Finnis on The Fraud

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Dec 16, 2003

You'll need patience, close attention, and a lot of time, but it's worth the effort. Prof. John Finnis's 1994 article from Academic Questions, "Shameless Acts in Colorado" is now available online.

The essay concerns one of the most outrageous and important instances of scholarly fraud in recent memory: Prof. Martha Nussbaum's testimony about Greek homosexuality before the Colorado Supreme Court in October 1993. The almost breathtaking willingness of leftist academics to lie under oath, and the alacrity with which their fellows abetted their perjury, is still staggering ten years later.

What was at stake was the legality of an amendment to the state constitution that would deny homosexuals "protected status" allowed to other minority groups. In order to vitiate the law the scholars retained by the plaintiffs as expert witnesses abandoned any pretense of objectivity, lying -- again, under oath -- even about the nature of their own published work in the field.

The good guys lost, of course, both in Colorado and in the U.S. Supreme Court. As usual the gender-benders carried off the spoil and the rest of us had no consolation beyond the characteristically acid Scalia dissent. In a footnote, Finnis explains why they're likely to keep on winning.

Those activists who wish to use the Bill of Rights and the judicial process to overturn the historic features of American law and public policy, whether on matters of race, religion, speech, abortion, euthanasia, duelling, drug-taking, or sexual "orientation," have a systematic procedural advantage over their opponents. For, the activists lay their plans and gather their financial, legal, and scholarly resources over years. Over years they test their strategies and arguments in legal proceedings in many jurisdictions. They come into each trial with briefs, counsel, data bases, and, as it may be, expert witnesses, all cumulatively more finely honed by this gathered experience of what will fly and what will not. Typically they confront on each occasion a team of State lawyers whose experience and expertise are far removed from these issues, who come to them cold, perhaps with mixed feelings about or even private sympathy for the activists' cause, and starting their preparation of the case more or less de novo.