SECOND PRELUDE TO NUSSBAUM

(As I said in my previous Post, I am preparing a short series of Posts on the feminist legal philosophy of Martha Nussbaum, since there is a hell of a lot in there that has been verrrry strongly driving all sorts of developments in legislation, jurisprudence, and general elite thought for decades now. But in the course of other responsibilities, I had to prepare a short series of comments that specifically dealt with Domestic Violence and Sex Offense developments from the legal and cultural point of view. I am putting them both up here since I discuss dynamics and ideas that have been introduced into the wider American culture and are still operating widely and robustly now.

A couple of acronyms u abbreviations: AWA is the Adam Walsh Act (2006, Federally organizing Sex Offense registries); SORNA is Sex Offender Registration and Notification; SO is Sex Offender.)

I wanted to do a follow-up Post restating or amplifying for clarity what I was driving at in the Nussbaum Post. I covered a lot of ground and there were – I think – some important points.

Before doing that, I have to make note of the Ohio Supreme Court Opinion in Bodyke and the US Supreme Court’s (somewhat surprising) Opinion in Carr. The cases are discussed at length on the several SO sites, and as so often, the Constitutional Fights site is a useful gateway.

In both cases the Courts have decided against AWA and in favor of the SOs. (And there is a further piece there about how States are still concerned about the financial costs of implementing AWA even with Obama’s sly addition of law-enforcement funding to cover some of the expenses; the start-up and projected expansion and maintenance costs have been – surprise! – understated by supporters of AWA, and the States – I wonder about the public – are shrewd enough to realize that they are going to get stuck not only with a big bill, but an ever-expanding bill for the whole thing.)

In Bodyke the increasingly interesting Ohio Supreme Court ruled that SOs cannot be reclassified by AWA if they have already been classified by court action (i.e. they were classified as part of the judgment that convicted them); this is a Separation of Powers ground (i.e. the Legislative and Executive cannot ‘decree’ changes to established Judicial Branch decisions).

Now this doesn’t reach – and the Court seems purposely to avoid the thorny thing – the issue of Retroactivity: can you retroactively add punishments to a crime for which one has already been convicted? As you may know, to raise the Retroactivity issue a Court would then have to formally decide whether AWA (and perhaps all of the Registration and Notification regime) is ‘criminal’ rather than ‘civil’; and that would be a truly significant decision.

As it stands, there are now 26, 000 or so Ohio SOs who must immediately be put back to their original conviction-classification on the AWA-compliant Ohio registry. Constitutional Fights reports that it actually called the Ohio Attorney General’s office and was put on hold and then given a run-around as to when the AG was going to get around to completing that now Court-mandated task; if the SOs’ names are left on the internet Registry in their new (and enhanced) AWA classification then the State itself will be committing an illegal act.

This will only have ramifications for SOs in States where the classification is actually part of the conviction sentence by the trial court. But Ohio is not the only State where that is done, and so this case will set a precedent.

In a larger sense, of course, the Ohio Bodyke case signals a judicial unease with the AWA (and perhaps entire SORNA) regime. And while the more professional SO sites, where attorneys make comments, are right to note that the actual legal effects are not large, yet still there is the unmistakable sense that the winds are changing.

There was a Dissent in the case where one of the Ohio Justices opined that reclassification is merely administrative and not a ‘further punishment’ – but that’s the old song.

In the even more surprising Carr case, the US Supreme Court, although divided 6-3, said that Carr could not be charged with a SORNA violation for an act that took place before the AWA law took effect. Again, the Court here does not clearly reach the Ex Post Facto or Retroactivity issues, which – if decided against AWA – would be lethal to the SO Mania law regime.

Instead, the Court simply states that Congress did not expressly authorize Retroactive application in the AWA enabling legislation. So it’s something of a ‘technicality’ – the Court leaves for another day the heavy-lifting involved in tackling head-on the Constitutionality of the regime. Congress could re-write AWA to expressly order retroactive application, and then the matter would have to make its way back up to the Supreme Court on those grounds.

Of interest here is that Justice Sotomayor wrote the majority Opinion, while Justice Ginsburg – the other woman on the Court – Dissented.

Sotomayor is deploying a bit of feminist-law thinking: that you have to consider not simply the formal law in question, but also take into account the effect upon those who must bear the burden of the law.

Ginsburg – true to a form that has not been sufficiently examined – seems to be writing from an older feminist-law thread whereby ‘women’ must be aggressively protected from male sex aggression and any law that works toward that must be upheld. I also note that Ginsburg operates well within the Nussbaum vision: since it is a ‘given’ that males ‘aggress’ against women sexually, then women’s rights are thereby violated and the government must use its sovereign legislative and police powers immediately and aggressively to put a stop to that. (Although it has become increasingly clear and well-documented how ineffective the SO regime laws really are even in achieving their stated purposes of public and women’s purported safety.)

See my thoughts further on in this Post where I discuss that thread and its approach a bit more.

All in all, I am verrrrry leery of the feminist-law approach and the mind-set that underlies it. (Which is not at all to say that I support genuine sexual offending by anybody of any age or gender against anybody of any age or gender; nor am I anti-woman or misogynist or in favor of female Citizens being deprived of Constitutional protections.)

And while it is nice to see how even feminist-inspired legal thinking can actually work in favor of SOs, I also realize that the entire SO Mania is profoundly inspired by the general feminist-law approach as it has evolved in this country over the past few decades.

So much for the cases. Let me move on to some further discussion of Nussbaum – since her vision is a major element in the theoretical underpinning of the feminist-law agenda.

As I had said in my previous Post, it seems to me that the 1970s saw feminist-law thinking and strategizing adopt the Black Civil Rights paradigm. In that paradigm, it was simply (and generally) accepted as true and as a given that the South of the Jim Crow Era (between roughly 1875 and 1965) clearly discriminated against Blacks in the South in such profound and clearly un-Constitutional ways that the government was justified in stepping in and vigorously re-arranging Southern culture and society in order to finally put an end to the whole Jim Crow regime.

Thus the government would be ‘regulating’ the South and its laws and its culture through aggressive action. So there was a ‘presumption of guilt’ – and that presumption was made against all Southerners such that you pretty much could and had to presume that everyone and everything down there was ‘tainted’ with Jim Crow thinking.

Nor did you have to presume that Southerners were individually and consciously seeking to abrogate or suppress the Constitutional rights of Blacks in the South: Jim Crow was so much a part of the warp and woof of Southern culture of that Era that even ‘decent’ white Southerners who had no conscious and deliberate ill or malicious intentions could grow up in that culture simply assuming the ‘normality’ (and even Constitutionality) of Jim Crow.

Thus ‘regulatory’ law would be the paradigm: the government would literally re-form or re-shape Southern culture so that it would no longer provide a seed-ground for Jim Crow-type suppression of Black Constitutional rights.

And, as I said, this ‘regulation’ presumed the tainted nature of Southern culture and of the mind-set of most Southerners. And Southern law – though ‘legal’ – and Southern legal thought had to be overridden in any instance where it operated to effectively deprive Southern Blacks of their Constitutional rights.

This might work in a ‘regulatory’ law approach.

But you can see where it bodes hugely dangerous trouble if applied to the practice of Constitutional criminal law: you cannot, in Constitutional criminal law, ‘presume’ the ‘guilt’ of an accused defendant. Indeed, such a presumption is not only un-Constitutional but profoundly anti-Constitutional.

Feminist law – and Nussbaum insofar as she codifies feminist-law thinking and underpins the feminist-law agenda – adopted the Black Civil Rights approach as it sought (and seeks) to re-shape American culture.

Thus, according to the paradigm: American culture is as hostile to women - and even more so - as Jim Crow culture was to Blacks; and since then the entire American culture is ‘tainted’ with those habits of thinking and acting, and since American law and jurispraxis is so tainted as well, then the government sovereign power must be deployed against American culture and the ‘male’ mind-set just as aggressively as it had been against the anti-Black Jim Crow culture and mind-set in the South.

Thus much of the ‘culture war’ dynamic as it has played out in the country for the past decades. Although most media and public attention was focused on ‘instances’ of such deprivation, rather than on the deeper legal thinking that was starting to flood in with ‘feminist law’.

But then in the Domestic Violence and Sex Offense legislation, you start to see the migration of this ‘regulatory’ approach into the criminal law. Thus for example, the ‘male’ is ‘presumed’ to be violating the rights of the female, and the government power thus must be exercised not to determine guilt (which is already presumed) but rather to ‘vindicate’ the rights of the female (increasingly cast as ‘the victim’).

You can see this clearly and quickly in the Domestic Violence entry in the massive “Corpus Juris Secundum”*, the legal encyclopedia that amasses all of the case law in a given area of legal practice. A 1987 Pennsylvania case is cited** wherein a court upholds the Domestic Violence legislation against Constitutional challenge by stating that such (at that time) apparently un-Constitutional novelties as ex parte court procedures, deprivation of access to property and family, warrantless arrests on the say-so of one person, and many of the other elements of Domestic Violence law were justified because of a) the ‘emergency’ of (male) violence and b) “to compensate for deficiencies in the criminal justice system”.

Note the ‘emergency’ bit. You don't have to go too far back in world history to see the ominous results of 'emergency' laws.

Note too that the “deficiencies” the court refers to are actually the Constitutional principles precisely set up by the Framers to prevent the hasty and emotional misapplication of the sovereign police power against a Citizen. IT WAS PRECISELY TO GET AROUND THEM that the feminist-law approach – with its incessant trumpeting of ‘emergencies’ that precisely DO require ‘hasty’ action – selected the ‘back-door’ paradigm of Civil and Constitutional Rights in order to insinuate itself into the American legal system.

