When you think of the Due Process Clause of the Constitution, which says that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law,” what rights do you imagine this language protecting? Perhaps the right not to be imprisoned by the government without a fair trial, or the right to be free of unjustified police confiscations of your belongings. According to a 4-3 Louisiana Supreme Court majority in Bienvenu v. Diocese of Lafayette, though, a due process right you may have failed to consider is the right of priests and their enablers not to be held accountable by victims of their sexual abuse.
Over the course of years in the 1970s, several boys between the ages of eight and fourteen in St. Martinville, Louisiana, were repeatedly sexually assaulted by their parish priest, suffering serious physical and emotional trauma. Like most child sexual abuse survivors, they did not disclose the abuse until they were in their fifties and sixties. Recognizing the developmental and emotional difficulties preventing survivors from disclosing childhood abuse, in 2021, the Louisiana legislature unanimously passed the Louisiana Child Victims Act, which provided a three-year “look-back window” allowing survivors to file lawsuits that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations. The law, versions of which have been passed in about half of states, finally allowed the St. Martinville survivors to sue the church and diocese that harbored their abuser.
Enter the Louisiana Supreme Court. In an opinion written by Justice James Genovese and published on March 22, the court found an absolute property right in the institutions’ right not to be sued. The Louisiana Child Victims Act, wrote Genovese, “cannot be retroactively applied to revive plaintiffs’ prescribed causes of action,” since that would “divest defendants of their vested right to plead prescription”—to defend themselves by asserting that the statute of limitations had run. The decision essentially strikes down the look-back window, leaving survivors once again powerless to hold their abusers accountable. It is a harrowing example of the legal system’s ability to obscure the nature of disputes and turn survivors’ real-life trauma into euphemistic abstractions, while at the same time protecting powerful institutions in the name of otherwise ephemeral property rights.
(If they’re thinking of replacing lexicographers, who know the meaning of words, with LLMs, that don’t know the meaning of anything, then double-fuck!)
We’ll just have lots of Newspeak. Double-fuck good!
Can’t post to “Today’s non-US mass shooting (or attacks with other means than firearms)” so posting here.
26 barges break loose and float down Ohio River, causing damage and prompting bridge closures in Pittsburgh, officials say
The Bridgepocalypse begins
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/16/us/ohio-uber-driver-murder-charge/index.html
It’s not clear from the story, but it seems this may be a case of scammers targeting an elderly person, and that person getting confused and scared when it came to the final stage of the scam, which if necessary may involve sending an Uber to the target’s home to pick up cash or to take the target to the bank to withdraw money.
I wrote about scammers sending Ubers to victims’ homes back in 2022:
Well, this is interesting…
The Alabama prison system is a hellscape. The alleged involvement of the generally respected university adds to the horror.
That’s why I always type gibberish into all my replies and posts. Game on, AI. 
Collision narrowly avoided at Reagan National Airport after two jets were cleared onto the same runway
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/us/washington-ronald-reagan-airport-plane-crash/index.html
The due process provision is one of several outlined in the U.S. Department of Education’s final version of regulations governing how K-12 schools, colleges and universities respond to complaints of sexual harassment and violence under Title IX. The regulations, a draft version of which the Biden administration proposed in June 2022, are scheduled to go into effect Aug. 1.
Friday’s release did not include provisions regarding the eligibility of transgender athletes, which had been included in an earlier Department of Education proposal. Officials separated that issue from the broader Title IX rules, and those regulations are not expected until after November’s presidential election.
Gotta protect rapists rights.
Fuck those “transgenders” though 
the guy who self immolated outside Trump’s courtroom expressed a lot of normal conspiracy stuff: predictive programming, the secret masters of the world hide sinister plots in plain site using TV and music
he is also obsessed with scams, and not irrationally so
he considers cryptocurrency as a global ponzi scheme by the elite to destroy civilization. my guess is he lost money in a big way. he is correct that a number of major industrial leaders- Musk and Thiel- are advocates of massive crypto cons, ponzi schemes
where he errs is in tying this to, well, just about every other ill in society, and nonsense like that the band Devo is a secret message from the rulers of the world about Devolution.
The core of his obsession though is in a very real problem: this country is run by scammers
I think it is inevitable that if you create a society where the most reliable way to succeed is to create ponzi schemes and other cons to rob your fellow citizen, some of the victims will lose their minds at the injustice of it all
Source:
Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) @IwriteOK Twitter
Relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, but anyway…
