the wisdom of a constitutional challenge to poly-gamy laws should all be considered as authorities consider what to do in the state's largest-ever child welfare case.

Politically, it's unpopular to crack down on polygamy. Since the disastrous 1953 raid on Arizona polygamists on hysterical charges of "white slavery" and "insurrection," the public outcry against the "cruelty of separating mothers from their children" left a hands-off policy by law enforcement. Until recently.

Currently, some conservatives worry about government crackdowns on religion, while some liberals obliquely fear an encroachment on "alternative lifestyles" (basically, anything other than a one-man, one-woman marriage arrangement).

But that doesn't mean authorities should look the other way.

Plural marriages can be pretty profitable. Since states only recognize a man's first wife, his subsequent wives are - in the eyes of the welfare system - unemployed single mothers.

"In the tiny town of Hildale (Utah), for example, along the Utah-Arizona border, as many as 50 percent of the residents are on public assistance, according to state and federal records," the Los Angeles Times reported in 2001. "The fraud occurs when plural wives claim they don't know the whereabouts of their children's father."

There are also "unusual levels of child poverty," the newspaper added. "For example, across the street from Hildale in Colorado City, Ariz., every school-age child in town was living below the poverty level, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates from 1997, the most current available."

But policymakers are in a Catch-22 situation. If they crack down on polygamy, they are seen as persecuting citizens for their religious beliefs. If they amend welfare policies to reflect the true "marital" status of plural wives, they find themselves recognizing and thereby legitimizing poly-gamy.

Just do the math. Generally, boys and girls are born in equal proportion. So if in a given generation, one boy gets dibs on six girls, then there are five boys who don't get any girl at all. The answer? Throw out the extra boys.

And that's exactly what happens in a polygamist society. It's what's happening now, with these seemingly wholesome and godly groups such as the FLDS.

"Welfare workers have long known about boys separated from their families, put out on the streets and considered 'dead' by their loved ones after drawing the ire of church leaders," the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported last week. "The FLDS has traditionally kept the number of boys in their polygamist communities low. That way the male leaders can have their pick of young 'plural wives,' without the worry of younger competition. ... Boys as young as 13 have been torn from their families and left on the unfamiliar streets of Salt Lake City and Las Vegas."

The result is predictable. With no money, no family and nowhere to go, many turn to drugs, alcohol and prostitution, investigators say.

FLDS lawyers and the group's unofficial defenders seem to be mounting a constitutional defense for the abuse that has clearly taken place. Any prosecution, they say, would be an abridgment on the members' freedom of religion.

But the U.S. Supreme Court addressed this argument more than 100 years ago, in the Reynolds decision of 1878.

"Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices," the high court ruled. "Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice?"

Justices demonstrated the classic "slippery slope" that such a ruling would put the law upon.

"To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself," the ruling says. "Government could exist only in name under such circumstances."

Let's be clear: No rights are unlimited. To exist within a community, we accept some limits. For example, we accept laws that no convicted felons or people with diagnosed severe mental illnesses can purchase firearms.

We accept that the freedom of speech doctrines don't cover child pornography or yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.

And even freedom of the press doesn't allow newspapers to print troop movements in advance during wartime or national security secrets. Some limits to the free expression of religion are valid, most of us would agree. Believe what you want, but don't sacrifice children to Moloch.

As society wrestles with the ethical rather than legal "right and wrong" of polygamous practices, there is an underlying current of "societal acceptability" to consider. What if, for instance, a man or woman was married to multiple partners and no children were involved? Would society then tolerate, and perhaps legalize, polygamy in certain circumstances?

For those who justify polygamy by citing a religious "Judeo-Christian" acceptance of it miss the point; polygamy was at the root of a multitude of problems as described in ancient Hebrew Scriptures, not the ideal. The behavior and sometimes severe consequences of those in the Biblical age is often a template on how not to proceed.

In fact, rabbis tell us today that by the time of Christ, polygamy was already well dead and gone in the Jewish community. A thousand years ago, rabbinic scholars officially put the practice to death. In the New Testament scriptures, the admonition to be the husband of just one wife, if any at all, was the qualification to be a leader in the new church. The reason can be found in Genesis 2:24 "For this cause a man shall leave his mother and his father, and the two shall become one flesh."

Monogamy has been found to work best in non-Christian or non-Jewish societies as well. Even in powerful civilizations such as pantheist Rome, marriage and intimacy between one man and one woman was lauded as the ideal. The upper and ruling classes of Rome promoted monogamy through the legends - and even worship - of noble women such as Cornelia (Scipionis) and Arria.

Monogamy was the ethical standard of Rome. The moral practices of individual Romans may have wavered, as some Americans do now, but Rome's empire lasted more than double the years the United States has existed.

For thousands of years then, polygamy has rightfully been widely perceived as a major step backward in the societal and spiritual evolution of human beings in Western civilization, regardless of their spiritual "orientations."

That concept of "oneness" has not only become a legal standard, but in the evolution of society has proven to "work best" ethically - not perfectly, because people are not perfect, but "best."

Society also reaps the reward of following the best path, not the expedient one. Laws limiting perceived "freedoms" that affect us all work best as well.

Reports coming out of the FLDS compound in West Texas reveal anything but a "Heaven on Earth." Texas authorities were right to step in. Perhaps they should have done so years ago.

Questions remain about the legitimacy of the initial "outcry," or call to the crisis center. It may turn out that the call was a fake.

But there's little question the raid was justified. Illegal activity was taking place - polygamy and the sexual abuse of children, at the very least. Let's all remember that as we see the FLDS begin its public relations campaign, and its defense of the indefensible.

Early Returns is the political observations column of staff writer Roy Maynard, who can be reached at 903-596-6291 or at roymaynardtmt@gmail.com.