Thus, Domestic Violence law is asserted to be ‘civil’ and ‘regulatory’ in nature and not ‘criminal’ (although, neatly, if you violate a DV protection order then you are subject to criminal penalties). And it ‘presumes’ the ongoing offenses on the part of the ‘male’ just as the Civil Rights Era anti-Jim Crow regulatory approach presumed the racism of the Southern culture and population, regardless of whether any of those folks thought they were committing, or intended willfully to commit, a crime.

And in the 1980s Domestic Violence law you start to see verrrry queasy ‘reforms’ that – by the way – are not at all unfamiliar to the SO community: these are ‘civil’ and not ‘criminal’ procedures (although – tee hee – criminal sanctions apply if you violate the Protective Orders); the ‘emergency’ is soooo great that SOMEthing must be done without any further delay; the goal is not ‘punishment’ but MERELY ‘prevention’; the now-traditional promise that the whole regime will ‘end’ something (in the Domestic Violence scheme, ending ‘family disruption’); and the grab-bag of dangerous tactics: ex parte issuance of Orders, warrantless arrests even on one’s own property, accepting the ‘word’ of the reporting party as sufficient to deploy the police power, as well as the de facto presumption of guilt.

Now what starts with Domestic Violence is taken to a dangerously aggressive new level in the 1990s Sex Offense regime – you are seeing an even clearer migration of the ‘regulatory’ into the ‘criminal law’ arena. And that’s on top of the whole invasive government-power paradigm derived from the Civil Rights Era.

The effect – and I believe the intent – of the feminist-law approach here is to sidestep or get-around the Constitutional safeguards that protect individual Citizens from the invasive and hasty application of the sovereign government police power through the criminal law.

Thus, SOs, like the Southerners of the Jim Crow Era paradigm, are presumed to be violent and dangerous; and thus they must be ‘regulated’ in the interests of an aggrieved group whose rights are already known to have been violated such that the government is not creating a ‘new’ level of invasiveness but rather is merely stepping-in to redress a long-standing abrogation of ‘rights’.

And thus SOs are not so much individual Citizens who – at most – have deliberately committed a crime; rather, like those Jim Crow Southerners, they are a deeply misguided group that has – whether deliberately or otherwise – been violating ‘rights’ and have to be stopped through ‘regulation’. AND you can presume as a given that they are doing the violating.

And so any ‘trial’ is going to be a ‘show trial’ in the formal sense: a trial not to ascertain guilt or innocence, but rather to ‘show’ that the government power will redress, prevent, avenge against actions that are so abusive of others’ rights that the actions must be stopped immediately.

THIS, I think, helps explain the profound intransigence of legislators and jurists in the matter of establishing and critically analyzing the SO Mania regime of laws. They are not simply politically pandering to vocal ‘interests’ (although that too now is a major element in this thing). Rather, they are convinced by this ‘regulatory’ paradigm (long espoused by Justice Ginsburg, and codified in the law schools by Professor Nussbaum) that they are doing The Right Thing, the same way that the legislators of the 1960s did The Right Thing by putting an end to Jim Crow culture in the South.

So the ‘regulatory’ and ‘civil’ aspects of the SO regime are actually vital elements of the Mania, specifically and deliberately (I would say) selected precisely as a way of circumventing ‘traditional’ American Constitutional safeguards.

To put it another way: if you have a ‘right’ not to have a crime committed against you, then any crime committed against you can be construed as a violation of your purported ‘Constitutional right’ not to have a crime committed against you (or, put another way, your ‘right’ not-to-live-in-fear-of-a-crime-being-committed-against-you). THIS THEN triggers the Southern Jim Crow paradigm, whereby you are having your ‘Constitutional rights’ violated and the ‘defendant’ or alleged perpetrator is now also an ongoing civil-rights violator.

AND ONCE THAT paradigm is accepted, then the classic and traditional (and indispensable) Constitutional rights accorded to accused Citizens that are enshrined in the Constitution are effectively sidestepped and defendants can be treated by the government not as the classic ‘defendant’ but rather as an already-presumed civil-rights-violator; and there go defendant rights (which are, let's be honest, everybody's rights).

And since the whole thing is a matter of ‘civil rights’ and not of a specific alleged crime, then not only are defendants' Constitutional protections sidestepped but defendants are subjected to the tripwire jurisprudence and legislation that are the consequence and legacy of the anti-Jim Crow campaign of the Civil Rights Era.

Verrrrry neat. Verrrrrrrrrrrrrry dangerous.

This entire dynamic is reinforced by Nussbaum’s long held belief that ‘emotions’ are themselves a form of ‘reasoning’ rather than a potentially dangerous rival to ‘reasoning’. (Which is a curious position for a feminist, who might reliably be imagined to refuse any such equation of ‘female’ and ‘emotionality’ as opposed to ‘rationality’ – but Nussbaum tries to solve that problem for herself by claiming that ‘emotionality’ is a form of ‘rationality’ … neat.)

And of course, one of the primary emotions is Fear – and once that is introduced as a primary element in jurisprudence and in the justification for sweeping police-power legislation (even when costumed in ‘civil’ or ‘regulatory’ sheeps-clothing) – then any Constitutional ethos is in a heepa trubble.

Ditto ‘outrage’ if you presume or discover yourself to have been denied your ‘rights’ all along.

Ditto raging impatience as you feel yourself justified to ‘demand’ immediate redress and vengeance.

Ditto the legislators and jurists who then want to mollify all these raging feelings and yet still claim to be acting (legislating, adjudicating) ‘rationally’. Oy.

And further, I had mentioned in the previous Post that Nussbaum wants to see her concept of ‘rights’ imposed by courts – especially the Supreme Court, because she doesn’t really trust ‘politicians’ or the ‘political process’ any more. But of course, you couldn’t trust the Jim Crow Era Southerners to clean up their own culture because they were so thoroughly used to it that they would neither be motivated to change nor able to see what had to be changed in the first place. They were like fish who are so used to ‘water’ because they have spent their lives in it and only in it, that they don’t and can’t realize that the water exists at all.

In the Nussbaum-Ginsburg vision, American culture (and – even more sweepingly – human culture) is as profoundly besotted and deformed by ‘male’ and ‘macho’ thinking and acting (especially in matters sexual) as Jim Crow culture was besotted and deformed by anti-Black racism.

And American culture doesn’t even know it – but the elite cadres know it, so We – like the lumpen, donkey Soviet masses – just have to trust them. Or else.

And that therefore, in terms of the paradigm, American and world culture must be as vigorously and aggressively ‘changed’ as the culture of the Jim Crow South was.

Hence you get a Beltway, now, that considers itself empowered to do all of that, and not only here but abroad as well.

And – since the trouble is not so much a ‘criminal’ act as it is a thoroughly tainted and debased ‘white and male’ cultural outlook and way of living and thinking and being – then the government sovereign power must be deployed against the most profound core of the national culture itself.

This is a recipe for a lot of things, not all of them good.

But it certainly requires something more than a ‘limited government’ in the Constitutional and Framing vision – which is precisely why the Constitution has been under sustained and lethally profound assault not only from the Right but from the Left (which was supposed to be the ‘liberal’ and pro-people side).

And, I think, it is the profound un-ease evinced in the hearts and minds of the Citizenry that has constituted so much sustained hesitation about embracing this vision that Nussbaum now (in her 2007 article) effectively declares that ‘democracy’ cannot be trusted to ensure her vision of ‘rights’! So she looks to the courts. (And thus you can see why, on a much deeper level than is usually noticed, it is essential that persons (and not necessarily female) who buy into this vision are appointed to the Supreme Court.)

Oy.

Which brings me to my last point: defining ‘rights’ in all of this. There are, I would suggest, three overall conceptions of American Constitutional rights: the first is the 1787 vision: Americans as individuals and as a civil society have a right to be free from any excessive government (National even more than State) intrusion or aggressive action that is not most clearly and undeniably justified. In this vision, the government police power and sovereign authority must be bound so as not to flood like the Mississippi and wreck everything built up along its banks and flood-plain.

The second vision is FDR’s rather overly capacious ‘Second Bill of Rights’ of 1944: every American should have a right to a job with a living wage, a home, freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, medical care and education. Now the government power is envisioned not simply as keeping the boundaries of the national ‘playing field’ steady and level and clear but is actually going to be running the national ‘game’ – this suggestion of FDR’s was a huge (and not altogether workable) change from the 1787 vision.

Even more so was his Four Freedoms: freedom OF speech and expression and freedom OF religion; but also freedom FROM want and FROM fear. You can see quickly that any government that would seek to implement the provision of such Freedoms as FDR proposes was going to have to be a verrrry busy government indeed.

And so especially in the matter of Freedom From Fear: if a government has guaranteed to its people that it will protect them from all Fear, then that government is going to need the wisdom and organizational ability and authority of ‘God’.

And if you watch the development of feminism and victimism through the last few decades in this country – where ‘fear’ seems to be the primary characteristic of Citizens … then you can see where this all can go. And if on top of that you accept the vision that one group of your own Citizens is by very nature and cultural upbringing the greatest source of ‘fear’ among the rest of the Citizens … you can see quickly where the Sex Offender becomes not simply a Problem, but a Necessary Demon that has to be invented in order to keep the Fear Factor up. Oy.

Or, to put this point another way: the massive post-1965 Second Reconstruction of Southern culture and laws could not have happened unless there was the 'emergency' and 'outrage' posed by the ongoing and violent 'taint' shared by Southern culture and by - for all practical purposes - all Southerners; the Southerners were the ongoing evil perps whose existence was essential to catalyze and justify the massively intrusive extension of Federal authority in those States.

So too, I would say that the existence of the ongoing, uncontrollable and irredeemable 'sex offender' is essential to the massive extension of Federal authority in the Sex Offense Mania and its regime of frakkulent laws.

