New Jersey law provides legal recourse to victims nationwide

[qwazse]

49 minutes ago, Mrjeff said:

Imagine that, when I was talking to the GM he fell back on the problems with the organization.  My reply was, "Should the Catholic church be disbanded,  or perhaps every church that has had similar problems be disbanded?" He really didn't have a response and it left him speechless.  Hmmmmm..........a speechless radio guy...........you dont see that everyday...

@Mrjeff. this is what's disconcerting about this issue. With the rise of the self-righteous secular* mob: extending their logic, the institution of family should be dismantled in light of the risks it poses to the nation's youth. Going there invites apocalypse.

*No offense to my friends who host such a show (should they every discover this post), but to me Christian + talk radio is a delusion in that the talk therein is not much more elevated than what we would find in my Uncle's bar when the miners came off shift -- healthy in small doses, but hopefully everyone leaves before too much is said.

[fred8033]

On 10/8/2019 at 9:50 PM, Eagle94-A1 said:

... he wants the BSA 'Disssolved' and stated if a need to something like the BSA is indeed need, then it start from scratch ...

My interpretation ... he wants the assets sold and added to the settlement funds. 

[fred8033]

On 10/9/2019 at 8:21 AM, Jameson76 said:

Yep

I made this observation years ago, the groups that do not like the BSA will not be pleased until there is no BSA.  The organization is operating from the viewpoint that there will be compromise and we will move on with the program.  Many who advocate for "change" do not want the program to move on and continue, they want it gone.  The groups do not in fact have the same goal.

The basic concept is that an organization should never attempt to please everybody; it’s simply impossible. They should try to please your constituency, your fans, your close friends; they will win over the unbelievers.

There is overlap, but this is about money.  Deep pockets and cash.  

[fred8033]

I must admit I'm still confused.

• Paying victims from decades ago with non-profit money recently collected just doesn't make sense.
• Penalizing BSA using evidence that can be interpreted as well as a good system that was put in place decades ahead of current national standards.  
• Penalizing BSA while leaving shielding organizations that have done much worse (parents, public schools, police, etc).  I'm not blaming others.  I just believe the BSA statistics are probably no worse than other organizations.  Penalizing behavior from decades ago using today's knowledge is wrong when it was a society-wide ignorance.  

There is no "fair" in this situation.  But correcting a wrong of decades ago by creating a modern-day wrong ... is wrong.  

IMHO, if anyone should be penalized, ... and I apologize if this is cold hearted ... but where were BSA's lawyers.  BSA should have purged it's records decades ago.   Nation wide, legal departments saw the trends in the 1980s/1990s for email and record systems to be used against companies in lawsuits.  For at least the last twenty years, companies have aggressively purged email to prevent lawsuits trolling deep records.  BSA should have clearly been more aggressive purging records ... before lawsuits became a possibility.

Edited October 29, 2019 by fred8033

[RememberSchiff]

12/2/19:

Dozens of new allegations of sexual abuse against priests and scoutmasters have surfaced after New Jersey opened a two-year window granting victims a second chance to pursue court claims that had been barred by time limits.

The Boy Scouts alone were hit with more than 20 suits before courts had even opened Monday, most of them from one firm representing dozens of plaintiffs. Because the organization was based in North Brunswick, N.J., from 1954 to 1979, sex abuse claims from across the country during that period are eligible to be heard in New Jersey’s courts.

More than a dozen states have considered similar bills, spurred by the #MeToo movement and the 2018 grand jury report outlining decades of abuse and cover-ups in six of Pennsylvania’s Catholic dioceses. Efforts to pass a window law in Pennsylvania have been met with fierce opposition from Catholic leaders and the Boy Scouts, who have argued that lifting the statute of limitations would subject them to a flood of lawsuits with allegations too old to defend against.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/new-jersey-sex-abuse-lawsuits-dioceses-camden-philadelphia-mccarrick-fortney-boy-scouts-20191203.html

https://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/local/courts/2019/12/03/nj-sexual-abuse-lawsuits-boy-scouts-america-named-14-accusers/2586906001/

Edited December 3, 2019 by RememberSchiff

[T2Eagle]

There are very good reasons for Statutes of Limitations.  Some of them were previously too short regarding this issue.   It's a close call to me whether a "window" law like NJ's is a good or bad idea.  But, and I say this as a Catholic serving a Catholic unit, what's really going on here is all of us paying for the sins of the Church. 

