Uh, yeah, this is serious.

Whether or not this is setting up an October Surprise--who knows?--this is serious.

Via Wendy McElroy:

According to the father, the gist of the story behind this YouTube: because Oath Keepers is classed as or with 'militia' by the state, a man's (and woman's) new-born daughter was taken away. Apparently the man's connection to Oath Keepers is listed in official documents regarding the 'state-kidnapping'. I do not know if other reasons are listed as well.

That I first ran across it at McElroy's site is saying something in and of itself. Vanderboegh was certainly on it too. I suspect others will follow soon.

The statement at Oath Keepers, by Stewart Rhodes, is crafted about as well as it could be, given his position. (I can't in conscience actually support OK, since membership means literally being a part of the systemic problem--but if ya just gotta work within the system, Rhodes actually seems like just the sort of guy you want doing it.) From the OK statement:

We are doing all we can to confirm and document this. But if is IS accurate, and a newborn child was ripped from her mother’s arms because the parents were “associated” with Oath Keepers by simply being members of our online ning discussion forum, then this is a grave crossing of a very serious line, and is utterly intolerable. It cannot be done. It cannot be allowed to stand.

If it is true, then I will do all in my power to stop it. We will pull out all the stops, every lawful means of seeing that this child is returned to her parents and that all persons responsible are held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. There can be no freedom of speech, no freedom of association, no freedom to even open your mouth and “speak truth to power,” no freedom AT ALL, if your children can be black bagged and stolen from you because of your political speech and associations -- because you simply dare to express your love of country, and dare to express your solidarity and fellowship with other citizens and with active duty and retired military and police who simply pledge to honor their oath and obey the Constitution. It was to prevent just such outrageous content based persecution of political dissidents that our First Amendment was written.

If true, then this is as bad, and in fact worse, than any of the violations of liberty that our Declaration of Independence lists as the reasons for our forefathers taking up arms in our Revolution and for separating from England. We no longer have freedom at all if this is allowed to be done. And we will not let it stand.

...

This is the camel’s nose under the tent. We need to fight even this one instance of such a violation of the right to associate and to peaceably assemble, and we need to push back against the new world of thought crime that is being relentlessly pushed upon us. If this listing of mere association with Oath Keepers is allowed to be used in this case to justify, even in part, removing a newborn from the custody of her parents, with nothing else alleged about Oath Keepers except that the father “is associated” with this organization, that will have a sweeping chilling effect on the First Amendment protected rights of freedom of speech, peaceable assembly, association, and petition for redress of grievances for all of us -- and it will only be the beginning.

There is much more. Read the whole thing, and get the word out.

The serious part, of course, is what happens next. This is clearly, probability approaching one hundred percent, a test case. For anyone who's been paying attention to this landscape for the last few years, what it looks like is a fucking goad.

"Here's an idea...If nobody wants a 'civil disturbance,' why in heck don't they quit disturbing us?" - MamaLiberty

UPDATE 10/9: Goad, indeed. Grigg is on it.

The "association" referred to in that document consists of occasional involvement by Irish and his fiancee in an on-line discussion group involving the Oath Keepers. Mentioning this tenuous connection served the immediate interests of the child abduction bureaucracy, since it created a caricature of the father as a potentially dangerous "extremist." But it also serves the long-term interest of the Homeland Security bureaucracy by using Jonathan Irish as an indispensable defendant in a potentially precedent-setting case.

As with pretty much all things Grigg, highly worth reading.