And, of course, all of this dovetails with feminism's Deconstruction-Reconstruction of 'tainted' American culture and society and - oy! - the American Constitutional ethos and even the democratic and deliberative process. (After all: according to Nussbaum, it's not the 'process' but the 'outcome' that is important here: the 'taint' has to be thoroughly uprooted like the Biblical weeds among the wheat - and it has to be done RIGHT NOW because, neatly and slyly if also somewhat incoherently, it is a 'constitutional rights' problem.)

But then there is also this third vision of ‘rights’: Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach. Here, as I noted in the previous Post, she is claiming that ‘formal rights’ aren’t at all enough: government must do whatever it takes in order to make sure that everyone has AN EQUAL CHANCE to exercise those rights.

And once again: when government is not only tasked with keeping itself from intruding into the polity, and not only tasked with ensuring protections that not even Divine Providence has historically guaranteed in this life, but is also tasked with ensuring that absolutely nothing interferes with the Capability to Exercise the Rights that the Constitution guarantees … then you have a Benevolent Despot from hell.

So when the term ‘equal rights’ is thrown around, you have to understand that there are hugely different ‘loads’ that the phrase might be made to bear.

And you have to ask the speaker of the phrase just how s/he defines ‘rights’ in order to get an inkling of just how much government power will be necessary to guarantee that they are ‘equal’.

And you can’t ignore the question as to whether any earthly government has a reasonable chance of doing so much. And doing it well.

And whether the government of 1787 – not because it was ‘male’ or ‘majority’ or ‘white’ but simply because it was HUMAN – has any possibility of undertaking such a huge agenda and yet still remaining a limited government.

Thus when you hear folks saying that the Constitution is ‘defective’ or ‘quaint’ or ‘inadequate’ you have to ask yourself some very serious questions as to just what the speaker expects the government and the Constitution to be doing.

Because if feminist law is essentially implying (though slyly not saying it in so many words) that if 'limited Constitutional government' doesn't meet its demands (couched as 'equal rights' arguments) then 'limited Constitutional government' has to go ... if THAT is the core dynamic of their programme, then We most surely have a huge national discussion to conduct.

(And if several decades of generations of law students, law professors, attorneys, prosecutors, and judges at all levels have already been produced under the illusion that this type of dreck is 'cutting edge' and 'progressive' and 'reform' thinking, then We most surely are in a heepa trubble.)

So then, I see after reading Nussbaum , that Sex Offenders and the Mania and its regime are not simply a cynical and duplicitous effort of a failing government to pander to certain ‘interests’ in the hopes of securing electoral support and distracting public attention from its own short-comings.

Rather, the SO Mania is simply a step in the deliberate effort, grounded and guided by Nussbaum’s game-plan (Ginsburg the most successful quarterback), to profoundly alter the role of government by seducing it into taking on Objectives and Goals that no human, let alone limited, government can ever realize.

To imagine that such a plan is merely ‘optimistic’ and ‘progressive’ is to imagine that a hippopotamus can fly – or even dance ballet in a tutu (the Boomers have gotten wayyyy too much of their political philosophy from Walt Disney, if you ask me).

And so Our present rendezvous with Destiny is located here on the cutting edge of this frightening shift in American governance as its elites attempt to move the tectonic plates upon which the whole polity rests. Blithely if not also arrogantly consoling themselves that they are on a Cutting Edge and in possession of The True, Correct, and Only Path to whatever Perfection they think they will achieve. And that they are merely ‘expanding equality’ and thus in total sync with the Constitution (though they know so much more than any of the previous generations – including the Framers – did).

I don’t think the rest of Us have to drink the Kool-Aid that is mixed with the Chardonnay and single-malt at A-list Beltway dinner parties.

We have a job of work to do.

And the country needs the help more desperately than it knows.

NOTES

*The CJS is a 100-plus volume copyrighted legal encyclopedia. I can’t find its material online; a large public library or university or law school library would have a set (about $7,000 for the whole). The ‘Domestic Violence’ section starts off Volume 28. [Verry interestingly, while the CJS has specific article entries for Domestic Violence and for Rape and for Sodomy, it has no article-category for ‘Sex Offenses’; perhaps the editors consider the subject too incoherent to organize; or too changeable to keep up with; or – could it be? – not a real legal category worthy of inclusion in their encyclopedia at all.]

**Yankoskie v. Lenker, 526 A.2d. 429.

MODERN WITCHCRAFT

Apologies for the delay in Posting. Two things happened over the past 5 days: first, computer connection problems – now solved.

Second, the latest series of ‘Miss Marple’ mysteries on PBS has shocked me. You may recall that this is part of a series of PBS mysteries set in an ‘old’ England that looks much like the Merchant-Ivory England of the 1980s, with charming country villages, bosky estates, tastefully attired Brits, and various old cars in all their shiny glory. Well, the recent installment chooses as its old car … a 1956 T-bird, which really doesn’t strike me as old at all!

That said, I came across a short piece in ‘The Atlantic’ this morning that merits a quick look.

The Republic of Central Africa has a ‘court problem’: its courts are currently jammed to overflowing with trials for witchcraft. This is especially true in the outlying districts, beyond the capital - where, if the country has any natural resources worth noting, there are probably scads of thoroughly modern US government types busily trying to deconstruct local culture and also secure rights (or at least functional control over) the resources. Such is our modern American reality.

The article estimates that a full 40 percent of trials are witchcraft prosecutions. And in some areas, for example in the local center of Mbaiki, Pygmies – who by conventional wisdom are well-known for “bewitching each other” – drive that up to 50 percent. Many American readers may quietly snigger, but the alert American observer of Our domestic affairs needs no enlightenment in this sort of thing. Such is our modern American reality.

A local judge, university-trained and exuding a French gentility, points to the section of the Criminal Code that requires for the crime of PCS (‘the practice of charlatanism or sorcery’) a decade or more in jail and a fine for engaging in witchcraft.

The ‘charlatanism’ recalls the ‘cottage industry experts and advocates’ that have sprung up like remoras around the great shark of the Sensitivity Revolution over here: dubious ‘numbers’, dubious ‘studies’, dubious credentials, dubious worst-case claims, a highly elastic definition of the ‘crime’ that could be anything at all.

The reporter (Graeme Wood) opines that while the judge admits things are a little extreme law-wise, and the township doesn’t have the money to maintain the jail that would have to hold all the convicted, yet he (the judge) sorta likes a law that gives him so much authority.

Apparently, especially among a certain tribe within the Republic (referring here to Central Africa), “a staggering range of misfortunes” are ascribed to “meddling by witches”. You don’t have to look very far over here to see the lists of claims as to what even the most minimal relational or sexual contact can do to a life. And helpfully so, explaining away with no responsibility accruing to the erstwhile ‘victim’, just about any failure or mis-step or unhappy outcome in a life.

Further, the ability of ‘witches’ to “cast spells” and to generally – well – ‘bewitch’ folks, is so widely and pervasively active there (according to the conventional local wisdom) that the government simply has to step in and do something about it.

Although just what a government can do about witchcraft … well, in the modern West (up to about 1970 or so) that lesson was learned the hard way: the Salem Witch-trials of the late 1600s left the Medieval Catholic heresy trials in the dust, drawing the coercive police power of the government into torture and execution merely on the 'allegations' of those claiming to be victimized (the professional term of the era was 'spectral evidence' - meaning evidence that nobody but the accuser-victim could know or see or - oy! - prove).

Which also dragged the newly-aborning court system that was emerging out of the Medieval morass back down into the awful swamps of innuendo, fear, accusation without evidence, and ‘victim’ assertions running as wild as kudzu.

But the Central African citizenry “demand that the law reflect the influence of witchcraft as they understand it”. Which gets me to thinking not about how un-modern the Central African folks remain, but rather how un-modern the American folks have become … all over again.

Nicely, it is not legally allowable to claim as a defense that the plaintiff suffered “an act of God”: the witchcraft apparently overrides any power God might have in the world as it is seen over there. In this sense, while the Central African culture accepts the actions of the Beyond in its daily affairs, yet that Beyond is somehow not responsible for the evil competencies of witches and sorcerers. And since such witches and sorcerers are very much in this world, then a government of this world must somehow use what powers it has to solve the problem.

Which is a curious mishmash of belief in a Beyond and yet a Flattened sense of what that Beyond can or does do.

Not that the government over there minds. Since you are going to start taking over the powers of God, then you will need the authority of God – and what government in human history has ever turned THAT offer down?

Well, come to think of it, that government Framed in Philadelphia in 1787 … but, as conventional wisdom now assures us – at least among the elites – that government is “quaint”*.

Interestingly, the Republic’s national government (Central Africa’s, not Ours) is thinking of striking witchcraft from the books. Perhaps – may I? – they figure that if they are going to be pressured into accepting assorted American legal ‘reforms’ associated with things like sex-offenders and ‘sensitive law’, then they really won’t need ‘witchcraft’ laws any longer; they’ll have more than enough chance to strut their authority going after sex-offenders and such.

Although if that is indeed part of what’s going on, then they need to be apprised of just how frakkulous a mess ‘registration’ regimes have created for States here and for the Federal-State ‘partnership’ in general.

Perhaps those distant legislators have already noticed that they too are now being offered a ‘partnership’ – and if so, then I can only hope that whatever residual fear of genuine evil they still retain might serve them well in warding off this most recent temptation masquerading as ‘humanitarian reform’.

Anyhoo, Wood reports that the lawyers over there whom he interviewed still wanted to keep the laws on the books, although “they admitted that it [i.e. witchcraft law] fits uneasily into a modern legal system”. And that’s true. Though hardly a new observation; the blood of many judicial executions paid for it in 1692.

Although the US no longer has a ‘modern legal system’: it has been ‘reformed back’ – or ‘regressed’ – to a pre-modern form, thanks to the ‘sensitivity law’ legal regime and its assorted related crazes, manias, philosophies, and claims. Apparently these members of the Bar over there were trained in ‘modern Western’ law and have not been familiarized with the back-to-the-swamps ‘reforms’ of the postmodern American legal cosmology. Multiculturalism, we hardly knew ye!

