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Saying that so-called child protection services had overstepped their authority, the Texas Supreme Court ruled today that the children must be returned to their families. This is an affirmation of the decision by the appeals court last week, which made the same ruling.

Both courts said there was no evidence the 460 children were in immediate danger, the criteria for taking any child out of their home.

The Texas Supreme Court said, "We are not inclined to disturb the court of appeals' decision. On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted."

"The moms are clearly very happy at the news that it looks like they're going to get their kids a lot sooner than expected," Cynthia Martinez, a spokeswoman for legal aid attorneys representing 38 mothers who filed the complaint.

With both courts ruling against the child protection agency, it looks like there was a huge abuse of power, as the agency originally said they raided the compound because young girls were being forced to marry and engage in sex. It's a devastating rebuke to the agency and law enforcement officers who partook in the outrage, now that the courts have ruled they never had cause to take the actions, meaning they abused their authority.

This is important because of the power invested in child protection services across the nation which can be used as a weapon by spouses and others with axes to grind against each other.

In this case, to treat the large number of families as a single family was ridiculous and unprecedented.

It is far past time that an organization should be allowed to exercise the type of raw power these child protection services are allowed to wield in the name of protecting children. After all, who's going to say anything against that, even if the services consistently are used to manipulate the lives of many children. It's a double-edge sword, and needs checks and balances in place to keep it in line; especially because it's children and families.

When you take into account that the original caller reporting the "abuse" was traced to out of state and a chronic liar and abuser of child protection agencies, you have a horrid situation that needs to be more than simply turned over. There's a systemic problem in the child protection services, and there needs to be an overview of the agencies, as well as much more restraint in going in on the barest of whims.

In this particular area, lives are permanently ruined, even when in many cases the charges are proved false. Once a person is branded with the stigma of being a child abuser, even when later proven innocent, they're branded for life. There needs to be much more burden of proof in place in order to take the steps to take children out of the home.

This was a debacle from the beginning, and it was probably known by the agency and law enforcement that the call was bogus, but was used as an excuse to take action.

The decisions by the courts were the right ones, and it hopefully will provide some restraint by those who think they can abuse people's liberties based on the flimsiest of excuses.

All of this is important because all people would have to do is consider you weird in order to report you to child protective services and have your children taken away. Some of the horror stories that have been proven to happen confirm that this is more than an anomaly, and we have to be very careful to delegate the type of authority to human beings that they aren't capable of rightfully handling. This case proves again the need for strict oversight and balance in handling these delicate cases and issues.

The bottom line? They could be coming for you next on the pretext of disagreeing with your lifestyle. This ruling had to be made to protect people from abuse of power, which was obviously exercised in this case.