For those who follow these things, there have been some interesting developments just recently in the American Catholic priest-abuse matter.
The premier American organization claiming to work on behalf of all the victims – or allegants – came under the legal knife itself in December when (it had appealed all the way up to the Missouri Supreme Court and been turned down) it was considered by the cognizant Court to have possibly violated or caused to be violated that Court’s Order to seal all the materials in a pending case against a Catholic bishop for allegedly having ‘covered up’ the matter of an allegedly sex-abusive priest in his Diocese.
The head of SNAP, one Mr. Clohessy, was required to submit to deposition. In the course of which he asserted in his defense that he has always considered his organization, fighting an “evil pedophile Church” to be held to a lesser standard of truthfulness and ‘transparency’ than the Church itself. Something along the lines of If you’re doing it in a Good cause, then you are Good and by definition cannot do Evil; whereas the Evil cannot do Good but must be held to account for that.
If that sounds remarkably similar to George Bush’s summary thoughts on the morality and justice of invading Iraq and any other place that seemed to him ‘the thing to do at the time’, then you could hardly be considered irrational or obsessive.
As if to demonstrate that History (or perhaps Divine Providence) has a sense of Irony, if not also Humor, shortly after that, on the first weekend of January of this year, SNAP hosted a victory-lap world Conference marking the 10th anniversary of the opening of Phase 3 (by my count) of the ‘crisis’. On January 2, 2002, you may recall, the ‘Boston Globe’ inaugurated the new Phase with a series of long ‘reports’ (basically stenographizing the ‘stories’ of allegants (many of whom were made available by SNAP).
The dynamics of Phase 3 were rather ingeniously sly. Whereas Phase 1 (the mid-1980s) and Phase 2 (the early 1990s) both concentrated on the offending priest, Phase 3 sought to ‘bundle’ large numbers of Plaintiffs and myriad specific charges against numerous priests (living and dead, most cases being decades in the past) into one huge lawsuit. Further, it was the Bishop or Diocese that was the named Party-Defendant; which, by amazing coincidence and in contrast to the often poor-as-churchmice individual priests, had deep-pockets Insurers.
The outcome, hardly unpredictable to those familiar with the dynamics of tort cases in modern America, was that the Bishop – under the advice of both legal counsel and the Insurers – chose to settle out of court for huge sums rather than face the massive task and expense of defending against each individual charge.
Much much money was made through this type of legal piñata arrangement. None of the ‘stories’ that formed the gravamen of the specific charges were ever put to the test of proven veracity; an outcome that no doubt made an impression on numerous other persons who then ‘came forth’, either with a ‘recovered memory’ or – when that particular bit was discredited as a usable theory – simply because it had taken this long to work up the ‘courage’ to sign up on the piñata list.
The media, of course, got an ongoing melodrama of classic proportions, with a powerful organizational villain, employing numerous leering, sexually perverse underlings who carried out their depredations, against purely good and utterly innocent persons in their hundreds and thousands (with additional hundreds of thousands, it was claimed, still ‘out there’, not yet having worked up the courage to ‘come forward’ and sign up).
Within the Church, the indirect beneficiaries of all this were the assorted ‘liberals’ seeking Democracy (meaning election of bishops and perhaps even priests), Diversity (code for ‘women priests and bishops’), and Regime Change (meaning the Pope and the Vatican had to go, preferably by being criminally indicted and convicted).
Anyhoo, only 75 people from around the world (or perhaps a lot closer to home) showed up in Boston for the Conference, a third of whom were officials and speakers. Most visibly not in attendance or leaping before the attending ‘Globe’ photographers and stenographers were any of the hugely enriched tort attorneys who had put the lawsuits together and conducted the horse-trading with the Insurers, for a hefty cut of the resulting Big Check.
A few days ago, the ‘National Catholic Reporter’ – a major American press organization specializing in things Catholic from somewhere in left infield (or outfield) – published an editorial which, to nobody’s general surprise, supported SNAP in general, even if – the editors piously sniffed – they didn’t always agree with SNAP’s tactics.
That editorial may be read here. If you take a moment to read it, then the following thoughts should fall into place clearly enough.
The Polish suicide case: Had it been proven by police investigation to be suicide or is it a cover-up for murder, and if murder then by whom and for what purpose? Has the allegation made in the purported suicide note been determined to be true? I don’t have the answers, but unless the editors have information they haven’t seen fit to share, then who does know the answers?