Western Law, we hardly knew ye! And now it’s gone.

Well, not quite.

Wood interviews one attorney who has recently defended (unsuccessfully) a bunch of Pygmies who had been accused of murder-by-witchcraft. Observes the defense counsel: “The problem is that in a witchcraft case, there is usually no evidence”.

Bingo. Precisely the swampy mess that the West was trying to grow out of in the 1690s when the Salem Trials tried to re-introduce the old addled screams and claims as sufficient ‘proof’ (along with any pressure that could be brought on the hapless defendant to ‘confess’ (or – nowadays – plea bargain)).

(And after reading Nussbaum, you will see precisely just how ‘the lack of evidence’ is now considered a ‘reform’, especially since the trial is expected not to find out if a crime has been committed but rather to demonstrate the State’s power by punishing someone already presumed to have committed the crime (if there is indeed a victim, there must indeed be a perpetrator … see, it’s logic and science!)).

Good blessed grief. This is progress?

It’s anticlimactic perhaps when the reporter then asks “how one determined guilt where the alleged witches denied the charges”. The attorney replies that “the judge will look them in the eye and see if they act like witches”. But of course. If you act “strange” or “nervous” in court (and who the frak wouldn’t, facing such a meat-grinder?) then clearly you are guilty. No Visigoth or Ostrogoth could find anything objectionable in such jurisprudence.

The attorney then, however, adds an interesting bit: the legal system (in Central Africa) “could not ignore a social fact as firmly embedded as witchcraft in the republic”. And I imagine that witchcraft is as firmly embedded there as in many other societies not deeply touched by the history of Western Law during its classic (now considered “quaint” by American elites) period.

There is, after all, a dark primal strain in all human beings; after all, we retain a complex layered brain structure that contains the old primitive sections, and then evolved more complex and advanced sections only more ‘recently’ (in evolutionary terms).

The kicker is that in the classic West, and in the government Framed in Philadelphia in 1787, the benefits of that evolutionary advantage were built into the political (and legal) system: it would be the reasoning competencies of the most advanced (but recent) parts of the human brain upon which the whole structure would be built. Hence, those more primitive legal practices based upon suspicion, fear, dark and unreasoning emotions generally, and especially upon impatient fear and revenge … those practices would be left behind.

But then came the awful resurgence of emotionalism that has accompanied the stampedes of the past 40 Biblical years over here, and almost immediately those stampedes began corrupting (and regressing) the hard-won legal developments that had put a stop to all the dynamics evident in the old witchcraft trials. And in the name of ‘reform’ and ‘progress’. And with the full connivance of a vote-addled Beltway.

This, I think, has not been a good thing.

And I don’t think it well end well. But that’s a quaint view, and hardly original. The Framers saw as much in 1787. The government in London saw as much even as far back as 1693.

I can’t see the ‘progress’ here. At least, not enough progress to justify the awful cost of unleashing the dynamics of witchcraft and the profoundly dark ‘witchcraft instincts’ deep within humans.

NOTES

*I have recently completed reading two works: Robert Elias’s book “The Politics of Victimization” from 1986 and Martha Nussbaum’s 2007 Harvard Law Review 100-page article “Constitutions and Capabilities: ‘Perception’ Against Lofty Formalism”. I will be Posting on both shortly, just so you can get a sense of a) how far back and how serious was the threat posed as far back as a quarter century ago, and b) how even the most ‘elite’ and prestigious legal thinkers (and law professors) are now undermining any efficacious concept of ‘limited government’ (which phrase I use here to mean the limitations on the deployment of the sovereign police power against the Citizens).

Again, I think it is important for the Us to get a grasp on just how much these legal ‘deforming reforms’ are not simply some weird weeds that have sprung up in an otherwise well-tended Constitutional garden, but rather are just an initial few in a possible jungle full of seeds being developed by assorted elements among the various professional elites, and are being sold to the Beltway (eager buyers, all) as not only Necessary but as A Good Idea and as The Right and Only Way To Go.

GARRY WILLS ABUSING THE POPE

I have a backlog of subjects and material for Posts and I don’t like doing a same-subject Post immediately after I’ve already done one.

But after putting up the previous Post yesterday, the course of my reading today brought a Garry Wills article (“Forgive Not”, in ‘The New Republic’, print edition of May 27, 2010, pp. 14-16).

The article is worthwhile in a negative sort of way.

Wills starts off with the wrong dates, and portentously so: “This early in the twenty-first century, the rulers of the Catholic Church have suffered an earthquake of crumbling credibility. Nearly ten years ago …” He’s going for the long-range ‘historical vision’ here, and considering that the Church has been around for all twenty-one of those centuries, it’s not a bad thing.

But “the rulers of the Catholic Church” strikes a sort of monarchical note that does not really capture the mode of governance that operates in the Church: the Vatican does not “rule” in the sense of a monarchy in the Middle Ages or in any pre-modern era. Though surely in a democratic (such as it still is) era the term “rulers” is going to strike certain chords in any reader.

It wasn’t ten years ago but twenty-five or so that the first focus on Catholic priests surfaced, about the same time that the ‘victim’ or ‘victim-rights’ movement was picking up steam, in Reagan’s first administration, not long after the Satanic Ritual Abuse School Day Care mania had gone through its first explosive phase. My own thought is that Wills uses the shorter time-frame to avoid giving ground for a reader wondering why this thing has been going on for a quarter of a century, and to preserve a sense of the ‘freshness’ of the issue.

He is falling into line with the thrust of this 4th phase (by my count) of the Catholic Clergy Sex Abuse matter, which is to go after the Vatican, the Pope and the rest of the Church’s leadership in Rome as well as in Europe. “At first, the Vatican rejected the measures taken [in 2002] by [the US bishops’ conference ] … as not being fair to accused priests, giving too much scope to lay panels of critics, and violating the confidentiality of confessions”. This, to Wills, constitutes evidence of collusion and cover-up.

But it seems to me that the observations made in Rome were perfectly consistent and precisely the type of moderation to be expected by a reviewing authority considering measures made by more local authority in the heat of a sudden situation that had arisen somewhere in the world.

And surely, the dynamics of the evolving victimist-‘sensitive’ jurisprudence (and media treatment) were unfair to any accused. In the evolving script dynamics, a) anyone who claims to be a victim is indeed a victim; therefore b) anybody accused must be a perpetrator simply because ‘there is a victim’; and further c) a victim cannot be questioned closely or skeptically about an allegation because that would ‘revictimize’ and ‘disrespect the pain’ of said victim; but there’s no need to worry about a miscarriage of justice (civil or criminal) because d) victims don’t lie.

You don’t need a law school education to see how such a set of assumptions – utterly fundamental to victim-oriented ‘justice’ – would, regardless of their ‘good’ theoretical intent, profoundly derange Constitutional principles of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, the right to confront and examine one’s accusers, and indispensable standards of evidence.*

Wills, however, wants the Vatican comments to be evidence of something much more sinister. This is not solid historical analysis; it is selective and seeks to move readers toward one specific (and negative) view, though the supposed ‘evidence’ clearly indicates that there are other less-sinister and even more plausible explanations.

Equally so, he quotes a Cardinal (Bertone) who opined to an Italian magazine that he didn’t think it a good idea that a bishop be required to forthwith “denounce” to the police one of his priests who “admitted the offence of pedophilia” to that bishop; if a priest could not confide in his bishop then the core of the bishop-priest relationship is cut away.

Bertone is right, from a purely conceptual standpoint. Although there is enough evidence that bishops did not hold up their end of the responsibility by taking forceful action (insisting on credible therapy, removing the priest from certain ministries, or from ministry altogether, or having Rome ‘defrock’ him).

Becoming aware of that, the Vatican now has to steer an even more difficult course: beefing-up the disciplinary and preventive elements of episcopal oversight and priestly training, while simultaneously not yielding to the excesses of the reaction that Rome’s own failures have ignited.

It also strikes me that Bertone’s reference to “an offense of pedophilia” is unhappily vague. Is he referring to a priest confessing what amounts to the clinical diagnosis of pedophilia – which itself is only ‘an attraction to’ prepubescent children? Is he referring to the confession of an actual pedophilic act? Or merely to that ‘attraction’ though it has not been acted-upon? And if it has been acted upon, in what degree was the ‘act’? Or is it a sexual attraction but not to prepubescents? Acted upon or merely the ‘attraction’?

To the conventional ‘script’ as it has now evolved and mutated, this is all ‘thinking too much’ and ‘evidence’ of collusion and cover-up; but to any administrator or manager or leader of a human organization (and not just a religious one) these are significant questions that must be addressed before a constructive and efficacious corrective policy can be formulated and deployed.

Similarly Wills quotes another Cardinal (Casado), not an American, who looks at American society from the outside (rather a multicultural sort of thing) and opines that the pedophilic scandal is attributable to “exaggeration, financial exploitation, and nervousness”.

To Wills this is evidence of more high-level cover-up. But Casado’s remarks are hardly inaccurate, though not a complete assessment of the matter. That from the point of view of social psychology there is some connection between America’s embrace of abortion and a greatly reduced family life on the one hand, and a simultaneous anxiety over the safety of ‘children’; that one of American feminism’s primary foci has turned out to be the sexual activity and proclivities of males; that the ‘reform’ (actually weakening and skewing) of both civil and criminal jurisprudence (see Note 1 below) has had as one of its consequences the opening of a highly lucrative opportunity for unscrupulous litigation; that the combined authority of both media and legislators has been deployed in the service of heightening this societal anxiety (or ‘nervousness’) … these are hardly inaccurate or irrelevant observations. It’s mostly sad that Americans as a rule can’t see these dynamics as clearly as non-Americans.

