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We Are (All) FamilyGrowing up in an "intentional community" isn't as foreign as it sounds.

By Lee Ann KinkadePosted Wednesday, June 4, 2008, at 11:56 AM ET

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Dahlia Lithwick compared the FLDS raid in Texas to the rights abuses at Guantanamo. Neil J. Young looked at the long legacy of a 1950s raid on polygamists. Juliet Lapidos explained how the FLDS finds three women for every man, and Torie Bosch excerpted highlights from the memoir of a former FLDS wife.

Underneath the desire to embrace cultural relativism and alternative definitions of family lurks a deep inability to reconcile the children who were taken into state custody with America's picture of itself. Americans might have an extremely generous and expansive notion of alternative lifestyle choices. But our notions of what constitutes an acceptable childhood occupy a very narrow bandwidth. Given the hairline margin for deviation, it isn't really surprising that the state of Texas' desire to protect the FLDS children resulted in chaos.

I'm often asked what it was like to grow up "that way." Whoever I am talking with wants me to build a bridge connecting the strange and the familiar. I tell them I converted to Christianity for two months when I was 6 to irritate people. Two years later, that same motivation led me to ask to join the Girl Scouts, even though I knew they were considered a quasifascistic organization. (I still haven't figured out what the problem was there.) I try to give friends from the outside a sense of the summer when the community assigned someone to sit in a hammock and teach me—a dyslexic, headstrong little girl—to read. I also tell them about the hollow feeling that came when the adults I loved would wander off to find themselves. Many people return the favor by answering my questions about custody battles, church picnics, and the social function of betting on some phenomenon I am given to understand is referred to as "March Madness."

I don't have a huge polemic ax to grind where polygamy is concerned. The idea of 13-year-old girls being married to their uncles is indefensible. I'd call social services faster than you can say "alternative lifestyle" and happily pin the men in question to the wall until the cops showed up. Any of the members of nontraditional families I know would do the same, even while a month's worth of news causes them to worry that a phone call and a state decision could break apart their own families.

The next time an intentional community stands accused of crimes, whether it's of the FLDS, New Mexico's Strong City, or another group, social services must better understand these children's lives. The tacit recognition of strangeness seems to be a key feature of this story, but the willingness to see any sameness is absent. As soon as the specter of child abuses rises in the national consciousness, we seem to need to consider communities monstrous in every particular. Children will be removed with indecent haste and returned slowly. Still, I wonder what degree of empathy is possible in a social structure that persists in defining the lives of the children it is trying to help as bizarre.

I wonder whether the newscasters and social workers have a childhood memory like mine. They woke up in a house with one family and crawled into a bed whose occupants were conventionally associated with each other. It might be that they associate that feeling of comfort with the marriage that brought about that bed. I don't know. What I do know is that despite my own distance from that Dick and Jane family you know, and like the FLDS children returning home from what must be a frightening spring, I too remember a window full of moonlight, warm blankets, and an arm around me as I fell asleep.