“I Wish I Could Just Blame the Democrats”–Child Abuse, Institutions of Trust, and Public Policy.

Kelly Clark, Esq.
O’Donnell and Clark Annual Firm Dinner
September 19, 2007,
Monarch Hotel
Clackamas, Oregon.

A Defense of Our Work.

Mark asked me to speak to you tonight about the work on the child abuse cases that I and the litigation team at O and C have done for the last several years. Many of you know something about these cases, some of you probably know very little. Anyway, I told MOD I was happy to do it, but that it didn’t seem to me to fit the general context of our dinners– which have always been concerned with some aspect of public policy. “Well,” he said, “you blame everything else on the Democrats; I’m sure you can find some way to blame them for child abuse.” Hmmm… tempting.

As I thought about it, however, it did occur to me that, while these cases against churches, schools, youth groups and such do not lend themselves directly to a political discussion, yet there are aspects of this work that, I have come to believe, do raise interesting questions of public consequence. It will be my goal tonight to explain what is at stake in these cases, why it is important to bring them– first of course for the survivors, for whom it is all about justice and healing. But also, more to the context of our dinner, why it is important for society that the institutions of trust in which these cases usually happen regain and retain our trust. For I will argue that these institutions of trust– elsewhere called Mediating Structures, elsewhere called 1000 Points of Light– are a critical component of any free society, an important guardian of liberty. And I will also argue that the litigation we bring against them is necessary, a radical surgery, but one unavoidable if the infection of child abuse is to be healed and these entities cleansed.

Now if it sounds like this thesis is a bit defensive, I confess defensiveness. So often I am confronted by those who, of course do not condone child abuse, still seem confused or even angry that we would regularly sue such rightly revered institutions as the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, the Mormon Church, schools, athletic leagues, youth organizations and others. I know very few people who are not loyal to one or more of these groups, and I often sense they are troubled in some way that they seem not to be able fully to articulate. Well, I will try tonight to articulate what it is that troubles them, and you, about these cases, and at the same time to offer a defense of our work– an apologia pro labore sua, to borrow a phrase from John Henry Newman.

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