(And I suppose I’d best say this now: I hold no brief for sexually abusive priests nor bishops or any managers lax in their oversight. I say this here because I noticed in victimist matters decades before the reign of Bush-Cheney, that verrry disturbing simplification to the effect that in the matter of victim-sensitivity one is either ‘with us or against us’ and that any effort to think is nothing but evidence of ‘insensitivity’. And, Wills would like everyone to think, evidence of collusion and cover-up.)

I can certainly agree to some extent with Wills when he quotes disapprovingly the opinion of the dean of canon law at the Gregorian University that “the bishop and superior (of religious orders) are neither morally nor judicially responsible for the acts committed by one of their clergy”. The service of human beings generates a strong responsibility to ensure training and oversight of those who will serve; this is as true for the Church as it is of, say, the Pentagon, when it deploys combat troops into civilian areas where non-combatants might be harmed by the actions of those troops.

And I think that in that regard the Church has not taken its responsibilities seriously enough. And to the extent that the Church is now correcting that – and has – then things are progressing at least as well as, again, the military’s efforts to fine-tune its activities in the several current war-zones. **

Another Cardinal (Maradiaga) is quoted as observing that Cardinal Bernard Law (of the Boston Archdiocese, in charge there when the 3rd phase broke out in January of 2002) was subjected to “Stalinist processes against Churchmen”. As I say in Note 1 below, the similarity of dynamics between ‘revolutionary justice’ and the methodology of feminist-victimist law cannot be ignored. Which is not a cheap shot seeking to ‘trump’ everything else, but rather is an observation that warns of the presence of dynamics highly corrosive of the Constitutional ethos and is intended to stimulate serious deliberation about what is going on and the possible consequences (unintended, one must hope).

Another Cardinal (Rodriquez) is quoted as observing that the sustained nature of the media attention amounts to “an obsession [that] is a mental illness”. From the point of view of a social-psychology analysis, it’s neither an inaccurate nor irrelevant observation.

The same Cardinal observed in a press conference that Americans have become rather litigious, using the example of suing a homeowner for slipping on a banana peel on the sidewalk in front of the house. This is hardly an original or novel observation and is almost conventional-wisdom even among Americans. As is his further observation that such litigation has become “a kind of industry” in the United States. That Wills claims this as evidence of cover-up or avoidance is a stretch indeed.

The same Cardinal then perorates that he’d rather go to jail than “harm one of my priests”. As a statement of pure principle it is unobjectionable and even impressive – surely the example of Abu Ghraib, where the ‘little people’ among the guards were offered up as scapegoats while the higher-ups escaped consequences comes to mind.

But I have to say that if any prelate in episcopal authority or in the Vatican failed to take sufficient measures in the oversight and training of his priests, then he has indeed “harmed them” as well as made possible the harm to any genuine victims of such priests. And in that I concur with Wills’s anger.

Wills then asserts that although his own book – “Papal Sins” – was published in 2000, before what I would term the 3rd phase, yet he sees now “the same patterns of denial, evasion, defensiveness, accusation, and protestations of innocence and holiness that I had already analyzed”. I have not read Wills’s book, but the quotations he marshals in this article do not with any degree of clarity establish such “patterns”.

Indeed, I am reminded of nothing so much as the ant-aggressors in T.H. White’s “Once and Future King”: preparing for a war against another nest, the ant propagandists say of their intended targets that “they are attacking us by defending themselves”. This dynamic is a key element in the victimist methodology, sad to say: if you do anything less than totally and immediately accept and approve every claim that a self-designated ‘victim’ makes, then you are somehow ‘attacking’ or ‘re-victimizing’ the victim. This simplistic equation is a recipe for democratic and Constitutional catastrophe. And it is no coincidence that White’s novelistic characterization was a reflection of Hitler’s actual propaganda as he gobbled up one neighboring country after another claiming ‘national self-defense’ and characterizing any opposition to his invasions as ‘attacks upon the German troops and people’.

But then Wills goes in another and more extraordinary direction. He claims to have been moved by reading Lord Acton’s disapproving assessment of the first Vatican Council (1870): Pius IX had used low political pressure tactics to get the Council to approve his claim of ‘papal infallibility’, Acton said, but clearly a papacy that had gotten through the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (of the French Huguenots in 1572) and whose claims to near-imperial authority were based on forgeries (the ‘Donation of Constantine’, dating from the 8th or 9th century A.D.), “was just acting true to form”.

This gets Wills going on the idea that the Papacy itself is an “ahistorical” accretion, almost a parasite (my image, not Wills’s) that fastened itself upon genuine Christianity and upon “the people of God” (Wills’s term). In other words, there is, according to Wills, a genuine Christianity comprised of lay believers, and then there is this thing comprised of clergy and bishops and Pope that was not part of the “early history of the Christian community”. Nor, he adds, were “males the only ministers at the outset”.

I had mentioned in earlier Posts within the past month that among the ‘interests’ comprising the synergy driving the oddly sustained ‘crisis’ of Catholic clerical abuse was a congeries of primarily Western and American elements who a) want to ‘democratize’ the Church and b) want women to be ordained (as part of the feminist initiative). I had also opined that this 4th phase of the ‘crisis’ seemed even more specifically aimed at taking a big bite out of the Vatican and the Papacy itself, almost as a logical extension of the earlier phases, but more specific and, consequently, more revealing of its basic generating dynamics and objectives.

And here now is Wills’s article pretty much laying the whole thing out.

Wills recounts the history of the Papacy’s increasing monarchical trappings and power throughout the Middle Ages. He presumes that it is evidence merely of a parasitic organism’s deliberate attempts, with malice aforethought, to impose itself upon genuine and true Christianity, those “people of God”.

I would like to see more concern for the complexities of Western history after the Fall of the Roman Empire. The Bishop of Rome – now the only authority left in the City with the departure of the Imperial court – became the only temporal as well as spiritual authority in the City. And when the Western Empire collapsed, and the Byzantine Patriarch attached himself as a sort of Court Chaplain to the Eastern Emperor in Constantinople, the Bishop of Rome both became the only authority left in the West and also sought to gain some equal authority to the Patriarch of Constantinople in order to prevent the lands and peoples of the former Western Empire from simply being subsumed spiritually under the senior authority of the Patriarch and the Emperor in Constantinople.

In the process the Roman Church established itself as independent of secular and temporal authority (as the Orthodox Church in the East, as evidenced by the Russian Orthodox Church, did not do).

As the Dark Ages ended and the Middle Ages began, Western political structures began to develop into nascent monarchies, and the Papacy found itself now striving to preserve spiritual independence across a broad spectrum of grasping temporal powers. The Papacy wound up becoming something of a temporal monarchy itself in order to avoid being overrun, or being subsumed as the ‘court chaplain’ of this or that momentarily dominant monarch or ‘emperor’.

And it wound up not only remaining the fulcrum of spiritual authority but also struggling to retain itself against the temporal tumult of Medieval European politics.

You don’t operate in floods like that without getting wet – and the Papacy wound up as temporally befouled as the rest of the monarchies of the time.

But to characterize this as some sort of long-held conspiracy on the part of (pick one or several: power-hungry clerics, ‘men’, maniacs) to deprive God’s true people of their rightful authority in matters of Church governance ... that is indeed a stretch.

Indeed, absent a central fulcrum of identity, Christianity would have dissolved into the many variants that actually developed after the Protestant Reformation, including the queasy fundamentalist sects so repugnant to Wills and the ‘liberal’ interests with whom he shares such an aversion to the Vatican and the Papacy.

So his analysis here does not at all impress.

Especially when he refers, almost incoherently, to the Papacy’s “ahistorical and medieval roots”. In the first place, the Papacy is verrry much ‘historical’ and in the second place its roots go back further than the Middle Ages (although roots in the Middle Ages alone would still be a pretty hefty set of ‘historical’ credentials).

I see in Wills the feministical tendency, evident as well in Marxist thought, to see ‘history’ primarily as a ‘conspiracy’ of those currently targeted as being ‘successfully in power’; said ‘conspiracy’ to have somehow existed and been sustained and nurtured over long eons of human history. Marx actually was on to something – the natural tendency of humans to seek security but also to overdo it and greedily amass resources – but the ‘conspiracy’ bit as a fundamental driving dynamic of history was a serious derailment.

Ditto the feminist assertion of the all-powerful ‘patriarchy’ that was responsible for everything that they felt was wrong these days (and whose ‘defeat’ was, by the by, such a great achievement of the present cadres of the revolution): ‘men’ had evilly plotted and ‘oppressed’ for no reason but pure malice. (Yes, there is now a kinder, gentler branch of feminist thought that feels ‘men’ might simply have been ignorant, and will be rescued by the current cadres – but the essential presumption that ‘men’ are ‘the problem’, have always been the problem, and will continue to be the problem remains.)

This is the investigative paradigm that Wills brings to the Papacy, through the mechanism of this multi-phased, sustained ‘clergy sex abuse crisis’.

Thus he rails against “the mythical underpinnings of the priestly system”. I think he only means ‘male’ priests; I get the impression that if priests were women, his objections to ‘the priestly system’ would dissolve; perhaps also his objections to the Papacy if a woman were Pope.

He asks with an angry flourish: “What real change can occur when such myths are clung to with a blind ferocity?” I’m not sure that the Vatican is either ‘blind’ or ‘ferocious’, but certainly he has given no evidence to support such a characterization.

It is equally possible that in the Vatican they don’t quite see the value of what Wills (and his many compatriot ‘interests’) is seeking; or they don’t know if ‘revolution’ as practiced in America these past Biblical 40 years is a prudent way to go; or they realize that with the exception of the declining West the current Church structure (of which abuse is not an officially-approved component part) is doing rather well in the world; or perhaps they see what happened to the music when Protestantism deprived the orchestra of a conductor and a score and claimed that every player could play the music s/he sorta felt was best – and how THAT has worked out for ‘the people of God’.

There are many possibilities here – and Wills’s efforts to move the herd down the one path he favors smacks of manipulation.

