Category Archives: rights

Child Molestation and Bankruptcy Escapes

Posted on by
Reply

Ironically, it’s the Catholic Church that has invented this ruse.

The Archdiocese of Portland was the first to do it. Three months later the Roman Catholic Diocese in Tucson, AZ, followed suit and three months after that the diocese in Spokane, WA, did it, too.
They all filed for bankruptcy and since then more than 15 other Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from lawsuits by sexual-assault victims, resulting in about 4,000 claims seeking compensation for past wrongdoing. This year, three more Catholic dioceses announced intentions to file.

Escaping debt—escaping court ordered financial penalties for the Church’s abuse of children and women—through bankruptcy.

But, of course. The outcome of this ruse is

[T]he legal strategy uses the law that protects companies from creditors to help preserve its mission and shield assets from claims made by victims of sexual abuse. Filing for chapter 11 freezes lawsuits and provides breathing room to work out a plan to compensate abuse victims.

Never mind that there already are plans for compensating the children and women: the courts’ judgments and assigned penalties from those cynically frozen suits.  There’s nothing to work out.  Aside from that, I’m not sure that a mission that includes condoning officials’ abuse of the most helpless of their flock is a mission worth preserving.  Condoning? See the Pope’s response to attempts to punish priests who are found abusive. See his attempts to absolve higher officials—bishops and cardinals—of their responsibility for the abuses.

And the strategy is spreading.  USA Gymnastics and the Boy Scouts of America are both in or looking to bankruptcy as a way to escape judgment.  Condoning?  See USAG’s—and USOC’s, come to that—covering up of a doctor/trainer’s decades long abuse.

This stinks.

I’m not much enamored of Federal laws, but we need one here: bankruptcy must be legally barred as a means of avoiding financial responsibility for this sort of abuse.  We even have a precedent: college students can’t duck their student debt through bankruptcy, albeit that bar is newly in flux.

Churches (not just Catholic), and any other organizations whose leadership teams or individuals are found culpable of child abuse or sexual abuse of women, cannot be allowed to run away from their fiscal responsibility (criminal courts work the crimes here, already; although I’d certainly like to see the employing institution punished, also).  No debt “reorganization” through bankruptcy should be allowed.  Pay the judgment in full or cease to exist.  With one exception: the guilty ones must be permanently barred from taking any role other than parishioner or line employee in any religious institution, regardless of religion, or in any company in the originating industry.  If the bankruptcy court is empowered to require that, then any fiscal penalties could legitimately undergo some adjustment once publicly available proof has been provided that all the named individuals—and all of the individuals responsible must be named—have been so barred.

Sadly, this bar will have to be done civilly, since the Church, of which the Catholic Church and USAG have shown themselves the canonical examples for all institutions—have chosen not to.

Foolish Misunderstanding

Posted on by
Reply

CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria is dismayed with our Constitution and the concept of a republican democracy.

[T]he Constitutional concept of equal representation in the U.S. Senate [is] a “structural problem.”

And

…”new dividing line in Western politics,” which [Zakaria] describes is the “less-educated rural populations” he calls “Outsiders” who “feel ignored or looked down upon” and “feel deep resentment towards metropolitan elites.”

And

…30% of America is now electing 70% of the Senate.  All those states with—you think of Wyoming. It has roughly a million people. It has two senators. California with 70 million people has two senators as well. So we have a kind of structural problem here where the land is being overrepresented. The people are being underrepresented. So both sides feel deeply wronged.

However.

That alleged imbalance is a designed-in feature, not a problem; it’s what makes us a republican democracy of some durability, not a popular democracy doomed to the failure of tyranny at the hands of a few—Zakaria’s metro elites, for instance.

The need to balance the large- and small-population States in one house of our Congress is just as important today as it was those 230 years ago.  For the same reason and for another: the political divide between the populous coastal States and less populous flyover country—illustrated by that very term of the Left’s and by Zakaria’s plain contempt for the less-educated (as we must be, because rural)—is even deeper than the political divide between the populous and rural States of those original thirteen.

