CONTEMPT

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(Reprinted after removing from Examiner Dot Com)

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Contempt. Now I understand the use of that word for disrupting the court. Listening to arguments by attorneys for the Franciscans of Santa Barbara in L.A. Superior Court last week, I had to take on physical restraints to keep myself from jumping up and hollering. Especially when they they mentioned the Friars’ vows of poverty, I kept wanting to somehow get it on the record: Vow of poverty? Then how can they have three law firms in here representing them? And when have these brothers ever had to skip a meal to feed their kids, or sacrifice to pay bills? All their bills are paid for them. What do they really know of poverty?

If a person jumps up and starts screaming in a hearing, does the Court Reporter take it down? Do you get to go on the record one last time before they throw you out of there forever?

Equally astounding was the Franciscans now, three years after the Santa Barbara settlements, claim the documents about the perpetrators have to be secret due to the father son relationship between the hierarchy and the brothers below them.

“These are adult men,” Judge Peter Lichtman pointed out after pointing out that he had already pointed all this out several hearings back and repeated it several times since then. The church attorney then threatened to appeal because he thought the judge was laughing at him.

That was me laughing out loud at you back in the viewing area.

But here is the part that makes me need even more anger management:

What's missing from our current state of civil justice: The voice of the plaintiffs, the crime victims, like me, aren’t even part of these procedures. There is one plaintiff attorney who sticks it out hearing after hearing, Tim Hale of Santa Barbara, but he is forced to respond to the church's ludicrous claims, I don't know if anyone ever mentions the crime victims. I am in the lone one, sitting in the back silent, taking notes.

“When have you ever gone a day without food so your kids would have something to eat?” Vow of poverty?

No matter how superfluous and redundant and ridiculous the arguments, the Court has to listen, be attentive, judicial, as there is always the threat of an appeal. Apparently you can win an appeal because the judge grinned during your argument in trial court

Contempt. I'm filling up with contempt, scrawling on a yellow pad...

And a father son relationship? So now the priests aren't just pedophiles but they are committing incest too, is that the church’s argument? Sorry, guys, but the judge may be listening. The public - like Me - we see right through you. And sorry, priests, but after all these years, if you are still in there schmoozing with the bishops, you are just as guilty as Goeghan and Shanley from Boston. So sit there and start taking some grief. To me, Catholic priests have lost all claim to respect. If you are still in there with them, you are one of them.

Of all the groups who can’t claim knowledge of parent-child relationships, I think Catholic Priests come out way on top.

Maybe if these priests had been able to marry and have kids in the first place, they would have seen the damage done to children and never raped us in the first place.

Superfluous ludicrous arguments made by people with no real right to make them, in 20-minute intervals of meaningless rhetoric, talking away in front of the court.

Like battery bunnies.

They just keep going and going, filing motions and motions, scheduling hearings and hearings, and getting away with it. Catholic Church lawyers with endless budgets can take a phrase in a plaintiff argument and write a 75 or 126 page objection with declarations from all the excess monsignors etcetera who are sitting around collecting salaries, they might as well do something, have them file an friend of the defendant affidavit.

The judge and the plaintiffs apparently have no choice but to respond, go through this theatrical demonstration of a hearing as though the Church legal motions were reasonable. But they're usually ludicrous, the result an endless supply of cash supplied to a growing class of nearly amoral attorneys.

So in the end, as long as you can afford to file motions, you will win your case, since the person who runs out of money first loses.

That's American Civil Jurisprudence today. No wonder I'm thinking about learning to make stink bombs. . . .