“The reaction of the hierarchy has been to dig itself even deeper into the past”. Surely, an institution that has survived for twenty-one centuries is going to have a sense of its past. And by the same token, is going to be a little leery of those who suddenly insist that that entire ‘past’ has been nothing but an oppressive and malicious conspiracy.

The stampede game-plan worked with the vote-addled Democrats over here 40 years ago, and contributed to the deformative morphing of both Parties into the treacherous blob that the Beltway now is.

But it hasn’t worked with the Vatican and the Papacy. Which, I think, is gall and wormwood to the cadres and drives them to frenzy – and hence, partially at least, the sustained nature of this ‘crisis’ over a quarter of a century.

This is a matter not only of interest to Catholics but to Americans. Because the dynamics involved here are deeply corrosive of a deliberative politics and the Constitutional ethos.

NOTES

*I have mentioned in a prior Post the statement of one Wendy Murphy, law professor and expert on ‘victim law’, who recently burbled that she was happy that a victim would not be denied ‘justice’ merely because of a lack of evidence. I am currently researching a far weightier expression of that principle by Martha Nussbaum, a top-tier philosopher of feminism, who gives clear voice to the basic feminist assertion that trials are not to establish the existence of a crime so much as to ‘provide justice’ to the (already believed) ‘victim’.

Thus, in her and feminist law’s vision, it is the outcome of the trial (punishing the already-presumed perpetrator) that must be the focus of expectation, rather than the process of ascertaining whether the defendant was indeed a perpetrator at all. In this scheme, the mere existence of the ‘victim’ is proof-positive that the crime was committed; the courts are simply there to provide official certification of that fact by deploying the sovereign police power of the state to punish the perpetrator-defendant and bring about (pick one or several: ‘justice’, ‘acknowledgement’, ‘closure’, ‘retribution’, revenge, prevention of further victimization).

Once you look at its core dynamics, it’s hard to distinguish the fundaments of ‘feminist’ and ‘victim’ law from the ‘revolutionary justice’ and ‘show trials’ of the Stalinist or Maoist or Hitlerite regimes, to name but a few more recent examples. And you don’t have to be a Pope-defender to see that either.

**In that regard, for that matter, the Church has never sent out the type of flyer to its agents that the USAAF sent to its bomber pilots during the fire-bombing campaign of Japanese cities: “for us, there are no civilians”. Nor have any priests or Church agents ever been assured, as American troops now report they were assured, that ‘command’ will ‘cover them’ if they kill civilians in the course of their actions. Thus, there has never been a Church document advising priests that it was ‘open season’ on children and they would be ‘covered’ by the Vatican if children (or anybody of any age) were sexually abused or raped in the course of ministry.

MORE ON CATHOLIC PRIEST ABUSE

(I had to do another Post on this topic on a different site. Although this Post deals with the same subject as the immediately previous Post here, I think I raise some further points that would make it worthwhile for readers here.)

As you may have noticed, the Catholic Priest Sex Abuse tornado has circled around and blows through town for – by my count – the fourth time now.

This phenomenon is a sub-variant of the general Sex Offense Mania and I look at it as the result of a synergy of all sorts of larger and deeper forces in American society.

My concern in this Post on this site is a bit more specific. I came across an article today about a priest from India – now back in India – who, years later, is charged with “sexually assaulting” a “teenage parishioner”. Or, at least, the charges are just now being publicized.

As always, I hold no brief for anyone who takes liberties with another human being, especially when that anyone is in a position of trust or authority.

I also don’t like stampedes. And while they’re physically dangerous when you’re talking about Texas Longhorns, they’re politically and morally dangerous when you’re talking about people, especially Citizens responsible for a Constitutional Republic.

That being said, and meant, there are some other points.

First, of course, is that “sexual assault” – the trusty vague phrase that can mean anything from something approaching Attempted Rape to something like a pat on the behind (or, for that matter, on the head, since it seems acceptable in Sex Offense jurisprudence now to infer a ‘sexual’ motivation even if it isn’t actually there). The parishioner is a 16 year-old female, which while it certainly does not excuse improper behavior indicates that this is not the Lindbergh Baby case either.

Curiously, there isn’t too much of a timeline given. But what there is indicates that he came to this country in 2004, worked in a small parish in northern Minnesota, and then in 2005 returned to India – the article says – because his mother was ill.

Half a decade later and the case is part of the 4th Wave.

There is no reason given by the local prosecutor as to why it has taken half a decade to bring the case to light, or why the US government has not yet moved for his extradition.

An ecclesiastical official in India said that in light of the public criticism that has arisen, the priest “has a duty to establish his innocence”.

I’d like to point out a couple of things about that comment.

In the first place, in the context of the Catholic Church, with the priest being an official representative and the matter receiving – as it now is – wide publicity, then the publicity itself now creates its own variable in the equation: there is the matter of “scandal”. In Catholic organizational and legal usage this term means that there is an event or action which might subject the faithful to unnecessary and unwarranted doubt as to the integrity of the Church.

When a matter which had been previously dealt with without such a publicized dimension is suddenly raised up by publicity, it is not so much a matter of the American popular usage of the word ‘scandal’ (something bad had been ‘hidden’ or ‘swept under the rug’ and has been finally brought to light); in theory – and in this case – official Church procedures were deployed and the priest in this case was sanctioned by his bishop –in this case, the priest is no longer working in parishes but rather in a special-ministry with alcoholics (where, presumably, he will be working with few if any children).

Rome – the Vatican – had apparently wanted the priest removed from all ministry, possibly ‘defrocked’ – although the article is not quite clear on this. Whether Rome did it because what the priest was determined to have actually done after ecclesiastical investigation and adjudication was serious enough to justify defrocking, or whether Rome made its recommendation to the priest’s ‘home’ bishop in India simply because the general atmosphere of Mania in the US would pretty much guarantee a situation of probable ‘scandal’ for the faithful … this is an interesting question, not dealt with in the article.

At any rate, in the Catholic system, the ultimate decision was in the hands of the local bishop. This is contrary to a popular impression that the Church functions much as the US military – where ‘Washington’ or ‘the Pentagon’ can issue a definitive order to any forces and local commanders anywhere in the world. In this sense, Catholic organizational practice is actually similar to the American State-rather-than-Federal arrangement, where the ultimate authority rests with the ‘local authority’ – the State – rather than with the Federal authority. (Although in the SO Mania over here we have seen a consistent effort by the Feds to horn in on the States’ Xth Amendment authority – as evidenced in the Adam Walsh Act and other legislation.)

The local bishop in India made his decision that the priest would no longer be allowed to work in parishes; but that he would be allowed to continue exercising his calling in other ministry settings where ‘children’ are not present, nor where the assorted ‘home’ or other ‘informal’ or ‘domestic’ settings organically arising from parish ministry would arise; the priest would work in a setting that by its nature was structured to preclude such informal interactions with the alcoholics.

In this way – in the Catholic view of things – the erring priest (to the extent – one must always say in matters of the SO Mania – that he had indeed erred) was removed from a setting that would place him in occasions of ‘temptation’, and the faithful and the Church would both be preserved from ‘scandal’ and not deprived of his actual services while the priest himself would be allowed to fulfill his calling.

This is a pretty standard example of the Church’s overall ‘patience’ and ‘prudence’ in such matters of priestly weakness, seeking both to maintain the integrity of the ministry while allowing a priest with a demonstrated weakness (to the extent that applies here) to continue to carry on his life-calling.

It is, most certainly, an approach that is hell-and-gone from the more radically ‘impatient’ American approach – so similar to the general Fundamentalistic approach – whereby ‘evil’ must be immediately rooted out and destroyed vividly. This Fundamentalistic approach, the ‘impatient’ approach in my terminology, informs the SO Mania over here.

As does the ‘zero tolerance’ policy, which actually includes not only an absolute intolerance of ‘evil’ but also the vivid and utter erasure of the offender’s life possibilities.

While nobody can accuse the Church of not being interested in ‘evil’, it has always been rather interested in ‘good’ as well – and the Catholic (as opposed to Fundamentalistic) approach has always been to salvage whatever good is possible from a situation.

This is premised upon a rather common-sense awareness that ‘evil’ does not exist in the abstract, but rather manifests through the lives of individual human beings, and you want to try to avoid creating more damage with your solution than existed with the problem in the first place (and can you say Iraq War?).

Also, the Church has always realized that ‘sin’ is more relevant an operational concept than ‘evil’, since the concept of ‘sin’ includes the human life through which ‘evil’ manifests itself in the world.
If you simply grab an edged-tool and start scything away in the field seeking to immediately inflict zero-tolerance on the tares, you are going to wind up cutting up a lot of still-growing wheat.

Which, also, does not mean to imply that some people are ‘tares’ (or weeds, and therefore totally evil) and other people are wheat (and therefore totally good). In the ‘field’ of each human individual, there is some amount of weed (evil) among the wheat (good) … that has always been the Catholic approach.*

And again, to the Fundamentalistic** mentality that has proven so crucially formative in the SO Mania, this can easily be spun into the more sensationalistic ‘script’ of ‘corruption finally uncovered’ that – nicely –also appeals to America’s increasingly sensationalistic media.

In the second place, I’d note that the comment of the ecclesiastical authority in India that it is the priest’s “duty to prove his innocence” must be taken as an expression of this Church requirement that the faithful not be scandalized.

As an official representative of the Church, he must respond actively to such accusations – since not doing so (human nature being what it is) would lead the average person (in the American setting, anyway) to assume that the government charges are accurate and that the priest is therefore guilty as charged.

But I would not at all accept this comment as reflecting traditional Western legal theory, especially as it is woven deeply into the fabric of the Constitutional vision and ethos: one is innocent until proven guilty, and it is the government’s responsibility to prove guilt.

