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The child custody chaos in San Angelo Texas continues and all three newscasts kept a correspondent on the case. CBS' Randall Pinkston sat down with members of the fundamentalist Mormon sect to ask about the state's allegations of child brides. "If I understood right, a few years back the law in Texas allowed a girl to be married when she was 14," answered one husband named Edson. The men of the Yearning for Zion ranch were sitting down for interviews "for the first time," noted NBC's Don Teague, but they appeared to have their talking points straight. Another husband, Leland, referred to the recent raise in the age of consent: "You move to a place and somebody passes a law that says what you do is wrong and then, all of a sudden, when you came there you were not a criminal and then, all of a sudden now, you may be a criminal." Teague noted that the sect's secrecy derives from "what they consider a well-founded fear of religious persecution." Meanwhile the family court ordered DNA tests on all 419 children to determine their parentage. ABC's Neal Karlinsky (embargoed link) commented that the genetic science will be "challenging" since "the polygamist sect is made up of only a handful of families who have intermarried for generations."
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