No investigator could rule out the possibility that either a) a shrewd murderer might well take advantage of a thoroughly-predictable public ‘spin’ (i.e. clerical sex abuse) to kill, and perhaps add a note to direct the ‘response’ neatly away from the actual perpetrator. Or, psychologically, has some unbalanced person found it impossible to go on and finds the monster-du-jour as a handy psychological scapegoat?
I don’t have the answers, but they are all quite real possibilities that would occur to investigators if not to bloggers. Nor do I deny the possibility that the suicide is precisely what it appears to be. But that’s only one possibility out of several to be checked out.
I don’t know why the priest involved in the case does not wish to testify in court. Is he being asked matters that are under the seal of the confessional? Is he simply an observant adult who can see just what happens to accused priests in a time of Mania? At any rate, if the Polish courts wanted him to testify (except in matters of the confessional), then why have they not compelled him? Absent some provision in Polish law that does not permit non-canonical courts from compelling a priest’s testimony, then there is some missing element or elements in the report.
Did the editors not notice any of this?
In a world as full of ‘horrors’ as this present one (upon all of whose victims be peace), I find it a bit too much of a muchness that the editors of a putatively world-class press organization have confessed themselves ‘groping’ for a response.
Despite all of the reforms and strictures (which probably place the Church in the front ranks of protective organizations on the planet, and certainly in the Western world), yet the editors report as if in amazement that “the clergy abuse scandal continues”. Is it not a hardly improbable possibility that the ‘crisis’ goes on precisely because the editors and organizations like SNAP need it to do so? By all extant measurements the crisis – such as it has ever been – is subsiding.
The public uproar is still being stoked, but that is a different matter altogether.
The work of SNAP – and SNAP alone – is “under threat” because a cognizant Court – supported by all relevant levels of superior appeals courts – has considered that there is reasonable cause to suspect that SNAP has violated the Court’s Order placing materials in a lawsuit under seal. If SNAP’s own actions have per se constituted a breach of law by violating that Order or causing it to be violated, then SNAP has brought its present legal travails upon itself and, I would add, upon the credibility of all similar organizations.
Whence do the editors derive their assertion that communications and records of SNAP are confidential? That SNAP “believes itself to be” a legally protected organization? Surely it had access to sufficient legal talent to determine that as definitively Yes or No long ago; numerous highly-rewarded tort attorneys have benefitted from SNAP and could hardly have been unavailable over the past many years to offer Advice of Counsel on that matter.
If SNAP is indeed so protected, then it will be easy enough to legally turn back the requests for information. If SNAP is not so protected, then it and it alone will be required to turn over records (for which individual names and identifying information can easily be kept confidential by the cognizant Court). So this editorial claim is a tissue of words camouflaging a non-issue.
The fact that SNAP has been turned back at all levels of appeal, presuming that it made this utterly vital assertion of its purported legal privilege to those various courts, indicates that those higher levels agree that it is not so privileged in that State’s law. How could the editorial overlook this rather basic point in making its analysis?
And to try to tie in SNAP’s predicament not only to all victim-counseling organizations that actually do enjoy such legal privilege, and then beyond those organizations to any whistleblower anywhere in regard to any matter about any organization whatsoever … is a reach that can only be characterizable as either hysterical or histrionic. Neither of which possibilities contributes to confidence in the competence and/or integrity of those who try to make the connection.
The “breadth” of the demanded documents is too wide. For what? To make that determination one would have to know the gravamen of the issue at hand.
SNAP is under a legal cloud not through the action of the original lawsuit (to which it was not a Party) but rather because it somehow broke or caused to be broken a Court Order putting a seal on the proceedings. If SNAP is a press organization – which to the best of my knowledge it is not and has never claimed to be – then its travails would justify the concern of press organizations. If SNAP is under the impression that in that State it is a protected organization, then its travails would pose a threat to all such privileged organizations, but in the eyes – apparently – of all the cognizant courts in the system it is not so privileged. (Although whether it has represented itself as being thus privileged to persons approaching it is another question entirely – and not a small one.)
So why the local Press Organization felt inclined to – or had the relevant need to – file an Amicus Brief is a mystery that no doubt harbors some interesting answers.
Ditto the assorted victim’s advocacy groups (presuming that they are themselves legally privileged – although if the signatory Amicus groups are not so privileged, then most certainly Yes, they have a great deal at stake in the outcome of SNAP’s travails).