For decades, and as near as we can tell universally throughout the Church, the leaders of the Church actively protected members of the clergy who they knew had raped and abused children.  This isn't some modern view retroactively applied to past acts.  These things were serious crimes when they happened, and people caught and convicted of them then, even 20, 30, 40 years ago, rightfully served decades in prison as punishment.  And it wasn't a matter of ignorance, unless you want to call it some kind of willful ignorance, because not everyone was protected by the Church.  The Church files that are coming to light aren't full of records of abuse by non priests.  If you were a CYO coach, or a lay teacher, or a scout leader, and you committed these acts you were tossed out, and no one stood in the way of your being turned in to the authorities.    They didn't cover it up, they didn't use the magistry of the faith to pressure victims and their parents to remain silent, and most of all they didn't transfer the perpetrators to another parish and assign them to be lay teachers, or CYO coaches, or scout leaders across town at St. Mike's instead of St. Pat's, where the parishioners didn't know and weren't told about your history.

Maybe it's a bit unfair that some people today will share in the price paid by organizations we belong to now for misdeeds committed by people who belonged to our organizations then.  But a lot of victims will have paid an even heavier price even if they are able to recover something today.  I can't find it in me to begrudge them that.  And I know for fact it was just luck and timing that I dodged that bullet back when i was a vulnerable adolescent.

BSA, and the Church, will survive this, and come out the other side, maybe a bit poorer, but hopefully the message will be clear to anyone granted the privilege of caring for children that nothing like this can be tolerated, and we all have an affirmative obligation to make sure of that.

[Eagledad]

3 minutes ago, T2Eagle said:

BSA, and the Church, will survive this, and come out the other side, maybe a bit poorer, but hopefully the message will be clear to anyone granted the privilege of caring for children that nothing like this can be tolerated, and we all have an affirmative obligation to make sure of that.

Interesting that you think the BSA will survive. I'm not so sure. They certainly don't have the resources of the church. If the BSA does survive, the program won't be recognizable as the traditional youth camping program of the past. I guess it's more a matter of what level of sacrifice is satisfactory justice. 

Barry

[elitts]

On 12/3/2019 at 11:56 AM, Eagledad said:

Interesting that you think the BSA will survive. I'm not so sure. They certainly don't have the resources of the church. If the BSA does survive, the program won't be recognizable as the traditional youth camping program of the past. I guess it's more a matter of what level of sacrifice is satisfactory justice. 

Barry

Well, I think the organization could survive if it's not somehow toppled by public perception.  The biggest issue the BSA faces right now on the perception standpoint is that the attorneys for the accusers are doing everything they can to make it appear that the BSA acted similarly to the Catholic Church in actively hiding and protecting abusers.  And unfortunately, with the advent of the #Metoo movement, BSA can barely even argue to defend itself because those arguments are immediately called "gas-lighting" or "re-writing the past" or "blaming the victim".

The public outlook on the situation is just not really rational at this point.  I mean, in most of the news articles I've seen written, you get the attorney talking about how the BSA covered up abuse, followed by a list of litigants talking about how they never filed a complaint or told anyone.  Then the lawyer reiterates that BSA "didn't do enough to protect kids".

 

 

[ParkMan]

On 12/3/2019 at 8:49 AM, T2Eagle said:

 Maybe it's a bit unfair that some people today will share in the price paid by organizations we belong to now for misdeeds committed by people who belonged to our organizations then.  But a lot of victims will have paid an even heavier price even if they are able to recover something today.  I can't find it in me to begrudge them that.  And I know for fact it was just luck and timing that I dodged that bullet back when i was a vulnerable adolescent.

BSA, and the Church, will survive this, and come out the other side, maybe a bit poorer, but hopefully the message will be clear to anyone granted the privilege of caring for children that nothing like this can be tolerated, and we all have an affirmative obligation to make sure of that.

Of course abuse is a serious crime.  It's without question that the victims paid a terrible price.  

The BSA is at its heart a member funded youth development activity.  Other than some endowments and camps, the BSA pretty much pays for its operations year to year.  I contribute today so that my kids can benefit from Scouting.  When this all came to light and the BSA had to pay, I would agree it was a tough, but important lesson for the BSA.  But, continuing to damage the organization that is chartered to bring the Scouting program to my kids and then asking current members today to pay restitution to those harmed so many year ago seems like a valid question of public policy.  Yes it makes "us" feel good that someone so horribly abused can blame a group.  But how does it help kids today that I have to write a bigger and bigger check to pay for this.  How does it help that there's a good chance the organization will go bankrupt in a year of two? How does it help that properties for kids of today and tomorrow will be unavailable?

Seems to me that we have to stop thinking of the BSA as some sort of entity.  It's much more like a service agency than it is a company.  There are no stockholders here.  We're not punishing some group who got rich because of those bad actions.  We're dismantling an agency that is chartered by the government to provide a service.  It seems to me that our country will be poorer for it too.

[TAHAWK]

Churches, schools, and other organizations are also being targeted.

[jpb6583]

A decade or less...