Texas does things large.

And the trial of polygamy is no exception - 416 children, 200 parents, 400 lawyers, two courtrooms, one "simple, country judge" and now hundreds of foster families.

Two weeks after sheriff's deputies, Texas Rangers and Child Protective Services (CPS) investigators raided the Yearning for Zion Ranch near Eldorado, 51st District Judge Barbara Walther ruled late last week that the state can keep the children indefinitely. She ordered hundreds of genetic tests to link children to their mothers and fathers, and warned parents that she still can terminate their rights.

Like I said - large.

"This is the hardest, toughest decision a judge makes every day," Walther said Friday. "It's no easy decision to rip families apart. There is no easy way to do this."

But Texas is making this one harder than it needs to be.

Each child will have a hearing in the next six weeks. That's enough time to start re-programming and "normalizing" the children of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Texas, it seems, is concluding that polygamy is child abuse. And the Lone Star State is going to do what Utah and Arizona have been unable to do for decades: Stamp out polygamy.

"This is all they're going to be dealing with for a year," says Duane Betournay, director of Utah Division of Child and Family Services.

With the excuse of a distressed phone call to a family shelter from a still-unidentified 16-year-old girl, Texas invaded the YFZ Ranch earlier this month and took all the children. Now, the state is making the case to keep them - all of them.

Every girl in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a potential rape victim and every boy a possible rapist, says Angie Voss, chief investigator with Texas CPS.

And she's right.

Knowing the predilection of FLDS men to marry girls the age of their granddaughters and bind first cousins and uncles and nieces in multiple "spiritual marriages," the mind reels at the potential perversions.

Texas is arguing that statutory rape is a way of life for many of Warren Jeffs' followers.

But this isn't just about sexual abuse. There is a whiff of cultural imperialism here. This is about further marginalizing an already-marginalized way of life - one person's religion, another's cult. Texas is taking on polygamy itself, FLDS polygamy specifically - its pervasive oppression of women, all-powerful patriarchy and molding of children's minds.

The Rangers didn't round up just the potential victims of sexual abuse (12- to 18-year-old girls). They didn't stop at criminal behavior. With reluctant and sometimes subversive victims, Texas child advocates have shown no consideration for different family groups, distinct styles of discipline or actual proof of specific abuse. Paternity testing will clear up some but not all of those questions.

"The environment is authoritarian," says Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist who has studied the Branch Davidians but whose knowledge of the FLDS comes mostly from newspapers. The mothers are loving, the children healthy and happy. But their innocence, Perry says, makes them vulnerable, suggestible.

Awakening polygamists' offspring to other options is a laudable goal. But is socializing sheltered children the state's job? The YFZ Ranch isn't the only authoritarian environment in America, so why stop there?

When some of the mothers offered to leave the ranch, find work, get counseling and have no contact with those church elders who like their pick of young girls, Voss and Walther said "no."

After the ruling, an FLDS father, who didn't want to be identified, said: "I think every parent in America ought to go home and hug their kids in case CPS come into their homes and gets them and does this joke of a hearing."

Reason - and the law - might still prevail.

Utah child welfare advocates say Texas' claim that polygamy is a culture of abuse is problematic.

"It's really hard to prove," says Julie V. Lund, child protection division chief in the state Attorney General's Office. "Under Utah law, I can't see us doing that. It would have to be on a specific, case-by-case basis."

Salt Lake City defense attorney Greg Skordas doubts Texas plans to take the children away permanently.

"At some point, those children are going back home. And somebody's going to have to decide whether the polygamist lifestyle is so abusive that a child may no longer live it," Skordas says. "I don't think any judge in America is ever going to say that.

"I don't defend the lifestyle. But when it comes to a time that the state can take 400 kids away from a group home, that's pretty scary."

walsh@sltrib.com