The public may very well and hardly unreasonably harbor the impression that a significant element in SNAP’s organizational plan is to be a collection-point and conduit between potential tort clients and assorted tort-attorneys. The editorial says this is not at all so … on the basis of Mr. Clohessy’s assertion that it is not so. Passing over without remark the fact that this is mighty thin gruel to constitute conclusive evidence by a putatively world-class press organization, there is the fact that Mr. Clohessy recently claimed that he has always operated on the assumption that the levels of truthfulness and honesty that apply to the Church do not apply to him or his organization. How then believe a man who sincerely believes in dishonesty?
Nor has his organization demonstrated transparency in the matter of making public the records of where it gets its money – to refute clearly the abiding suspicion that SNAP received kickbacks from the tort attorneys for whom the victim-stories and cases have been (you should pardon the expression) manna from heaven.
I am not sure why the various attorneys are interested in ‘repressed memory’, that always-dubious and now discredited theory that fueled so much of the victim movement’s agitations since at least the early 1980s.
The idea that a memory a) was like a snapshot and b) was like a computer file and thus c) could be suddenly returned to consciousness with all the clarity of a photo or a pristine computer file suddenly recalled from ‘Documents’ was always hugely dubious. There is no neural architecture to provide pathways for such processes; the memory does not function like a camera but is far more dynamic and complex in what it selects; the emotional pressures present in a traumatic situation would act to further confuse what is an already fluid dynamic; and it flies in the face of everything we know about evolution that human beings would be prompted and equipped to ‘forget’ grave dangers – rather, those are precisely the experiences it is most necessary to recall if the species is to survive.
And all of that presumes the sincerity and integrity of the person claiming to have such a ‘memory’.
Do the editors know none of this?
But at any rate, it is well within the Court’s purview to maintain the confidentiality of the individuals who did claim repressed memory to SNAP staff. (Although if there should prove to be discrepancies between communications with SNAP and later claims, say for example, made in a court case under pains and penalties of perjury … well, yes, that would create some problems in the perjury department. But are the editors intent on preventing the righting of such perjurious miscarriages of justice? Or are such miscarriages merely ‘acceptable losses’ and ‘forgivable exaggerations’ in the Great and Good Cause?)
If a number of attorneys for various priests (or Dioceses) were granted the Standing to participate actively in Mr. Clohessy’s deposition, then they were granted that authority by the cognizant Court or applicable law. The Church could not – as some seem to believe – simply order a pig-pile (to use a childhood phrase). Given the rather significant numbers of Dioceses and priests Mr. Clohessy and his organization have brought under their attentions, it would hardly be surprising if perhaps some common practice(s) engaged in by Mr. Clohessy and/or his organization were found to have somehow tainted a large number of past and present legal cases and lawsuits and such.
And in that regard there is his own recent assertion of a double-standard by which he and his organization should not be held strictly. And his assistant Ms. Dorritt’s that accused priests have no legal rights anyone is bound to respect. It would hardly be surprising if attorneys for a large number of accused individuals and sued Dioceses weren’t interested – they would be remiss in their responsibilities if they didn’t take a most serious interest.
But how do the editors assert that in the course of the deposition Mr. Clohessy was largely questioned on irrelevant matters? Did the interrogating attorneys confess that to them? Were their own attorneys present as observers or did they have access to the deposition transcript? Or did they merely take the word of Mr. Clohessy and/or his counsel? And if the latter, then what sort of confidence can be placed now in their thoughts?
The editors piously intone that “we don’t agree with all of SNAP’s tactics”. Aside from what I have discussed above, I have no idea just how much they know that they are now trying to distance themselves from, but the statement certainly raises more questions than it answers or tries to preclude.
Yet they then go on to make the assertion – for all practical purposes – that whatever its dishonesties, SNAP is just too good and too “unique” to fail. I haven’t been keeping a strict tally of the number of Impossible Things to be Believed Before Breakfast, but they must by this point in the editorial have gotten beyond the Red Queen’s Six.
Apparently dishonesty in a good cause is OK. And if you trying to take the Church down several or a dozen notches then that qualifies as ‘good’. And if you are a) a legally privileged organization that actually isn’t one; and b) an organization crusading for justice that doesn’t consider itself bound by truth or law; and c) a press organization that actually isn’t one; and d) a therapeutic aid organization that offers a verrrry speshull type of therapy-by-lawyer with (up until the recent developments) almost no risk of being challenged as to the veracity of your ‘memories’ or your ‘stories’ … well, yes, I would agree with the editors that SNAP is unique.
