UNITED STATES
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Senator Rick Santorum has been in the news recently, touting his faith-based views on public policy. (Santorum's faith is Roman Catholicism).
In my recent book, God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law, I document the harm that comes from elected representatives acting according to the dictate of religious lobbyists, without consideration of the larger public good. This is a severe defect in our representative government -- and Santorum is the best modern example. ...
There was an abiding belief, at the Convention and among the Framers, that representatives should be "filters" of factions -- including religious factions, of which there was quite a variety at the time of the framing -- within the society, not simply stand-ins for such interests. The Framers' view was that only if factions, including religious factions, were filtered -- refocusing all requests to encompass serious inquiry into the public good -- could the system produce good laws and good government.
Rick Santorum is no filter, as the following concrete examples will illustrate.
The Roman Catholic Clergy Abuse Crisis in Boston
Across the country, the Roman Catholic Church has been under fire from prosecutors, litigators, and childhood sexual abuse victims for its "handling" of its pedophile clergy. It is now well-documented that bishops, archbishops, and cardinals did not report known pedophiles to police. Instead, they moved pedophiles between parishes within their dioceses, or traded these men between dioceses - not only allowing the abuse to continue, but ensuring that pedophiles could start afresh with new trusting parents, and new potential child victims.
An uncontroverted fact is that the failure to report the abuse meant that the vast majority - 98% of the predators - avoided conviction due to the short statutes of limitations. In most cases, by the time the victims were ready to come forward, in adulthood, the limitations periods, set by the various state statutes of limitations, had long passed. Imagine how different the world would have been, had the Church timely reported these terrible crimes to the police, as soon as it learned of them.