Genarlow Wilson, Ctd

A legal reader writes:

One of the e-mails you posted on the Genarlow Wilson case is misleading by saying that the prosecutor is black. While the state attorney general appealing the grant of habeas corpus relief is black, the original prosecutor was white and was hardly offering Wilson an easy way out – he would still have had to serve substantial time in prison and would still have been a registered sex offender. It was that individual’s decision to charge Genarlow with the aggravated child molestation charge and the apparently unsubstantiated rape charge.  The absolutism of his position was responsible for almost all of this tragic situation.

As for the attorney general, however, his actions are neither as despicable as you have implied nor as courageous as your commenters suggested.

He is simply doing his job, which is to defend his sole client, the State of Georgia; as long as a good faith argument can be made that the law he is charged with enforcing is constitutional, he must make that argument on behalf of his client.  Once a conviction has been implemented, an attorney general can no longer base his decision on issues of justice and fairness.

However, the comment by your correspondent that the court lacked the authority to release Wilson and that General Baker is the only person standing up for the rule of law is deeply flawed.  This was a habeas petition, and Georgia law gives the county containing the prison exclusive jurisdiction to determine habeas petitions.  Additionally, section 9-14-48 of the Georgia Code requires that habeas relief be granted "to prevent a miscarriage of justice."  Section 9-14-42 makes clear that the judge has the right to decide the case on grounds of both the Georgia Constitution and, more importantly, the US Constitution.  In this case, the judge found Wilson’s sentence to be not only a miscarriage of justice, but also "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the 8th Amendment of the US Constitition.  That conclusion, by the way, is one that is supported by a number of US Supreme Court cases, most notably Salem v. Helm (1983), which defined even a prison sentence as cruel and unusual if it was overly harsh compared to the underlying offense, the sentences imposed on other criminals in the state, and the sentences for the same act in other states.  Wilson’s sentence would seem to be excessive under each of these tests. 

Has Lieberman Lost It?

He wants to bomb Iran and sides with Gonzales against a fifth of the Republican caucus? Hard to disagree with this:

Technically speaking, Lieberman actually voted to extend debate — that is, to refuse to end it by cloture. Which is a fine way to express your opposition to spending time on more debate, don’t you think?

Still, it was a useless procedure. This isn’t a parliamentary system. The president remains such for another year and a half, and he clearly doesn’t even care any more if he is effective. Here’s Lieberman’s statement. More griping from Democrats here. Meanwhile, Michael Ledeen wants Lieberman to be secretary of state. Mona casts a skeptical look at Michael’s previous statements on an Iran invasion. The Onion asks the American people what they think.

A friend thinks all of it is simply personal. Lieberman feels betrayed by his party – and he has been. But that’s no reason to embrace Bush, is it?

Romney and Liberty

Against it, of course. Well: to be more precise, he hasn’t done the polling yet. It’s great to see more conservatives standing up for something called freedom:

"Mitt Romney’s ignorance of the Constitution’s checks and balances and protections against government abuses would have alarmed the Founding Fathers and their conservative philosophy," said Bruce Fein, one of the group’s co founders and a Reagan administration attorney, in a press release last month attacking Romney for not signing the pledge.

The American Freedom Agenda, which intends to put all candidates in both parties to the same test, is aiming to revive a strand of conservatism that they say has been drowned out since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The conservative principle of limited government, they say, means not just cutting the budget, but imposing checks and balances on those who wield power.

"Conservatives have to go back to the basics," said co founder Richard Viguerie , a veteran direct-mail strategist and author of "Conservatives Betrayed: How the Republican Party Hijacked the Conservative Cause." "We have to go back and re launch the conservative movement. And for traditional conservatives, it’s part of our nature to believe in the separation of powers."

Scripture and Homosexuality

As any reader of Virtually Normal will know, I do not doubt that the Bible condemns homosexual sexual acts. Any intellectually honest, Christian defense of gay love and relationships needs to confront that reality. We reformists are clearly confronting what we believe are the false premises and assumptions about homosexuality that we find in Scripture. In this conflict with texts, of course, we are not the first Christians to challenge the Bible, as Luke Johnson expains:

Our situation vis-à-vis the authority of Scripture is not unlike that of abolitionists in nineteenth-century America. During the 1850s, arguments raged over the morality of slave-holding, and the exegesis of Scripture played a key role in those debates. The exegetical battles were one-sided: all abolitionists could point to was Galatians 3:28 and the Letter of Philemon, while slave owners had the rest of the Old and New Testaments, which gave every indication that slaveholding was a legitimate, indeed God-ordained social arrangement, one to which neither Moses nor Jesus nor Paul raised a fundamental objection. So how is it that now, in the early twenty-first century, the authority of the scriptural texts on slavery and the arguments made on their basis appear to all of us, without exception, as completely beside the point and deeply wrong?

Luke Johnson is particularly candid about this point:

We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality-namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God’s created order.

Here’s how I put it in an interview with the Jesuit magazine, America, some fourteen years ago:

"(The Roman Catholic Church) defines Gay people by a sexual act in a way it never defines heterosexual people, and in this, the church is in weird agreement with extreme Gay activists who also want to define homosexuality in terms of its purely sexual content. Whereas being Gay is not about sex as such. Fundamentally, it’s about one’s core emotional identity. It’s about whom one loves, ultimately, and how that can make one whole as a human being … a single person’s moral equilibrium in a whole range of areas can improve with marriage … because there is a kind of stability and security and rock upon which to build one’s moral and emotional life.  To deny this to Gay people is not merely incoherent and wrong, from the Christian point of view.  It is incredibly destructive of the moral quality of their lives in general …

You can’t ask someone to suppress what makes them whole as a human being and then to lead blameless lives.  We are human beings, and we need love in our lives in order to love others, in order to be good Christians!  What the church is asking Gay people to do is not to be Holy, but actually to be warped … no wonder people’s lives, many Gay lives, are unhappy or distraught or in dysfunction, because there is no guidance at all.  Here is a population within the church, and outside the church, desperately seeking spiritual health and values, and the church refuses to come to our aid, refuses to listen to this call."