Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 2:16am

The Golden Thread

Dave Griffey at Daffey Thoughts gives us Mark Shea’s predictable take on the Roy Moore controversy:

 

 

 

Both in and out of the courts.  A case study, by Mark Shea. 

Knowing Mark’s own political loyalties, is wasn’t difficult to believe that Mark would do what he did, and that’s join with all of Roy Moore’s political opponents and adversaries on both sides of the aisle and demand Moore be removed from his senate race.  Most, like Mark, made this call long before more women were produced from the same part of the town where Moore was living forty years ago, and before Moore made some of his own questionable statements.  Many, like Mark, did it within a day of the WP piece that initially broke the story.

Mark, like Steven Greydanus, has made it clear that Moore’s guilt is all but obvious.  There is no room for debate.  If you don’t immediately condemn Moore and want him punished, then you support child molesters.  Sort of like what people used to say about the Catholic Church, but I’m sure that’s different.  After all, Mark asks why women would make false accusations for no reason?

Which brings us to this little tidbit that came my way.  In it, we have a cry for justice against a vile women who has made an innocent man’s life a nightmare with endless false accusations and stalkings.  And who is that man?  It would be Mark Shea’s nephew

Personally, I have no more vested interest in the case against Mark’s nephew than I do the case against Roy Moore.  My thing would be to wait to demand punishment until the cases were heard in an official capacity.  Was Mark’s nephew lying to protect himself, or was the woman lying?   I might have my own opinions, but I certainly wouldn’t want anyone punished until official inquiries and investigations were conducted that included examining the evidence.

Same with Moore.  But yet, whereas Mark found it easy to accuse a woman who had falsely accused his own nephew, Mark finds it just as easy now to believe every woman accusing Moore and immediately call for Moore, the child molester per Mark, to be punished, no physical evidence or corroborating documentation needed.

And that, kiddies, is why we have the rule of law.  It’s to protect us from people who can’t quite see the fact that they appear to be playing fast and loose with consistent application of standards, and who seem to be guided more by emotionalism and raw personal bias and prejudice, than an actual quest for truth and justice.

 

Go here to comment.  When I am tempted to rush to judgment I try to recall the golden thread that runs through American law, the presumption of innocence.  Rumpole of the Bailey stated it well:

 

 

When factual allegations are made, I try to remind myself that the burden of proof is on the accuser, inside or outside of the courtroom.

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Art Deco
Art Deco
Monday, November 20, AD 2017 6:56pm

Well, we’ve all been through this before. Then, the people who couldn’t ever reserve judgment were Rod Dreher and Leon Podles (a retired FBI agent, egad). Mark Shea was more temperate when he was younger, and that’s too bad.

Greg Mockeridge
Greg Mockeridge
Monday, November 20, AD 2017 8:22pm

Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say the accused is actually presumed not guilty as opposed to innocent? After all, when someone is charged with a crime, the one making the charge is not presuming innocence. And seeing as how someone accused of a more serious crime is usually remanded, the judge is not presuming innocence either.

And even when a defendant is acquitted, he is not normally pronounced innocent, but not guilty. Now, I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one in my imagination, but I do know that not guilty and innocent are two different things in the eyes of the law. The fact that a defendant is actually pronounced innocent in rare cases proves that. So, my lawyer friend, why is the term presumed innocent used as opposed to presumed not guilty?

Mary De Voe
Monday, November 20, AD 2017 8:54pm

Thank you, Donald McClarey. All men are created in original innocence and must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Innocence comes from the Creator, not from the state. It is the state’s job to protect the innocence of all citizens.

Father of Seven
Father of Seven
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 6:09am

As with all Liberals, his only dogma is hypocrisy. I love how Uncle Mark wants her put away for a very long time. He sounds quite unmerciful. Where’s the accompaniment? Where’s the sympathetic questioning as to what conduct on the part of his nephew would drive a woman, his nephew formerly cared for, to go to such lengths? It’s almost as though Mark doesn’t care at all for her side of the story. How odd. Mark is usually such a guiding light.

Phillip
Phillip
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 8:09am

” I love how Uncle Mark wants her put away for a very long time. He sounds quite unmerciful. Where’s the accompaniment?”

Perhaps Mark can learn from this writing in the sand and turn from what may be calumny.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 8:31am

Phillip,

Mark Shea thrives on slander, the same sin that Satan committed in the Garden of Eden: “You will not die if you eat from the Tree. God is wrong.”

