That isn't stopping their investigation of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, situated on a sprawling ranch near San Antonio.

Last weekend, 437 children were removed from the ranch, where residents believe in divinely inspired, polygamous marriage involving underage girls.

As a spokeswoman for Texas Child Protective Services told the Los Angeles Times, "We removed the children based on . . . evidence we found of sexual abuse of young teen girls and a pattern of grooming these girls" for sex with older males.

If young girls are being coerced into sex, if boys are being groomed to become predators - and, worse, worse, if neither can flee for their own protection - then thank God for the state's urgent advocacy on their behalf.

And I have a request: When investigators are done, could they please come to Philly? From what I can tell, the same terrible things are happening to vulnerable adolescents here.

We just see them differently.

Visit any obstetrical clinic or high-school hallway in this city, and you'll see them: teen girls, bulging with pregnancy, some as young as the girls that Texas authorities are so worried about.

We don't call these girls abused. We call them loose.

Walk through any tough neighborhood in this city, and you'll see the males who sire these babies. Some are teens themselves, but others are far older.

We don't call them statutory rapists. We call them players.

They often have babies by multiple females, and the females have babies by multiple males.

We don't call these people polygamists. We call them baby-mamas and baby-daddies.

And we don't intervene on their children's behalf, our sense of collective responsibility telling us that these children need to be rescued from the sexually coercive society that brought them to life in the first place - and whose culture will likely eventually harm them.

We say that the immoral denizens of the inner city bring their fate upon themselves.

Eldorado and Philadelphia: So far apart, so much alike, so profoundly different in the reaction they engender about the protection that children deserve from the parents who raise them and from the society they all depend on for support.

If the disconnect is making me crazy, you can imagine what it's doing to people who study this stuff for a living - like Maria Kefalas, a sociologist at St. Joseph's University.

"Here we are, facing a crisis in the cities, where 30 to 40 percent of poor, African-American girls are being diagnosed with sexually transmitted disease, where we know that some of that is the result of abuse, and there's no reaction," says Kefalas, co-author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. "Yet in Texas, the suspicion of sexual abuse actually brought out the National Guard. Where's that same sense of urgency for the rest of the country's girls?"

Brenda Green, executive director of CHOICE, the sexual-health-information clearinghouse, laments how teen-pregnancy rates have recently risen by 3 percent - a significant bump, after years of decline.

The news barely blipped on the national-consciousness radar. Yet the FLDS story has been headline fodder for more than two weeks.

Beyond wondering whether some of these pregnancies were the result of sexual abuse, Green says: "We should be asking ourselves, what is wrong in our society that kids have so little dreams for their future, they think their only option is to have sex and a baby at 15?"

The problem is too huge, too dispiriting, to get your arms around. It's no wonder there's been such a rush to fix things in Eldorado.

The FLDS ranch is contained, its rules established, its leaders known - and therefore, perhaps,able to be held accountable for whatever lack of regard has been shown for the sexual innocence of its children.

Unlike the teen-pregnancy crisis wreaking havoc on poor American communities, the one in Eldorado actually has the potential to be fixed.

It's no hoax that it's in the news. *

E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/polaneczky