No Crueler Tyrannies by Dorothy Rabinowitz
Wolfe, Alan
WITCH-HUNTS & CHILD ABUSE No Crueler Tyrannies Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times Dorothy Rabinowitz Free Press, $25,239 pp. Alan Wolfe Dorothy Rabinowitz won the 2001...
...Instead they took their fury where they could: leaving behind children and parents convinced that their children were abused...
...Somehow the child protectors never looked there, no doubt intimidated by the difficulties of extending the law into religious establishments...
...The cases were built solely on the testimony of children who were carefully led to their conclusions by interviewers who essentially coached them...
...No one knows whether Harshbarger's inflexibility caused him to lose his next election campaign-I refused to vote for him because of it-but the more important point is that his actions revealed a most unattractive side of the liberalism he professed, a liberalism that had lost all sense of proportion in order to hold fast to a predetermined sense of who is a victim and who victimizes...
...Three in particular stand in special need of censure...
...Better at description than analysis, Rabinowitz offers no explanation...
...Her persistence in writing about their cases for the Wall Street Journal is in part responsible for the fact that all of them, except Gerald Amirault, have now been released from prison...
...One feels particular pain for Gerald Amirault...
...Conservatives come across no better in the book...
...His The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith will be published by the Free Press in September...
...No prize has been more deserved...
...Others played similar roles in equivalent cases in Florida and We-natchee, Washington...
...Four-year-olds claimed to have been raped at knifepoint (or even with knives...
...But because he never committed any crimes, Amirault, a model prisoner, has made no such confession, and in return for his integrity-a virtue we ought to honor in America-he continues to sit behind bars...
...Before blaming the system, we should focus on the actions of specific individuals...
...In fact the only abuse they suffered was at the hands of their presumed protectors who made a mockery of the claim that justice will always be served...
...Ironically, of course, there were children who were being abused in the 1980s and earlier, all too often, alas, by clergy...
...Oddly, though, no evidence was ever found for the charges...
...It is not enough that his life has been destroyed...
...In the end, however, no amount of corrective action can ever remove the stains to American justice imposed by the army of the righteous united behind the conviction that children were being abused all over America...
...Yet the power of her narrative suggests one anyway...
...Perhaps the cause of the panic lay in the guilt parents may have felt at not spending sufficient time with their children...
...How did it...
...There are heroes as well as villains in Rabinowitz's book...
...The most perplexing figure in the entire episode may well be Charles Fried, a law professor at Harvard and former member of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts...
...An attorney named Robert Rosenthal appears frequently throughout No Crueler Tyrannies, undertaking appeal after appeal on behalf of the falsely accused...
...He responded to those who sought to bring justice to the falsely convicted by accusing them in turn of abandoning the children his own office had so helped to manipulate...
...Alan Wolfe is director of the Boise Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College...
...Gerald Amirault was victimized by a third individual as well, former governor Jane Swift...
...Some day, probably not until the children who were led to believe the worst have passed from the scene, the United States government may begin to make amends for the harms it imposed on innocent people like Gerald, Cheryl, and Violet Amirault, Grant Snowden, and Margaret Kelly Michaels...
...A liberal in the Massachusetts sense of the word, Harshbarger, who went on to head Common Cause after his gubernatorial defeat, has never once showed a trace of compassion for the victims of his crusade...
...His sister was also sent to jail, and his mother died shortly after her release...
...To win parole, the State of Massachusetts insists, he must repent for his crime...
...Rabinowitz has turned her articles into a book almost too painful to read...
...Yet his love of liberty never extended to Gerald Amirault, an individual who had felt the full fury of governmental zeal...
...If anyone were in doubt why Swift would have been a bad choice for governor, her cowardice provided reason enough...
...Or maybe it was caused by a growing irrationality that produced the cults and extraterrestrial sightings of the times...
...Secret rooms filled with clowns and magicians and reserved for sex crimes were said to exist...
...Throughout the 1980s, workers in day-care centers around the United States found themselves accused of sexual abuse...
...The charges were fantastic...
...Judges went along, adding their voice of disapproval for the presumed offenders...
...A young and relatively inexperienced politician, she assumed the office of governor when the incumbent, Paul Cellucci, was named ambassador to Canada by President George W. Bush...
...As second thoughts began to creep into public consciousness about the abuses of the 1980s, Harshbarger went on a rhetorical rampage, equating the Ami-raults with the serial killer John Wayne Gacy...
...Defendants had no opportunity to challenge the testimony...
...The contrast between this law-abiding man sitting in prison and the overzealous, rule-breaking, and brutally insensitive people who put him there is enough to make anyone wonder how a system designed to insure justice could have gone so haywire...
...Five members of the Supreme Judicial Court voted with him, including Margaret Marshall, the chief justice (and the wife of crusading columnist Anthony Lewis...
...In the meantime, Dorothy Rabinowitz has not forgotten them...
...Some children believed that peanut butter was spread onto their genitals and then licked off...
...The convicted were given maximum sentences...
...Their decision was so shameful that lower court judges tried their best to work around it...
...Trailing in opinion polls, Swift, when presented with a chance to approve a decision by the state's tough-minded Board of Pardons to commute Amiraulf s sentence, ducked, only to fall even further behind in the polls before exiting the race on behalf of Republican Mitt Romney...
...The first is Scott Harshbarger...
...Fried, solicitor general of the United States in the Reagan administration, is widely known as a libertarian...
...Pride of place goes to Jude Isaac Borenstein, who ordered a new trial for Violet and Cheryl Amirault that eventually led to their release from prison...
...Fried wrote a decision saying that closure in the case mattered more than any miscarriages of justice that may have taken place...
...Even more remarkable, he opined that cases like that of the Armiraults routinely came before the court, as if, Rabinowitz acidly writes, clowns who drink urine and seduce children by dressing as elephants are the usual fare of daily life...
...Prosecutors congratulated themselves, including two who aimed for higher office: Miami's Janet Reno, who became attorney general of the United States, and Massa-chusetts's Scott Harshbarger, who lost a campaign for governor...
...Alan Wolfe Dorothy Rabinowitz won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in commentary for the reporting that makes up the bulk of No Cruder Tyrannies...
Vol. 130 • May 2003 • No. 9