Guy McClung
Admin
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 8:57am

Does Uncle Mark follow Alinsky? This from Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals, Democrats, liberal catholics, Progressives, and other Totalitarians: “The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”

Why can’t Uncle Mark simply follow the standards all liberals had for William Jefferson Blythe Clinton IV?

Remember when we were told by the democrat, etc. serpents, hypocrites and vipers that Billy Bully’s priapism had zip to do with his ability to rule?
Why don’t the NYT and Gloria Steinem’s justification of Predator In Chief apply to Moore and Freaken today ?
Guy McClung, Texas

From: BILL CLINTON: A RECKONING
Feminists saved the 42nd president of the United States in the 1990s. They were on the wrong side of history; is it finally time to make things right?
THE ATLANTIC
Caitlin Flanagin

“The notorious 1998 New York Times op-ed by Gloria Steinem must surely stand as one of the most regretted public actions of her life. It slut-shamed, victim-blamed, and age-shamed; it urged compassion for and gratitude to the man the women accused. Moreover (never write an op-ed in a hurry; you’ll accidentally say what you really believe), it characterized contemporary feminism as a weaponized auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

Called “Feminists and the Clinton Question,” it was written in March of 1998, when Paula Jones’s harassment claim was working its way through court. It was printed seven days after Kathleen Willey’s blockbuster 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley. If all the various allegations were true, wrote Steinem, Bill Clinton was “a candidate for sex addiction therapy.” To her mind, the most “credible” accusations were those of Willey, who she noted was “old enough to be Monica Lewinsky’s mother.” And then she wrote the fatal sentences that invalidated the new understanding of workplace sexual harassment as a moral and legal wrong: “Even if the allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb, and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.”
Steinem said the same was true of Paula Jones. These were not crimes; they were “passes.” Steinem revealed herself as a combination John and Bobby Kennedy of the feminist movement: the fair-haired girl and the bare-knuckle fixer. The widespread liberal response to the sex-crime accusations against Bill Clinton found their natural consequence 20 years later in the behavior of Harvey Weinstein: Stay loudly and publicly and extravagantly on the side of signal leftist causes and you can do what you want in the privacy of your offices and hotel rooms. But the mood of the country has changed. We are in a time when old monuments are coming down and men are losing their careers over things they did to women a long time ago.”

Dale Price
Dale Price
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 12:08pm

Sure, he deserves the presumption of innocence. And so does Al Franken, Jeffrey Tambor, Charlie Rose, etc. for the actions they denied.

The thing is, this dispute is never going to see a court of law, criminal or civil. So we’re left to assess the evidence on our own, applying skepticism, credibility assessments and, as the jury instructions say, common sense.

Thus, it seems likely to me that Roy Moore was a creep in his younger days, at best Matthew McConaghey’s “Wooderson” from “Dazed and Confused” and at worst a predator on vulnerable girls.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 12:21pm

Yes, Jeffrey Tambor & Charlie Rose deserve presumption of innocence just as Roy Moore does. Not so much Al Franken, given the photo of him fondling Leeann Tweeden while she slept and his virtual admission of its authenticity.

PS, Leeann Tweeden with her semi-nude photos for Playboy & Maxim isn’t much better.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 12:22pm

Sure, he deserves the presumption of innocence. And so does Al Franken, Jeffrey Tambor, Charlie Rose, etc. for the actions they denied.

True, but is assessing them, we’re not in the same square on the board. Unless she’s being misquoted, Rose’s executive producer says the general complaint contra Rose is true. There’s photographic indicators that the complaint contra Franken may be true. Neither Franken nor Rose are currently running for office; they don’t have enemies doing oppo research on them and the Washington Post is not a known antagonist of either. The complaints against Rose make reference to various dates over the last 25 years. The complaints against Franken are quite specific to time and place in 2006.

The complaints against Moore date to around 1978, none have been corroborated yet, and the Washington Post has been trafficking in hearsay and jumbling dissimilar accusations together so that one seems to validate the other. Already the most distinct and verifiable complaint appears to be falling apart.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 12:25pm

Thus, it seems likely to me that Roy Moore was a creep in his younger days, at best Matthew McConaghey’s “Wooderson” from “Dazed and Confused” and at worst a predator on vulnerable girls.

A cousin was pursuing my aunt ca. 1941. Creep or no?

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 2:16pm

PS, I would like to see as much research done on these women accusers as on the men whom they accuse. In the case of Al Franken and Leeann Tweeden, as I intimated above, simply entering “Leeann Tweeden” in Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) was quite revealing – NOTATE BENE: forewarned is forearmed.

