Wednesday, March 7, 2012
The Mormons and the Dead
“As for that,” said Waldershare, “sensible men are all of the same religion.”
“And pray, what is that?” inquired the prince.
“Sensible men never tell.”
— Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion
The good new is they’ve been told to stop. The bad news is that may prove to be impossible. Mitt Romney has no opinion. He’ll let the church speak for him. The issue goes back to 1995 and it was supposed to come to a halt then. The thing that was to have been stopped was posthumous baptism.
The Mormons believe that their beliefs are the only ones that guarantee their followers a decent seat in heaven. Being generous in nature, they are eager to share their good fortune with those who did not join them while on earth. To remedy the non-Mormons’ oversights, it was disclosed in 1995 that posthumous baptism had become something of a large-scale operation here on earth by Mormons eager to share their good fortune with non-Mormons. According to Mormon theology, former humans have “free agency” and the posthumous baptisms provide only an opportunity and not an obligation to join the church in the afterlife. The way it probably works is that once in heaven and baptized posthumously, the beneficiaries of the process are summoned by some divine being and told that as a result of earthly activities by Mormons, they have the opportunity to spend eternity in a different venue from that in which they were prior to the announcement. If the Mormon digs are more attractive they can accept the baptism and move in with the Mormons and, if not, stay put.
One of the things that was revealed in 1995 was that Adolph Hitler had been posthumously baptized. Mr. Hitler probably welcomed any opportunity to move from where he had thought himself destined to spend eternity and was happy to join the Mormons. (The only reason he might have hesitated was that the Mormons had posthumously baptized more than 380,000 holocaust victims, including, among others, Anne Frank, and Hitler might have had some hesitation about moving in with those who were there because of him.)
Following the 1995 disclosures the Mormons and the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors based in New York, arrived at an agreement pursuant to which the Mormons agreed to end the practice of “vicarious baptism” and to remove the names of those it had already baptized from church roles. The agreement was not honored.
On December 13, 2003, we learned that not only had Mormons continued the posthumous baptisms but had failed to unbaptize prior beneficiaries as promised. In defending the failure to unbaptize people, spokesman explained: “We never had in mind that we would on a continual basis, go in and ferret out the Jewish names. That would represent an intolerable burden.”
In 2010 there was some good news. It was announced that the Mormons had a new computer system in place that would make it hard for members to get people posthumously baptized unless they were direct ancestors of those submitting names to be baptized. The computers notwithstanding, in February 2012 it was disclosed that Anne Frank had been baptized (for the 9th time) in the Santo Domingo Dominican Republic (LDS) Temple on February 18, 2012 and Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and died in Pakistan in 2002 had been baptized in Twin Falls, Idaho, in June 2011. There is no reason to assume that there were not other, less well-known individuals, who were baptized, promises to the contrary made in 2010 notwithstanding. Now the practice will almost certainly come to an end.
On March 4, 2012 a letter signed by church president, Tomas Monson and two others in the Mormon First Presidency, was read to every Mormon congregation in the world that says posthumous baptisms of “unauthorized groups, such as celebrities and Jewish Holocaust victims” must stop. It says that names submitted for the process “should be related to the submitter.” (For some reason “should” rather than “must” is used.) Those who “embarrass the faith by submitting the names of celebrities and Holocaust victims” will “lose access to the Mormon genealogical records” and “other corrective action may also be taken.”
Asked to comment about former drug addict, Rush Limbaugh’s comments that Sandra Fluke, a woman he called a “slut” and a “prostitute”, should be required to post online sex videos if taxpayers were paying for contraception, Mr. Romney courageously said, so as not to offend Mr. Limbaugh: “Well, that isn’t language I would have used.” Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate whose father was posthumously turned into a Mormon, asked Mr. Romney to denounce posthumous baptisms, a practice in which Mr. Romney said in a 2008 interview he had not “recently” participated. His campaign referred the question to church officials. As time goes on we will learn if the Mormons in fact abandon posthumous baptism. We will also learn whether Mr. Romney encounters something that he feels REALLY strongly about.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
The Death Penalty's Effect on Decedent's Reputation
Hanging is the worst use a man can be put to.
— Sir Henry Wotton, The Disparity Between Buckingham and Essex (1651)
It is not often that one is inclined to look to other countries to see if there are procedures that could be usefully introduced into our own system of jurisprudence. Indeed, there is considerable controversy as to whether it is ever appropriate to look to the practices in other countries to see how particular laws might be applied in our own country. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia has opined on more than one occasion that what other countries do should have no bearing on how our courts rule in particular cases. In a 2005 case in which the Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for juvenile killers, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority said that “the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty. . . . .[T]he Court has referred to the laws of other countries and to international authorities as instructive for its interpretation of Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of ‘cruel and unusual punishments.’. . .[T]he United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which every country in the world has ratified save for the United States and Somalia, contains an express prohibition on capital punishment for crimes committed by juveniles under 18. . . . ” Justice Scalia objected to the majority’s invocation of foreign law in arriving at its decision saying, among other things, that “the basic premise of the Court’s argument-that American law should conform to the laws of the rest of the world-ought to be rejected out of hand.”
It is not the purpose of this column to take sides in the ongoing debate about the applicability of foreign laws to our own justice system but rather to suggest that at least one recent example of a foreign proceeding might be worth imitating in the United States. Our instructor in this procedure is Sergei L. Magnitsky and the process entitled to thoughtful consideration is found in Russia.
Mr. Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer who was arrested for allegedly having tried to expose a tax fraud perpetrated by officialdom. He said that certain interior officials had embezzled $230 million from the Russian Treasury. Arrested in 2008, he died in prison in 2009. His family said that he had not received proper medical care.