It is hugely regrettable, I think, that in 2002 the American bishops chose to ‘settle’ in civil courts (for sums in ‘damages’ that now total in the billions of dollars) rather than accept the route of defending priests in criminal trials. Yes, sound legal advice from the Church’s organizational legal advisers might very practically have justified that approach: the sight of dozens or even hundreds of criminal trials involving priests as defendants might itself have provided ‘scandal’.

And in a time of Mania Law – especially given the deformations introduced into such classic jurisprudential protections as Rule of Evidence and Statutes of Limitations, and the monstrously selective and hostile ‘reporting’ done by most of the media – a seasoned legal professional might have decided that it would be impossible to guarantee the possibility of an uncontaminated trial-process.

But the result of choosing the ‘civil settlement’ route has been equally disastrous. Such a surrender merely engorged and further inflamed the appetite for financial gain. And many accused priests were deprived of a chance to defend themselves. And many of the faithful, confronted with the jaw-dropping sight of the American Church truckling so quickly and shelling out billions without – as it were – a fight, led many to believe that the nightmare scenarios limned by the accusers and their representatives were largely accurate (which has not been established).

Only a little less so, I am going to imagine, have been any plea-bargains made. Yes, seasoned defense counsel now take it as given that a defendant in the current climate and in light of the assorted deformities that have now been formally introduced into the American legal system has a poor chance of establishing innocence in a rational and traditionally Constitutional way. But most Americans still operate on the assumption – now utterly outdated by events – that only ‘guilty’ people make plea-bargains; whereas actually now many defendants accept plea-bargains imposed by prosecutors who know that the defendant’s only other option is to face a trial on a greatly skewed field.

And that further reinforces the ‘scandal’ of many of the faithful presuming that priest-defendants are indeed almost always ‘guilty as charged’. Which may well not be the case at all.

Most interestingly, of course, the idea of guilty-until-you-prove-yourself-innocent is precisely the anti-Constitutional presumption woven into the very core of the SO Mania legal approach.

And that stems from the very fundaments of so-called ‘feminist’ law or – to use my term – its further enshrinement in ‘victimist’ law.

Which is demonstrated clearly in a comment in the article made by the (female) prosecutor up in Minnesota: “We want justice for the victim here and we want to do whatever we can to protect potential future victims everywhere”.

This is an almost pitch-perfect encapsulation of the frakkery of this ‘new’ type of legal thinking.

In the first place, nobody is formally a ‘victim’ until they are proven so in a court.

It has been a great conceptual trick – ‘rhetorical’ in the classic sense – of feminist/victimist law that anyone who makes the claim to be a ‘victim’ must surely indeed be a victim. And from that flows the further frakkulent assumption that to ‘question’ the victim further or to ‘doubt’ the victim’s allegations or ‘story’ constitutes a further ‘re-victimizing’ of the ‘victim’. Recently one Wendy Murphy, former prosecutor and now second-tier law school ‘victim’ maven, opined that she’s glad victims no longer are ‘denied justice’ just because there’s no evidence. (Yes, she’s a lawyer – and a law professor.)

Instantly, the entire process of formally establishing guilt or innocence is utterly undermined.

Because then if there is a ‘victim’, and that ‘victim’ must be assumed to be truthful (and ‘good’), then whomever the victim has accused must indeed be cast as a ‘perp’ (and therefore utterly ‘evil’). At which point the necessary elements for a melodramatic, soap-opera type ‘script’ are in place. And let the games begin.

The legitimate insight underlying this dynamic of feminist/victimist law is that many crimes can thus remain hidden because there is insufficient evidence to prove that they actually took place.

This however is hardly a new observation. You may recall that in the film version of ‘Camelot’ – now almost half a century ago – one of the old-school barons approaches King Arthur, who had just established the fundaments of evidentiary law against the old Medieval concept of ‘intuition of guilt is enough to justify the presumption of guilt’. The baron reproaches Arthur for such a new-fangled approach: “So, no evidence no crime, then?”

But the position Arthur takes in the film is actually the (pre-feminist/victimist) Constitutional approach enshrined in Western and American jurisprudence: you cannot permit the police power of the government (or the ‘sovereign’) to impose its awesome capacities against any individual unless you make the government/sovereign authority clearly prove that such a deployment is justified.

And you can only establish that by making the government demonstrate that its evidence is beyond any reasonable doubt.

So – alas – what feminist/victimist law has done (and continues to do) since its espousal by the government (no surprise there) in the 1970s is to re-introduce the old Medieval concept that ‘intuition of guilt is proof of guilt’. Or to put it less formally: if it feels like he’s guilty, then he is guilty. This is not progress and it is not ‘progressive’. It is regress and it is frakkulously ‘regressive’. (And again, you can see what has happened not only in the SO Mania but also in the ‘justifications’ put forth for the invasion of Iraq after 9/11.)

It’s not hard to understand the frustration built into the classic post-Medieval Western legal system: a crime can indeed be ‘hidden’ in the sense that there is not sufficient evidence to clearly justify the deployment of the government police power against the alleged perpetrator.

But the only alternative is to have the government police power deployed merely on the basis of ‘feelings’ and ‘intuitions’ – and that is death to the post-Medieval Western political concept of limited government.

And this is not essentially resolved by the government raising up the ‘victim’ to ‘front for’ the engorgement and un-limiting of its police power. (And again, you can see the lethal effects of this ‘new’ development in other areas of government activity, including the invasion of other sovereign nations, whether on neocon or neoliberal grounds.)

So you get now a Medieval element poisoning from the Right with the Fundamentalistic 'satanic' stuff that made its debut in the now-infamous Ritual Satanic Day-Care Child Sex Abuse trials of the early 1980s, and from the Left with the feminist-law 'progress' that throws out the need for solid evidence and so brings everybody back to the Medieval era of 'law'. Charming. And on top of that, folks are supposed to see these developments as 'progressive' and merely as 'reforms'.

Phooey.

Further, this prosecutor’s comment touches the ominous but oh-so-Correct base of ‘preventing’ further harms to “potential victims”. Which boils down to the government deploying its police power against non-existent criminal actions.

And this constitutes a core dynamic motivating and sustaining the Regulatory-Preventive State, whereby the police power can now be deployed even where no crime has yet been committed.

Because, built into the post-Medieval Western concept of limited-government is the assumption that there is only so much a limited-government can do. Beyond which boundary a government escapes its ‘limits’ and you are hell-and-gone from the classic Western genius and into some other, far more ominous, form of government.

I add that such a development – as I have said before – is virtually guaranteed if you take Carol Gilligan’s 1982 mommy-at-the-breakfast-table vision (Mommy knows best and must provide whatever she feels is best to calm her squalling, immature children) and try to erect it into a philosophy of government.

But with the hugely-dangerous adoption of the Gilligan insight by the vote-addled Beltway, the most indispensable basis of Constitutional vision and ethos is thoroughly undermined. The government will deploy its police power a) on the basis of feelings and intuitions about b) what may happen and c) its intentions are so ‘good’ or the ‘emergency’ created by ‘pain’ is sooo great that it may not be effectively questioned.

If it is not clear just where this must lead, then folks have really and truly lost touch with the fundamental genius of Western and American government.

And if that is so, and it is not widely considered worthwhile to reverse this trend, then this country is indeed no longer in touch with its Founding genius and it is truly ‘decadent’ in the most basic (and ominous) sense of that term.

NOTES

* And – I say again – you can imagine how Iraq might have turned out had the Catholic rather than the Fundamentalistic approach had been taken; in a sense the Catholic view would support the ‘diplomacy’ approach and the Fundamentalistic approach demands the ‘military’ approach.

Thus also, you can see why the Fundamentalistic Ascendancy in American politics (and most surely in the military chaplaincies and senior leadership) was so dead-set against the Catholic vision and the Catholic approach. Neither the neocon militarization approach nor the neoliberal ‘humanitarian intervention’ approach (equally militarized) are looking for the obstructions to the imposition of their will and the fulfillment of their ‘visions’ that a Catholic ‘patience’ and diplomacy would present.

**I also point out here that the Fundamentalistic 'impatience' and impetus toward the 'radical rooting out and punishing' of 'evil' is itself very similar to the Leninist and Maoist 'revolutionary' impatience with in-Correct thinking.

This is not so surprising, for two reasons.

First, the late-19th and early-20th century 'revolutionary' approach was a secularized version of the Fundamentalistic approach always latent, and often not-so-latent in Reformation-era Protestant thought.

Second, the radical 'revolutionary' approach very greatly informed early, radical feminist thought and praxis as it came to then be espoused by the political 'elites' over here starting in the early 1970s.

ADDENDUM

The article adds a second report of a priest who was accused of “fondling” a 12 year-old altar server (female) at her apartment in 2003, for which a New York court sentenced him to four months “in prison”. The priest served the time, returned to his native India, and is now working with alcoholics and is not in parish work. Which the article seems to consider more or less outrageous.

It’s odd that in 2003, a full year after the 3rd Wave began on Jan. 2, 2002 with the ‘Boston Globe’, an American court – and in New York, no less – would give such a short sentence for a substantive sex offense charge against a minor. And so short a sentence usually means ‘jail time’ in a county lock-up, not full-scale ‘prison time’ – which usually indicates a sentence of at least a year.

ADDENDUM 2

As if by inadvertence, the 'Boston Globe' - whose 'reporting' enabled the 3rd phase of the Mania in 2002 (it also supported the invasion of Iraq) and now fuels the 4th - today 'reports' on its own stunning marvelousness in a front-page, above-the-fold story.

ADDENDUM 3

It may be that I did not clearly point out some of the more specific possible or probable connections.

I have recently come into possession of a used copy of a 1989 book (“High Treason”, by Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone). The book compiles all the information then extant – a quarter of a century later – concerning the evidence in the assassination of JFK.

It makes for disturbing reading.

