I get a little queasy when I read that San Angelo, Texas, authorities have removed 437 children from a polygamist religious compound and sent them to foster care.

The children were removed from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints a week ago. They were housed for several days in a sports coliseum and, beginning Tuesday, put on busses and sent to foster homes throughout Texas.

Yet, there seems to be no evidence the children were physically abused. Authorities received an anonymous call -- which seems to have been faked -- on April 3 from a woman who claimed to be 16 and abused.

The police claim to have found at least some evidence that young women in the compound had been forced to marry older men.

All this is kooky. But, are claims like this really justification for seizing 437 children, separating them from their parents and bussing them all over the state?

I have trouble with that.

Usually, authorities do everything in their power to let children remain with their families.

My colleague, Doug Erickson, looked at out-of-home foster care in a series carried earlier this year in the Wisconsin State Journal. His conclusion: For years, Dane County social workers have relied on an overriding philosophy when investigating child abuse danger: It is best to keep them with their parents and try to change the conditions that make them unsafe.

In all of Dane County, the total "out of home " foster care placement for children at the end of 2006 was 371. If you add in placements of children removed from their homes but placed with relatives, that number increases to 427.

So in this one act in Texas aimed at an unpopular religious sect, more children were removed from their homes than in our entire county.

And these kids weren 't just "removed " from the compound. Police showed up with an armored personnel carrier and dozens of armed officers. They stormed the sect 's temple, gathered up the kids and moved them, along with some parents, to the coliseum.

It all seems unpleasantly reminiscent of the 1993 raid of a Branch Davidian religious compound in Waco, Texas, in which 82 church members, including 21 children, died. The Waco sect opened fire on federal agents when they originally raided the compound, but the group in San Angelo offered no resistance and, fortunately, no one was physically injured.

And, yes, I know polygamy is illegal. And, yes, I know marrying off teenage girls to older men is really, really creepy.

But those kids were being cared for by mothers and aunts who loved them. They were being fed. They weren 't in physical danger. The trauma that was done to them was done to them by the authorities, not the church. I can 't imagine what the long-term psychological damage will be.

Surely, there was a better way to handle this.

Contact Wineke at bwineke@madison.com or at 252-6146. Read Wineke 's blog at www.madison.com/wsj/blogs.