Mr. Magnitsky has now been dead for more than 2 years. In early February it was announced that the government intended to try Mr. Magnitsky for tax evasion, the offense for which he had been arrested, notwithstanding the fact that he was dead. According to reports, this would be the first posthumous prosecution ever to take place in Russia. Russian officials explained it would permit relatives and supporters to clear his name. or, alternatively, vindicate the officials who had been accused of corruption.
The government recognizes that this is a somewhat unusual procedure and sent a letter to Mr. Magnitsky’s mother offering to drop the case if relatives had no “desire to protect the honor and dignity of the deceased.” As of this time there is no word on whether she thinks the trial should proceed or whether she is content to have her son remembered as an accused man rather than a victim of a false accusation. The question readers are no doubt asking themselves is how this foreign procedure could be applied to United States proceedings. The answer is by adopting the Russian procedure in death penalty cases.
One of the arguments against the death penalty is that once it has been administered the results are final and the case is over. There is no way for someone who has been executed to clear his name. Troy Davis, formerly of Savannah, Georgia, for example, was on death row for many years. A large contingent of prominent citizens had come to his defense asserting that he was not guilty of the crime for which he was to be executed. Among his defenders were former president, Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI (who opposes the death penalty was well as contraception), former Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Norman Fletcher and other prominent citizens. Appeals exhausted, Mr. Davis was executed September 20, 2011. Here is where the Russian example could usefully be invoked.
When it is learned that an innocent person has been the beneficiary of the death penalty, adopting the Russian practice, the decedent’s family could, if there were new evidence or old evidence that the courts had refused to consider, demand a posthumous trial of the decedent in order to clear the decedent’s name. Legal purists might worry about double jeopardy in trying someone a second time for a crime for which the decedent has already been executed, but that concern falls of its own weight when one realizes that nothing bad can happen to the accused since it has already happened. But it would help to make the death penalty considerably less final since the execution would not deprive the family of the chance to clear the defendant’s name. Sadly, given Justice Scalia’s fondness for the death penalty and his dislike of foreign law, the practice is not likely to be adopted in the United States. A pity that.
Friday, February 24, 2012
E-mails and the Earth
it won’t be long now it won’t be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it won’t be long now
before man will have it used up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it.
— Donald Robert Perry Marquis, archie and mehitabel (1927)
It’s a sad time for the climate. It’s enough to make an iceberg melt. That’s because everyone is stealing e-mails from everyone else.
In 2009, just before the December Copenhagen climate-change summit was to take place, hundreds of private e-mail messages that had been stolen from a University of East Anglia computer were released by those who question global warming (climate change deniers.) In those candid e-mails many statements were made among friends and colleagues that, climate change deniers said, proved that those supporting the theory of global warming were skeptical about the results of their own research. Patrick Michaels, a climatologist climate change denier was quoted in the New York Times as saying of the purloined e-mails that that “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud.” Some of the scientists whose e-mails were released said that the e-mails did not undercut the extensive body of scientific research that demonstrated the existence of global warming. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA whose e-mails were released was said that all the releases prove is that “Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice. Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.” The 2009 release was not the end of the story.
In 2011, just before the climate talks in Durban, South Africa were to
begin, purloined e-mails from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were once again released by climate change deniers. One of those who was pleased at the release of the e-mails and what he thought they proved, was quoted in The Economist as saying: “All your favorite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of e-mails exaggerating the extent of Anthopogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as strong as they’d like it to be.” Andrew Watson, a scientist at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, said the quotes relied upon by opponents were taken out of context and showed nothing more than that scientists are “a diverse, sometimes contradictory” group with assorted motives. One of those is Peter Gleick.
Peter Gleick who co-founded and works at the Pacific Institute as a climate researcher has admitted that he lied to get some documents from the Heartland Institute, an organization described in the journal Nature as “a major force among climate skeptics.” Peter Gleick admitted in a posting on the Huffington Post that he pretended to be someone else in order to get copies of fundraising and strategy documents not intended for release to the general public. He said he decided to try to get the documents when an anonymous source sent him a document “that contained information. . . about the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy.” In an attempt to verify the validity of that document he assumed a false identity on the Internet in order to get someone at the Heartland Institute to e-mail a trove of confidential information to him. Included in the information he received was information about salaries, personnel actions, funds raised and names of donors. The material also disclosed that the Institute was working on developing a climate-skeptic science curriculum for high schools that would cast doubt on the idea that emissions have an adverse affect on the climate. This probably comes as no surprise to the cognoscenti in the arena since the Institute has an annual climate-skeptic conference that is called “Denialpalooza” by critics of the Institute.
The Institute is not only upset because of the purloined e-mails. It is upset because of the memorandum, “2012 Climate Strategy,” which prompted Dr. Gleick to assume a false identity. It says that memorandum is a forgery. The Institute says it has retained a forensic investigation firm to identify the source of the memorandum and the results of that investigation are not yet available. The Institute says independent experts have concluded the “climate strategy” memo is “almost certainly fake. ” Those at the Institute have used Dr. Gleick’s actions as proof that scientists in the global warming movement are “desperate, delusional and collapsing as global warming fails to live up to alarmist predictions.”
What Dr. Gleick did is patently unethical. He has done his colleagues and the climate no good. The Heartland Institute released a statement saying that Peter Gleick “confessed to stealing electronic documents from The Heartland Institute in an attempt to discredit and embarrass a group that disagrees with his views” and says Gleick’s crime was a serious one.” The Institute is right. The Institute could have said the same thing of the 2009 and 2011 thefts. It didn’t. There is no winner in this e-mail war. Mother earth and her inhabitants are the losers.