Hitchens: Why Is the White House Siding With the Vatican?
Faced with a number of court cases in the United States that have named the pope himself as a defendant in the enabling and covering up of many rapes, the Vatican has evolved the strategy of claiming that the Holy See is in effect a sovereign state and thus possessed of immunity from prosecution. It has now been announced that the Obama administration will be advising the Supreme Court to adopt this view of the matter.
…It will be a disgrace if the Supreme Court overrules the sane and legal finding of the 9th Circuit.
It is already a disgrace that so many innocent victims and their families have had to seek redress on their own and fight for decades against a ruthless and cynical clerical hierarchy that on its own admission was more concerned to protect the predators than to do justice.
Where were the nation’s law officers and policemen while all this was going on? Did they not feel it their bounden duty to represent the interests of the most vulnerable? Now at last the majesty of American law is being deployed in this matter—but on the side of an institution that has irreparably stained itself with crime. Kagan and her colleagues should be made to feel the shame of this, as should the president, who talks so glibly about human rights and equality before the law.