But then, “unique” is rather too mild a term indeed, and the editors do not do the real SNAP justice.
The editors point out that SNAP is not a Party to the original lawsuit, but that is irrelevant to its problem in this matter. The editors characterize the presence of so many attorneys across the table from SNAP as signs of a “fishing expedition”. But surely, if SNAP has been engaged in widespread and long-sustained skullduggery, then it is hardly unusual in such a case for attorneys from the long-ago or the far-away to want to find out if anything had been done which prejudiced their own clients’ cases or – more ominously – constituted or contributed to a Fraud Upon the Court in one or a number of cases.
The editors then point to the value of “well-informed media”. Although, as I said above, the point has no relevance to SNAP … unless, of course, the case is to be made that SNAP did indeed violate a Court Order in disseminating sealed information but only because it was privileged as a ‘whistleblower’ or as a rape-crisis and counseling center or as a press organization itself. Or all of the above – one gets the idea that SNAP is trying to throw anything up in the air to see if it flies, and the editors are doing their best to assist.
At any rate, the 2002 ‘Boston Globe’ reference is very interesting. First, it marked Phase 3 of a sustained campaign that – like a tornado controlled by forces unknown – blew through, turned around, blew through again, turned around, and then came back for a third trip down Main Street. Phase 1 came and went in the mid-80s, Phase 2 in the early 1990s, and both of them focused on individual accused priests.
But in 2002 a far more complex and hydra-headed strategy was developed: a) it was the Bishop or Diocese named as Party-Defendant; b) numerous allegations were ‘bundled’ into a single civil lawsuit (so few of any of these cases ever went to criminal trial); thus c) the Party-Defendant (and the deep-pockets Insurer) had to decide whether to contest or simply ‘settle’ – which, given the huge number of allegations and stories (almost all of which have never had to or have been corroborated or verified formally) would have been a hugely expensive proposition.
The Insurers, who would have had great say in the matter, would almost as a matter of sound financial practice insist upon a settlement (and it would have been the same in a train wreck or a plane crash or any other type of large and multiple-Plaintiff lawsuit).
This served many interests: tort-attorneys, persons with stories who saw (or were shown, perhaps by SNAP or perhaps by attorneys to whom it referred ‘victims’) the possibility of closure and/or cash; SNAP itself which fed off the intensifying dynamic as a hurricane feeds off ocean water; and a media that was economically interested in any good scandal story, especially if it could be guaranteed to have ‘legs’ and go on and on.
(I leave out the possibility of ideological motivations such as, say, a generally acknowledge ‘liberal’ paper or a secularist and anti-religious agenda. And I also leave out the possibilities useful to persons within the Church seeking Democracy, Diversity, and/or Regime Change in one form or another.)
But what has this to do with “a well informed press”? The ‘Globe’ essentially merely pasted together a whole lotta unsupported allegations and accusatory ‘stories’. Very little investigative reporting went into it. But THEN it comes to me: the unspoken middle in the editorial is that SNAP not only fed its victims to tort attorneys (for a kickback?) but also fed their ‘stories’ to the ‘Boston Globe’ (which, alas, garnered a Pulitzer for its ‘reporting’). So SNAP has been doing a whole lot more than counseling anybody who came to it. It has - “uniquely” is indeed accurate here – set itself up as a very active and not overly principled middleman between victims, tort attorneys, and media – and all have made out rather well.
So much so that you wonder if they’d really rather not see it all end. And thus have some perhaps subsurface desire (or strategy) to ‘keep the ball rolling’ and to that end, to do ‘whatever it takes’.
Anyway, at least a third of the seventy-five people who showed up for SNAP’s 10th anniversary world conference in Boston were officials and speakers. And not a single one of the tort attorneys who made so much off these cases even wanted his/her name mentioned in conjunction with so world-historical an event. What are we to make of that? What did the editors think of it? They must have known. Did they send of their reporters to this event? If not, why not?
The editorial then asserts that “it has been the partnership of advocates and media that has moved responses to sexual abuse out of backrooms and into courtrooms”. But such a ‘partnership’ should not exist in the first place: the press is supposed to be ‘independent’ precisely so that it can conduct its own analysis independent of alliance or partnership with any interested party. Otherwise, the press becomes – to use the military term – ‘embedded’ with the advocacy and that creates lethal problems in credibility and integrity. Surely the editors were not unaware of all that.