The stunning amounts of contradictory evidence, missing evidence, falsified evidence, evidence incompatible with eyewitness accounts including doctors in attendance, and much of all of the foregoing overlooked or ignored by the Warren Commission … it stuns.

There appears clearly to have been a potent synergy of interests – to say nothing of a conspiracy – that JFK’s death would have served. Ray McGovern, noted present-day intelligence analyst and former CIA member, had admitted as much late last year: after a comprehensive private review he finally acknowledged that he could no longer doubt the existence of a highly-placed conspiracy before and after the fact, both to kill and to cover-up.

In that frame of mind, let me be a little more specific in regard to connections that in the main body of this Post I perhaps treated too politely.

Only a month or two before this latest 4th Wave of Catholic Priest Sex Abuse and Church Cover-up, I recall noticing articles in ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Boston Globe’ remarking that one of the most vocal victim-of-priests groups was in danger of folding because of financial short-falls. Without pursuing this fact into the realm of causality – why were the donations falling off? – the articles simply rehashed the original (and by 2009 old) stories.

So when this 4th Wave suddenly started up in January 2010 – just about the 8th anniversary of those papers’ initiating the 3rd Wave – it occurred to me that there was more than coincidence in it.

Of course, with the national economic crisis taking the public’s attention away from smaller advocacy causes and forcing that attention to the grievous and huge matter of the weakened and declining national economy, and to the government’s failure in addressing it or preventing it (indeed claiming not even to have foreseen it developing), then those very potent ‘interests’ could well appreciate any distraction – especially one so tried and true – of the public’s attention back toward ‘safer’ emergencies (so to speak).

And clearly the alliance – you can’t not-call it that – between the ‘Times’ and ‘Globe’ and the priest-abuse advocacies has proven quite useful to both sides. At this point, though, I can’t get out of my mind a scene from ‘M*A*S*H’ the TV show: Klinger has figured that a wounded young soldier is his ticket out of the war-zone; he arranges it to look like the soldier has gotten a gun and taken Klinger hostage, demanding that he (the soldier) has to be given passage out of the war-zone and Klinger (Klinger will yell out the door to the staffers who surround the building) has to accompany him; so far so good, until the soldier passes out; resulting in Klinger having to prop up the limp form of his ‘kidnapper’ in order to try to get himself a ticket out of the war-zone. At this point, with the priest-abuse mania having run (and outrun) its course, the papers now have to prop up their ‘advocacies’ in order to keep up sales. It isn’t so humorous as it was in the show, I think.

Further, with a still-hopeful American ‘progressive agenda’ hoping to spread itself to any nations around the world – especially the developing world – where the Church’s influence is growing, then those interests would also be served by a re-ignition of the bonfires against whatever vulnerable areas of Catholicism might be easily reached.

And so this 4th Wave, focusing now on Europe and on the Vatican and the Pope, suddenly burst into media flame.

There are three things that strike me.

First, is that from a Vatican, long view – and therefore not primarily an American short-term view – the prospect of secular authority being exercised against the Church has a dark history. Since the growth of monarchical power after the Dark Ages (say, ummmm, about after 1000 AD or so) the Church has been involved in a struggle to keep local – in the Vatican view of it – and secular powers from exercising authority over the Universal Church.

Many monarchs chose to pursue this path for the purpose of strengthening their own authority and – they could never resist the temptation – getting their hands on whatever cash and ‘reachable assets’ belonging to the Church that lay within their jurisdiction; in this regard, Henry VIII’s assumption of power over the Church in England – which also included closing the monasteries and confiscating their property and assets in order to enrich his treasury – was only the culmination of something that had been brewing in Europe for centuries.

Nor is it only about assets. Henry, influenced and perhaps given ‘cover’ by the theological currents of the Reformation, also sought to make such changes in doctrine as would conform the Church of England to his authority (and clear his path to taking a new wife, and then another and another and … you know the rest of it).

Presently, some developments – as in some of the Commonwealth countries – are seeking to deploy national government legislation to make it illegal to exclude women from ordination, using the current Western trends in feminism supported by Western governments.

From the point of view of the Vatican the current US mania over sex-allegations takes place as one more in a long line of efforts by governments to involve themselves in the doctrinal integrity and freedom of the Universal Church. (This is not, certainly on my part, a sly effort to minimize wrong-doing by any genuinely assaultive priest.)

Surely, the transfer of billions in the US through civil settlements paid out in lieu of numerous individual civil – and very few criminal – trials constitutes as large a transfer of Church assets as Henry effected in the 16th century.

The significance of this long-historical point is that the Vatican has always been leery of governments that seek to involve themselves in Church affairs.

This is not the whole story, but certainly it goes to the popular media charge of ‘cover up’ and also goes to put in perspective the Church’s approach. It also goes to the media inferences to the effect that the Church is merely opting for an oppositional stance in order to avoid responsibility.

And it has to be added that since the development of Western Law arose in significant part from the Church’s canon law, then to the extent – and it is not small – that the legal regressions essential to the imposition of certain core aspects of feminist/victimist law constitute – as they do – a threat to the integrity of the entire hard-won evolution of Western law, then the current US trend in law has to be kept from spreading to the Church’s law.

This point is no doubt unpalatable in the US for at least three reasons: i) a Mania requires simplistic conceptions of Good-Evil in order to maintain its vitality; ii) Americans have not been well-informed as to the negative consequences of the rise of feminist/victimist law within American jurisprudence, where that rise has been spun as merely ‘progressive reform’; and iii) both feminist and victimist elements are now so politically ‘valorized’ within American domestic politics that is very hard for the Beltway or the ‘elites’ to now change course and present a more accurate picture of what has really happened.

Second, almost all of these cases are old – decades old; there are no new cases. Which leads me to think that the Church has indeed made substantive progress in handling these matters and even – through a more careful vetting of its candidates for priesthood – strategically preventing them.

(This won’t satisfy those elements of feminism that want to see nothing less than female priests, of course, but that’s another – although not irrelevant – matter.)

(And if Benedict is already starting to show signs of wear and tear after only 5 years on the job, then perhaps there are elements within the Church that are simply starting to prepare the ground for influencing the next papal election … yes, the average person doesn’t think like this, but there are those who are paid to sit and opine and ‘influence’, for whom such a world-historical event is simply another move on the game-board, and the Game is what they do.)

There is also the fact that the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, commissioned almost a decade ago to examine priestly sex abuse found that only 4 percent of priests between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of abuse. The Jay study had its problems, and I Posted at length about them here.

Among the many points of complication: the Jay study counted allegations of abuse, not findings; ‘abuse’ is an elastic phrase that could mean anything down to and including touch without sexual intention at all (because according to victimist dogma, the ‘victim’ gets to define if it ‘felt’ like it was sexually intended); and in that heady time of heavily publicized 3rd Wave Mania, and with the hugely watered-down criteria for credibility and evidentiary value, there were still only allegations against 4 percent of the priests, when the national average of sexual abuse actually perpetrated by males (according to one national child-victim organization) is 10 percent. And then, of course, what of the 96 percent of priests who even if you credit the headlines are conducting their ministries well? See this article and its embedded links.

Third, having now reviewed the jaw-dropping evidence of the most premeditated and criminal cover-up – and at the highest levels – in the JFK assassination case, it seems to me that the assorted documentary ‘smoking guns’ in the Catholic matter constitute verrry weak ‘evidence’ of a cover-up in comparison.

If anything, the most salient point is the similarity in the tactic of distracting public attention from the most urgent and vital areas of inquiry.

If the Catholic Church and the Vatican are going to be held up as examples of ‘cover-up’, then what on earth should be done about the cover-up in the matter of the assassination? Because although it is now almost 47 years ago, the consequences of it were and remain huge: an elected government overawed by the ability of its most lethal and secret security forces to pull off such a brazen plan, and for several years afterward to continue to eliminate witnesses and – even from the National Archive! – evidence that contradicted the official ‘story’. This when the witnesses could not be suborned or the evidence couldn’t be falsified, as clearly happened in several instances.

If you subtract those Church documents that either clearly indicate or may quite reasonably be read as indicating a preference for a non-sensationalist handling of a particular matter, you will see that there are few documents of the This Is a Heinous Sin and Crime and We Are Going To Cover-It Up For Our Own Benefit variety.

But a stampede has to make do with whatever ‘loud noise’ is available to spook the herd.

And in the absence of a lot of solid dry wood, a bonfire has to be fueled with whatever vaguely combustible stuff that may be lying around.

In addition to helping old friends and cultural allies, of course, the papers are doing themselves a great favor: resurrecting ‘proven performers’ among their old great ‘stories’ in order to boost sales. Sort of like so much of Hollywood and Broadway output now merely re-hashing old gems from a bygone era, rather than undertaking the strenuous and demanding responsibility of creating new works.

And, neatly, the 4th Wave isn’t going after individual offending priests as did the first three. Because there aren’t any – not any new ones, anyway (though perhaps if the Statute of Limitations is pushed back to, say, 50 years – as Connecticut is now so Correctly considering – there may well be a new spate of allegations, even more indeterminate and indeterminable than the last).

So now, somewhat by default, it will have to be a run at the Vatican and the Papacy.
If I were an ‘advocate’, I’d be thinking the way the Beltway is now thinking: are folks finally starting to get so fed up that they’re not going to jump through all the old familiar hoops when prodded by all the old familiar cues?

Surely there have been some priests that have done genuinely awful things. (Though whether there are proportionately more than in the other professional groups and whether their cases were as ‘covered up’ as, say, the actual perps in the JFK assassination … are questions that still remain to be posed and answered.)

Many of the alleged-against are dead.

And thus those among the deceased who were truly guilty have ‘gotten away’.

But only from earthly justice, such as it is.

You wouldn’t want to be in their shoes when they faced Varsity justice, as it were.

But then, for that reality to be of any consolation, you’d have to believe in ‘the Varsity’, in a God Who Judges even (and especially) His official servants.