I’ll wager many if not most of these women accusers have secrets as deep and dark as what they accuse those men of having done. Either their sexual morals are as decrepit and perverted, or they are Democratic Party operatives engaged in slander and character assassination – remember that Satan’s sin in the Garden of Eden was slandering God Almighty. The old phrase “the pot calling the kettle black” comes to mind. Thus, one can defend neither the men accused nor the women accusing. But I understand that that point oft escapes the Pharisitically pure in conservative political orthodoxy.

Dale Price
Dale Price
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 2:50pm

Art: Was your cousin in his 30s and did he loiter around high school dances looking for your 14 year old aunt? If so, then I’d say “creep.”

Dale Price
Dale Price
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 2:55pm

Paul, I would think that equal protection of the law applies to all women, even those who take their clothes off. A certain base entitlement to not be assaulted or groped is a low benchmark for a decent society, don’t you think? Although it is salutary to know that you think only sinless women are entitled to make accusations.

I’ll leave it to objective observers to determine whether I’m a pharisee or even particularly interested in conservative political orthodoxy, whatever that might mean.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 6:09pm

Art: Was your cousin in his 30s and did he loiter around high school dances looking for your 14 year old aunt? If so, then I’d say “creep.”

No, he was born in 1923 and died in 1992. She was born in 1925 and died in 2015. Of course he did not meet her at a high school dance.

Did I mention that their grandfather was 16 years older than their grandmother?

The term ‘creep’ is an aesthetic judgment, not a moral one. The accusation of it is also a tool in status competition, mostly yielded by women or in reference to women. There is no fixed definition of ‘creep’. My dear cousin would be called a ‘creep’ by most I grew up with. Homosexual men would have been called that when I was in school. It’s modally used to describe someone socially awkward with odd tastes.

While we’re at it, this is pretty funny:

https://view.yahoo.com/show/saturday-night-live/clip/40058288/sexual-harassment-and-you

From an eccentric source, it demonstrates a few things. One is that a man who actually is a capable predator does not acquire a reputation for being a predator; his approaches give him what he wants. A non-zero portion of what is given the appellation ‘sexual harassment’ is just ordinary attention or social interaction Ms. X doesn’t want. Of course, Ms. X (and everyone else) expects Ms. X to grade approaches, not undertake them herself, so ‘unwanted attention’ is what she defines it to be.

Those observations do not apply in every situation that generates complaints, but it does apply in some of them. (One of the complaints contra Charlie Rose was that he was in his bathrobe when said intern arrived at his home and went into the next room to change while she waited, just to take one example).

I cannot help but notice that the most damning accusations contra Moore are the most dubious. The rest are along the lines of him spending time with adolescents. Now, growing up, I’ve known people who married quite young and had a good run with it, but adolescents of 19 seldom have the talent and diligence anymore to build durable relationships (as Richard Nixon’s grandson had to learn the hard way). It wasn’t terribly prudent of Moore, in what I’m going to guess was a quest to find a woman without much of a past, to be looking there. He did find a woman of that vintage, but a half dozen years later when she was a more fitting prospect.

When I was of a certain age, I frequented a coffee house where I could charge up for the night-shift job I had. It was frequented by local high school students and cohorts just older. Yes, I had pleasant times talking with them. If I ran for public office, someone could twist this around if they cared to. Just some shading and some small lies, that’s all it would take.

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Tuesday, November 21, AD 2017 9:12pm

Art can probably also testify at how hard it can be to properly guage ages as asking for ID is rarely a profitable opener (unless you’re trolling for milfs).

With some of the Moore talk it’s hard not to get the impression that maybe the crime is to be a single man in his 30s or 40s.

Unless there’s been an update, at least Moore’s accusations are from a limited period of time and stopped once he settled down. With hollywood and other politicians the problem seems to be ongoing issue for them.

bob kurland
Admin
Wednesday, November 22, AD 2017 8:59am

My wife made the following astute remark about the Moore affair. To be a 14 year old girl in Alabama back in the 80’s was to be a 20 year old woman nowadays–the mores and culture there and then were, shall we say, best described by Tennessee Williams? And we live in that part of Pennsylvania described by James Carville as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between,” so we should know.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Wednesday, November 22, AD 2017 10:51am

Greg Mockeridge wrote “[E]ven when a defendant is acquitted, he is not normally pronounced innocent, but not guilty…”

Consider the case of Creasey v Creasey 1931 S.C. 9.

