**********The City of Angels is Everywhere*********

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Church Attorneys Deserve All The Disrespect They Get

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By Kay Ebeling
Some might complain about the way I portray Church Attorneys on this blog, comparing them to Alice in Wonderland characters or cartoonish buffoons, but attorneys who represent the LA archdiocese and its cohorts deserve all the disrespect we can give them. They've made a hoax out of the American justice system proving to the world that whoever has the most money in this country wins. For anyone to even try and stand up against a money hemorrhaging machine like the Roman Catholic Church is a monumental effort.

Any Catholics who complain about the $660 million LA settlement should ask the LA Archdiocese for an accounting of how much was spent on the legal fight against the plaintiffs. We know that more than 18 law firms were attached to the cases and most of what they did was object to plaintiffs' discovery requests and file motions to strike for technical reasons.

The crimes that caused the lawsuits were horrific and premeditated, in some cases almost satanic, carried out on people so vulnerable they thought they were being taught some kind of secret religious ceremony. We were children. Messing sex with our religion messed with our lives in a frightening and hard to describe way. Now here was this parade of defense attorneys using doubletalk and blatant obstruction of justice to keep the crimes secret.

Church attorneys may have found legal loopholes to get cases thrown out, but the church never had any proof or evidence to prove the crimes did not take place. Church Attorneys deserve to be portrayed in this blog and in literature of the future in ways that show them to be as reprehensible as they are.

The LA Archdiocese had no legal arguments against the plaintiffs at all, at least not displayed in any of the pretrial documents. With few exceptions if jury trials had gone forward, the crimes of the church in LA were going to be documented, proved, and testified to under oath. Interesting items of evidence would have been introduced to prove what really goes on in the rectories and dorms and camps run by Catholics for children.

However, those of us who have lived through these crimes have not been silenced. Watch for the Very Merry Unjury Trials Coming Soon on this Blog -- hopefully for a very Merry Christmas --

Kay Ebeling
Los Angeles

1 comment:

SarahTX2 said...

Your third paragraph is the most astounding and accurate short description of clergy abuse that I have ever read. Many thanks for your diligence.