Wyoming needs to be able to defend itself from an overweening California.

It’s sad that Zakaria slept through his 8th grade civics class.

Faith in the PRC

Posted on by
Reply

The People’s Republic of China is broadening the reach of its religion.

Officials have threatened to close the Early Rain Covenant Church in the central city of Chengdu by the end of the year in keeping with new religious-management regulations, according to several congregants who said they had been waiting for the net to fall. In coordinated raids starting Sunday night, police detained Pastor Wang Yi and more than 100 of the church’s 500 members, said Li Yingqiang, a church leader.

Wang and his congregants have committed no felonies that anyone outside of the PRC would recognize.  He has, though, objected to the intrusiveness of President Xi Jinping and his Party and government, though, and he’s done so often from the pulpit.

That’s blasphemous: the One True Religion in the PRC is that of the Chinese Communist Party.

Just ask the Muslim Uighers, the Falun Gong, Yellow Hat Buddhists (and all other Buddhists), and the Christians.

A Conservative’s View….

Posted on by
Reply

My latest effort, a pamphlet on the American legal system (because I don’t lack for ego), A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law, has been released, and it can be found on amazon.com: https://amzn.to/2L4iVXx .  Links also can be found on my Books page.

Our legal system is explicitly founded on natural law through our Creator’s endowment—the origin and source of our fundamental principles.

Though government should not legislate morality beyond a very narrow arena (vis., a measure of specificity regarding types of homicide and theft; strictly limited controls on bearing false witness, etc.), with natural law as the foundation of our legal system, morality inescapably informs it.  This is so because morality flows from the Creator-endowed and individually-imbued nature of our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our social compact was founded explicitly to protect these.  From that, our statutes are at their best when limited to attempts to implement and protect those foundational principles and nothing more. Any further legislation should be limited to improvements on those strictly circumscribed efforts. In particular, legislation should not be used to generate new morals.

The nature of our American judiciary and the proper role of judges in our jurisprudence has been argued throughout our history, but the argument has been especially virulent over the last dozen or so years.  The current dispute (I don’t call it a debate) centers on whether our Constitution means what it says and neither more nor less, or whether it’s a living document that should grow and adjust to meet a judge’s understanding of changing times and mores.

In this pamphlet, I lay out three key propositions.  The first is that only Congress may make law.  The second is that judges may strike a law before them as unconstitutional, but if they do not, they must apply the law as written.  The third is that the Constitution must be applied as it is written.  Alterations or updates to it are political decisions, and thus only We the People may make them.

Understand: I’m not writing about the origins of the idea of law or of systems of law.  A plethora of legal philosophers (HLA Hart, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, and Gustav Radbruch to mention a few Western ones) treat these subjects should the reader wish to explore them. I begin later, with the principles underlying our American legal system.

 

Keep in mind, too, that government, per se, does not make law; the men who populate the government do.

 

Finally, Justice Antonin Scalia made this claim in his A Matter of Interpretation,

Surely this is a sad commentary: we American judges have no intelligible theory of what we do most.
Even sadder, however, is the fact that the American bar and American legal education, by and large, are unconcerned with the fact that we have no intelligible theory.

I agree, and in my hubris, I offer the beginnings of such a theory here.

Brussels Interferes Again

Posted on by
Reply

Now the European Court of Justice has decided to weigh in on Brexit.

The European Court of Justice’s opinion, which requires confirmation in a final court ruling, says the U.K. can unilaterally stop the process of leaving the EU, something that Brussels and the U.K. government had sought to oppose. A final ruling is expected within the next few weeks.

This is yet another cynical effort by Brussels to interfere in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation, this time compounded by Brussels’ insistence on punishing the Brits for their impertinence.

Were this a serious, honest move, they would have issued this opinion two years ago, at the outset of the sham negotiations.