These laws [criminalizing adult consensual prostitution] may be sins, but there are no real victims, except for family members.
~ Alan Dershowitz
I first met Alan Dershowitz 20 years ago while a graduate student at Harvard. Then, I was thinking about suspending my graduate studies in music history and go to law school; therefore, I took a couple of law courses to see if it would be a good fit for me.
This was also during the ascendancy of the Rev. Al Sharpton and the case of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old black girl from New York who received national attention when she claimed that some white men kidnapped her, sexually assaulted and abused her by chopping off her hair, wrote “NIGGER” and “KKK” on her body and smeared her with feces. Although later it was conclusively proven to be a tragic fraud, it launched the political career of that false prophet, “the Rev.” Al Sharpton.
In late 1988 or early 1989, one of Brawley’s attorneys, C. Vernon Mason, was invited to Harvard Law School to discuss the Brawley case at a faculty/student assembly. About a third of the way through his speech Dershowitz strolls in with about three or four students in tow covered in winter attire. He walks right up to the front of the hall and sits down off to the right. I didn’t think much of his appearance and was kind of perturbed that he so rudely interrupted the speaker, but I later understood this swagger as being vintage Der-SHOW-itz.
After Mason finished speaking, he took questions. Dershowitz then launched into his obviously pre-planned diatribe against Brawley’s attorney, basically characterizing him and his case as a complete fraud. Although history has proven Dershowitz right on this count, decorum suggests he could have been a little more discrete with an invited guest to the law school.
This was my first encounter with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.
As you can see, Dershowitz has a flare for the dramatic. He displayed that skill again Monday on all the major TV shows and later in articles in the Jewish magazine Forward and the Wall Street Journal, where he further explained his controversial opinion about Spitzer’s 10-year affair with prostitutes that recently caused him to resign in disgrace as governor of New York. It was once again vintage Dershowitz, insisting that people need to:
[T]ake a collective deep breath and try to regain a sense of proportion about the essentially private actions of this public man.
We are a nation of hypocrites who publicly proclaim against acts that so many of the proclaimers perform in private.
Yes, Eliot Spitzer can be charged with hypocrisy for prosecuting prostitution rings while patronizing prostitutes himself. … But … forcing him to resign or using vague criminal statutes to prosecute him for federal crimes for which no one is prosecuted would constitute an abuse of the political and criminal processes.
Oh, that Dershowitz would have exercised such magnanimity for Clarence Thomas in 1991 during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, or for any Republican president going back to Nixon! – but all we heard from the good professor was intellectual partisanship, vitriol and demagoguery.
You must understand, dear reader, that Dershowitz is an unabashed liberal academic and has no use for conservatives, Republicans or what he and many of his Ivy League colleagues consider biased, ignorant and irrelevant ideas.
At this point, Dershowitz takes his exalted position as a law professor at Harvard and descends into the purgatory of liberal hypocrisy. It’s not enough for Dershowitz to exonerate Spitzer – a notoriously vindictive, ambitious, arrogant, narcissistic and evil man – for the delicious paradox of being hoisted upon his own petard that he himself built for others to hang upon. But to add insult to injury, Dershowitz arrogantly lectures America, calling us “a nation of hypocrites” because we dare to “publicly proclaim against acts that so many of the proclaimers perform in private.” This is beyond the pale.
Dershowitz, a Jew, and like me, a strong advocate of the nation of Israel, should know better than most from his own people’s storied history, which is indelibly chronicled in the Torah, that a nation that forsakes “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” for the expediency of political power, position, privilege, riches or lust will soon fall into the abyss of infamy.
The prophet Hosea warned Old Testament Israel: “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
Dershowitz continues his apology (argument) for Spitzer:
There is another issue that is potentially quite troubling in this case. The story about how Spitzer’s alleged crimes were discovered does not ring true. … I strongly suspect that we will learn more about how the feds came to focus on Spitzer’s financial transactions. The money laundering statute is so vague and open-ended that it can be used selectively to target political and economic opponents. On this issue, stay tuned. We have not heard the last of it.
As a nation we must learn how to distinguish between sin and crime, between activities that endanger the public and those that harm only the actor and his family. The criminal law should be reserved for serious predatory misconduct.
There is an old expression: “When you don’t have the law on your side, argue the facts. When you have neither the law nor the facts or your side, just argue.” After attacking America for being religious prudes, Dershowitz now impugnes the motives and tactics of the feds, claiming they have a personal vendetta or a political ax to grind. I believe that neither are true in that Spitzer was hated (and feared) by politicians on both sides of the aisle.
Dershowitz continues his apology (argument) on behalf of a champion of liberalism, Gov. Eliot Spitzer:
The laws criminalizing adult consensual prostitution – especially with $5,000-an-hour call girls – are as anachronistic as the old laws that used to criminalize adultery, fornication, homosexuality and even masturbation. These may be sins, but there are no real victims, except for family members.
Here, Dershowitz attacks the very foundation of the Ten Commandments by Moses from where the moral-based laws in America’s legal system originated as being outdated and irrelevant. In an earlier piece on Dershowitz’s Harvard law school colleague, Laurence Tribe, I also strongly criticized Tribe for brazenly perverting the rule of law. Tribe not only advocates the legalization of partial-birth abortion, homosexual sodomy and same-sex marriage, but he ridicules traditional marriage today as “constitutionally suspect” and a “federal constitutional issue.”
It is the same intellectual war stategy liberal academics have waged against society since they successfully separated morality (Judeo-Christianity) from science by diefing Charles Darwin’s “theory of evolution.” For the past 150 years, Darwin’s theories have deciminated Western societies as they have infiltrated every discipline of the academy and intellectual thought – from philosophy, science, medicine, law, to economics, education, business, politics, art, culture, even the United Nations and beyond.
Dershowitz and Tribe’s view of the rule of law must not carry the day because according to Dershowitz’s apology on the Spitzer affair, “there are no real victims.” However, the real victims here will be the rule of law and the deconstruction of society if Spitzer and other powerful men can successfully escape the bar of justice simply because Dershowitz says so.
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