The editorial then asserts – versus “opponents” who claim that the same standard of organizational transparency applies to both the Church and to SNAP – that SNAP and the Church are not “equivalent structures” – which is a rather novel bit of philosophy and law. As an assertion of morality it is insupportable, and as an assertion of legal principle it is positively lethal: if all persons and entities are not equally responsible for being truthful, then on what basis does the accuracy and legitimacy of legal process and Law stand?
SNAP’s only “uniqueness” in this regard (clearly the editors have already forgotten about or ignored SNAP’s purported already-existing legal privilege) is that it even dares to make such a claim. Of what use is a whistleblower who is not truthful in his/her revelations; or a press agency that is not truthful with the public; or a therapeutic organization that is not truthful with its clients or patients?
SNAP, the editors say, is “unusual” because it is an organization that arose in response to a crisis “that nobody could have foreseen”. What is the point? What is the relevance of this assertion? This is a duplicitous way, as far as I can see, of making Clohessy’s own claim that when you are trying to do good in fighting “an evil pedophile Church” then you shouldn’t have to be required to tell the truth … but the evil pedophile Church should be.
This principle makes any and all advocacy suspect. How much advocacy in regard to anything in the past 40-plus years of Identity-Advocacy Politics has considered this to be a valid operational philosophy? How many press agencies that engage in so-called ‘advocacy journalism’ have been engaging in ‘partnership’ with such philosophy?
The editorial then quotes an Amicus Brief that makes the creative argument that if SNAP has to deliver all these documents, then all sorts of folks who communicated with SNAP will be put in danger of death or retaliation like members of the NAACP in the Jim Crow South in the 1950s if their names were made public to the Klan.
All of the courts in this SNAP matter rejected that argument and how could they not? The cognizant court could keep the personal identifying information confidential (unless a case might be made that this or that individual allegant could be reasonably demonstrated to have committed Perjury or a Fraud Upon the Court in some case – but that is not the Church getting an allegant in trouble; that is the allegant committing Perjury or a Fraud Upon the Court, which – not to put too fine a point on it – constitute crimes in just about every State).
If anybody, it is the accused that stand to suffer precisely from such dangers – “economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility”, to use the list the Amicus Brief uses – through the Mania that SNAP has committed itself – with self-admittedly no responsibility to truthfulness as it is commonly understood – to fostering and continuing. As in any other aspect of the Sex Offense Mania, the dangers to any accused in terms of permanently losing reputation, livelihood, the ability to raise a family, maintain a residence, or even to live in physical safety are multiple, interlocking, substantial, and almost inevitable.
And if Mr. Clohessy’s remarks – which are a certainty – and SNAP’s organizational methods and operation strategies – which are far more than merely ‘possible’ – are any gauge, then if “survivors and witnesses of sexual abuse will no longer feel comfortable in approaching SNAP with confidence” that perhaps may not be such a bad thing for them in any event.
I can’t imagine on what grounds any experienced attorney – let alone law professor – can claim, as does the editors’ chosen source on this matter – that these subpoenas are somehow the most “ugly” tactics she has ever seen.
An illegal act reasonably suspected by a cognizant Court to have been committed by SNAP – an organization that has been deliberately involved for years in numerous acts of supporting legal action against many individuals and entities – suddenly gives reasonable cause to suspect that SNAP may well have engaged in untruthfulness in any number of ways during some of those prior or present cases. Attorneys of all the persons and entities involved as Parties-Defendant in those cases or otherwise indirectly were harmed by any such dishonesty AND any other Courts that might have reason to suspect that a Fraud was committed upon them … well, if you have committed untruthfulness to the point where so many lives may have been harmed and so many formal legal proceedings fundamentally and fatally tainted by Perjury or Fraud, then Yes, you are on the cusp of a whole lotta trouble.
And really, so few of these abuse cases have ever reached “the courtroom”, contrary to the editors’ pithy but ultimately empty characterization. Most of these were civil cases, and most were ‘settled’. Rarely did ‘Perry Mason’ enter into it. And even in the cases where trials were held, the taint of impropriety, especially now that the emotions of the moment have faded and with them their protecting aura of ‘rightness’, becomes more clearly palpable.
Thus I don’t see how the depth and breadth and width of the subpoenas are disproportionate to the depth and breadth and width of the possible perpetrations effected by SNAP over the almost quarter-century of its very busy organizational existence. Rather, I think there are strong grounds to suspect that SNAP and its ‘partners’ – press and tort attorneys and others in on the game – have every reason to fear that even a single glimpse of what has really been going on is going to subject them to serious legal problems that will indeed be proportional to what they have done and what they have been doing for all these years.