Mr Creasy raised an action for divorce against his wife and a co-defender on the grounds of adultery and concluded against the Co-Defender for expenses. The criminal standard of proof applied, namely, proof beyond reasonable doubt and by corroborated evidence.

The evidence against Mrs Creasey consisted of certain admissions she had made to third parties, corroborated by independent evidence of clandestine association. On that evidence, the Lord Ordinary, Lord Mackay, found that she had committed adultery with the Co-Defender. However, Mrs Creasey’s admissions were not evidence against the Co-Defender; he had neither authorised nor adopted them. Accordingly, he was assoilzied from the action.

“And so,” as Lord Birkenhead said in Rutherford v Richardson [1923] AC 1, 5, “it happens that the court may quite reasonably conclude that it is proved that B has committed adultery with C, but not that C has committed adultery with B.”

Art Deco
Art Deco
Wednesday, November 22, AD 2017 2:12pm

My wife made the following astute remark about the Moore affair. To be a 14 year old girl in Alabama back in the 80’s was to be a 20 year old woman nowadays–the mores and culture there and then were, shall we say, best described by Tennessee Williams? And we live in that part of Pennsylvania described by James Carville as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between,” so we should know.

The incidents are supposed to have occurred in 1977-79. There is an ample population of boozy sluts among this nation’s 20 year olds and I seriously doubt that was particularly common among young women of 14 in Alabama in 1978, except in the imagination of the person who came up with Florence Jean Castleberry.

Neither Tennessee Williams nor James Carville were from Alabama. Carville wasn’t from Pennsylvania, either. He ran a successful congressional campaign there once (and got good press for doing things for which Lee Atwater got bad press – some of them have been Democratic operatives-with-bylines for a while).

Interior Pennsylvania has a jagged landscape with mountains you don’t find in Alabama (while Alabama has coastal plain you don’t find in Pennsylvania. Alabama has Southern pine woods. Pennsylvania had deciduous forest and mixed forest. Alabama has ample populaitons of Southern Baptist and Convention Baptist. Interior Pennsylvania is well-salted with Slavic Catholics and my have the largest % of Eastern-rite parishioners in the country. Alabama is 26% black. Interior Pennsylvania is 5% black. Pennsylvania has been hit as hard as any place by the decline in manufacturing. Alabama, not.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Wednesday, November 22, AD 2017 6:30pm

“There is an ample population of boozy sluts among this nation’s 20 year olds and I seriously doubt that was particularly common among young women of 14 in Alabama in 1978….”

It’s not just that. A fair size of the population seem to be feminist airhead snowflake millennials with little or no moral compass. What we are seeing is the result of decades of a culture of free sex and contraception. It isn’t that men don’t have to reverence women any longer. It’s that as women insisted on having contraceptive sex with all the frequency of a baboon in heat just so that they could imitate a caricature of what they think a man is, they invite the disrespect and the abuse. It’s frankly suicidal because if they really believed in the nobility and virtue of true womanhood, then they wouldn’t behave like that.

Now I am NOT saying that’s the case all the time. Nor am I saying that that at any time gives any justification for a man sexually harassing a woman – there is NO excuse. Such a man ought to be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible. But it goes the other way too. There’s no excuse for a woman to be a feminist “slut” (to use Art Deco’s term – well, he said boozy sluts) or dress like one with public photos strewn all across the Internet either.

No, I still think that Roy Moore didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t believe any of the reports from any of the news media. But when it comes to a Democrat who openly advocates homosexual marriage and abortion (unlike Roy Moore), then we all know where his public moral compass is at, and by his own admission he is capable of any immorality.

This purity in conservatism that we must damn Republican Roy Moore based on unproven allegations, but we have to excuse a Democrat who publicly advocates homosexual marriage and abortion is likewise suicidal. Even if Roy Moore did something questionable in the long distant past, Doug Jones (his opponent) is worse simply because of what he said he WILL do if elected. Mr. Jones advocates pure evil and Roy Moore does NOT. Think on that. And if that makes me a single issue voter, then so be it.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Wednesday, November 22, AD 2017 6:38pm

Here is an article that really gives a good explanation of this sickening culture of feminism and male sex abuse of women:

https://spectator.org/the-rise-of-the-beta-male-sexual-harasser/

One quote right at the end says it all:

“From the sordid bed of the sexual revolution and crass feminism has come a new creature — the male feminist pig.”

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