"All truth passes through three stages," nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is widely attributed as saying. "First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

In 2008, polygamy entered the second stage. Last month, Texas authorities raided the Yearning for Zion ranch, a nearly two-thousand-acre compound of 700 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a splinter group of the main Mormon Church that broke off in the 1930s to practice polygamy, which the main church had renounced.

In the wake of the Texas raid, Utah and Arizona are reconsidering their prosecutorial strategies. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has called for a federal task force to investigate polygamous groups. And Texas is looking to move in on another polygamous community, the House of Yahweh.

Texas placed all 416 children into state custody, including 30 reportedly pregnant teenage girls. For perspective, that's like taking every single student from your local elementary school.

Why the raid? The polygamy issue is a red herring, in the truest sense of the phrase.

Young hunting dogs were once trained by dragging the pungent smoked and gutted fish across a trail until they learned to recognize it; later, when the dog was learning to follow the faint scent of a fox, the stronger-smelling red herring would be dragged across the path in a different direction to try to confuse the dog. Eventually, the dog would learn to focus on the faint but more important smell.

Polygamy is a red herring here because it leads off in a different direction. It is not the case that the Eldorado ranch was raided because adults were marrying each other in a greater than one-to-one ratio. They were raided because of allegations of child abuse.

What allegations, exactly? It turns out this is a key question.

According to an affidavit obtained and described by the Deseret News, among others, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services received several calls from a single person on March 29. The caller claimed to be 16 years old, several weeks pregnant and already the mother of an 8-month-old baby. She said she had been dropped off in the compound three years ago by her parents, who did not remain there, and that she hasn't seen them since. She was forced to spiritually marry a 49-year-old man last year, becoming his seventh wife. She said she had been abused regularly, including having several broken ribs that a nearby hospital had to bandage. She also gave her name: Sarah Barlow. With all those details, it should be a cinch to find this particular girl once all of them had been taken into custody, right?

She has never been identified. She has never been found. She may not even exist. This single complainant may have been a hoax. The calls came in from a prepaid cell phone, so there are no available records. However, a woman again calling herself Sarah Barlow also called a battered woman's shelter in Washington, more than 2,000 miles away, from a different phone, one that has been traced to the apartment of Rozita Swinton, a 33-year-old Colorado woman.

These weren't the only calls about supposed abuse by Ms. Swinton. She also called a Utah organization for women escaping polygamy and an abuse counseling center in Florida. Last year, she pleaded guilty to a charge of false reporting. She was arrested again this month and charged with calling authorities in February using different names and claiming abuse by male relatives.

She even talked to the Texas deputies again after the raid, after she called Washington once more as Sarah Barlow and was transferred to them. She said she was angry with the woman she had spoken with initially because that conversation had prompted the raid.

Almost surely there is no Sarah Barlow. And without that phone call, there would have been no raid, polygamy or no polygamy. Keep your nose on the scent: follow the children.

Child abuse is a crime and must be punished. It is why we have government. But polygamy, like any voluntary contract between consenting adults, is, by and large, not the government's business. ("To marry," Schopenhauer also said, "is to halve your rights and double your duties." Imagine the relevant multiples for polygamy.) As a society, we may exclude certain promises from being enforceable, such as social promises ("I promise to take out the trash.") or promises with an illegal purpose ("Let's split the heist money fifty-fifty."), but we do not prosecute those who enter into such contracts for the mere fact that they exchanged promises.

Gay marriage and polygamy are examples of other contracts that various American communities have taken different approaches on. Marriage is an important contract to society only because of children. Last week, the California Supreme Court ruled that gay couples may not be prohibited from marrying, even though they were afforded essentially equivalent rights through civil unions, because there is a fundamental difference between marriage and a civil union. The primary difference is children.

But perhaps it shouldn't be. We are accustomed to children having just one mother and one father, but that is not today's reality. With divorces and remarriages, many kids who you would not consider products of polygamy have many adults in their lives who share the role of parent. According to the Stepfamily Foundation, more than half of American families are either remarried or re-coupled. For the most part both the biological parents and the stepparents love their children. Should the government use force to return them back to their biological parents? No.

So why do it in this case? Texas is gathering the DNA of all the children and as many adults as it can get its hands on to try to determine whose child is whose. Supposing that basically all of the parents in the polygamist community loved basically all of the children, to about the same levels as stepparents and stepchildren in the ostensibly monogamous part of the country, what is the justification?

There can be only two: physical abuse and sexual abuse.

Children who are victims of abuse need to be protected and their abusers brought to justice, as they would even if no polygamy was involved. Then it becomes the standard yet constantly gut-wrenching decision of: how do you prove and end abuse? Suppose the rate of physical abuse is about the same as it is in the general American population. You wouldn't round up all the children on your block into foster care because a few were hurt. So why would you do it in this particular neighborhood?

Now that the children are all in foster care, it should be a relatively simple process to have them medically examined to determine if there was indeed abuse. What portion of the children would be found to be abused? How does that percentage relate to that of the general population, or, say, the population of your town? I have not seen any numbers at all on this point. Some might say the act of sex itself, a marriage, or even pregnancy among girls could be res ipsa loquitor ("the thing speaks for itself") evidence of wrongdoing.

After all, the vast majority of underage American females who have sex do so voluntarily and willingly, and the 750,000 annual American teenage pregnancies are not usually considered evidence of rape.

There is plenty of such evidence in the general population, where the age of consent for much of our history, including well into the 19th century, has been closer to thirteen than eighteen, and one-eighth of all 15-year-old girls and two-thirds of all 18-year-olds have had sex. Overall, one in ten girls who had sex before age 20 reported that their first sex was involuntary, and that number increases the younger the girl is when she first had sex. These statistics are from the Guttmacher Institute.

One false justification for the raid, which is inexplicably vocalized by the authorities rather than merely being an unspoken and hidden reason, is to prevent the socialization of children into polygamous beliefs. In other words, even if the parents have done nothing wrong, and even if the children have never been abused, physically or sexually, those children still need to be separated from their parents and all who love them because someday in the future, those boys may grow up to be old men who have sex with 13-year-olds and those girls may grow up to be happy with that arrangement.

That's about an absurd a reason to raid a community as is the equally bogus justification of educational neglect. Carolyn Jessop escaped from a polygamous commune in Colorado City eight years ago with her five children and wrote a book about it. She supports the Texas raid and goes even further, calling on state education officials to require polygamous parents to either enroll their children in public schools or file paperwork showing intent to home-school. But no person on earth has ever been in danger of imminent educational neglect. Our friend Schopenhauer has something to say on socialized education as well: "Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors." Even Carolyn Jessop's oldest daughter eventually chose to return to the commune from which her mother had rescued her.

There are, unfortunately, instances of rape, abuse, and poor education in polygamous communities, just as there are in monogamous ones. But how different are those levels? If they are comparable, perhaps that says more about us as a whole than about these specific communities.

But really, with divorces and affairs and stepparents, polygamy is self-evident in mainstream society, not just isolated communities. Perhaps the sooner we can move polygamy to Schopenhauer's third stage, the sooner we can mount an effective, consistent hunt against child abuse wherever it is found, without being distracted by the red herring of polygamy.