How can the editors characterize this as “hardball” as if SNAP hasn’t been playing “hardball”? Careers wrecked, professional lives destroyed, and no extant evidence demonstrates that all or even most cases were demonstrably true.
And if Frauds were committed upon Courts, then it is not the Church that SNAP has to fear but a whole lotta verrrry angry Courts. And that, I think, is why all the ‘partner’ tort attorneys who made a mint off this Phase and have always been so camera-ready, suddenly disappeared off the radar two weeks ago in Boston and ever since. They know in their professional bones that Courts that realize they have been en-Frauded are verrrrry dangerous creatures, besides which a Vatican ruminating or a bishop scratching his embroidered cone-cap is child’s-play.
Lastly, the editors mention that SNAP is only “modestly funded”. And yet they neglect to consider that SNAP has been partnered with some of the slyest (and now rather wealthy) tort attorneys in the country. Where are all these folks with checkbook or lawbook when their erstwhile “unique” ‘partner’ stands on the cusp of a genuine legal (if not also moral) abyss? And why have they allowed their ‘unique partner’ to languish in this unjust and unwarranted hell?
The editors apparently don’t think to ask.
It appears, at the most charitable, a habitual failing of theirs.
So much remains to be done.*
Thus the significance of all this for the SO community is substantial: the SO Mania itself was one of the government’s first efforts at using the advanced techniques of manipulating public opinion – already reduced to cartoonish caricaturing and emotion-laden posturing instead of deliberative and tire-kicking analysis – and then combining that with the vastly enhanced technological ability to ‘track’ any targeted Citizens (the Nazis had to rely on file cards and constantly updated book-sized master-lists in a society riddled with ‘checkpoints’), in order to construct an ‘outrage’ of putative horrific proportions, that thus generated an ‘emergency’, to which the government could then respond by (what was in the early 1990s) draconian legislation.
A baaaaad thing even at its inception, this gambit was quickly adapted after 9/11 to go after just about anybody as a ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist-enabler’ without regard to civil rights or liberties (since, as the odious Lindsey Graham has recently said, ‘we are at war’ – just as the government was at with Sex Offenders 20-plus years ago).
The Catholic priest abuse ‘crisis’ was a subset of the SO Mania, specifically designed to weaken the authority of the Catholic Church (no other organizations have been subjected to such sustained attention in the matter of sexual-abuse for a quarter-century and counting) to impede the secularist agendas of the Nanny State Left and the war-making and rights-reducing agenda of the Security State Right. The Church had in the 1980s made powerful oppositional statements to major dampdreams of both Left and Right; and both extremes saw a handy way of making sure that wasn’t ever repeated again.
Within the Church, Lefty ‘liberals’ also sought Democracy (election of bishops and priests by the Faithful), Diversity (women priests and bishops), and Regime-Change (breaking up the American Church’s bond with the Vatican) in order to make the American Catholic polity more like a ‘liberal’ Protestant American church polity (which has led that gaggle into a massive irrelevance and a profound metaphysical aimlessness).
Neatly, the civilian-public aspect of the SO Mania begins to wane: one indicator is that the SMART office, charged with administering AWA after that whackulent Thing was erected into law in 2006, no longer dates its press releases; the last time I checked a week or so ago, the second most recent press release was advertising funding opportunities for Fiscal Year 2011 – which makes it over a year old since we are now almost halfway through FY 2012 (the federal Fiscal Year begins on October 1st of the year before).
So too the Catholic abuse-mania begins to wane, although still dangerous in its dying throes.
But I hope the SO Community remains aware that a) all those noxious Mania Regime laws are still on the books; b) their guiding principles are migrating now into the military law, but may well use that last refuge as a springboard to try a comeback into civilian law; and c) the entire mindset of the Beltway is now infected with police-state conceptions that have been given increasing play since 9/11 but that were originally embraced in the run-up to the Sex Offense Mania Regime two decades and more ago.
NOTES
*So, for example, this article clearly recognizes the police-state and totalitarian consequences of the National Defense Authorization Act. But it urges ‘progressive’ action against it. Yet not only does it make any reference to the clear steps taken toward this police-state with the construction of the SO Mania Regime, but how can it not be clear that at the time of its inception the SO Mania Regime was itself considered to be ‘progressive’?
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