The Words of the Durst Family
|
|
The Words of the Durst Family |
Father
and Mother, setting out for the court, leave
behind Yeon Jin Nim,
who longs to accompany them
On May 26, 1982, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon was ordered into a United States District Court by Judge Richard Owen and ridiculed in front of the entire world by a hostile interrogation of his religious beliefs -- in utter violation of his United States Constitutional and human rights. Two days later, the U.S. Court of Appeals ordered the judge to end the trial and to strike all of Rev. Moon's testimony from the record.
Dr. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and one of the world's leading authorities on constitutional law, successfully argued the case before the appellate court, calling Judge Owen's action "a gross abuse of power" by a judge.
Tribe said the higher court had accepted his argument that "in a truly literal sense this trial had become a religious inquisition."
He also said the court "took a rather extraordinary step and issued a very rare order called a 'writ of prohibition' commanding Judge Owen to halt the religious deprogramming trial."
It is incredible and alarming that in the United States a religious leader would be ordered to appear in a court of law and, under threat of fine or jail, be forced to answer hostile and mocking questions about his religious beliefs, his spiritual experiences and his personal life.
That is a situation we might expect to find in the Soviet Union where the government considers any religion -- other than the official atheist doctrine -- a form of insanity. It is something we may read about in the darker chapters of human history, say, in the Salem witch trials of 1692 or the medieval Inquisition that tried and tortured "heretics." But in the United States of America, freedom of religion is guaranteed by the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land and where a system of courts exists to uphold and defend that law for all.
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, was subpoenaed by lawyers for religious kidnapper Galen Kelly, whose business is to kidnap adults from religions of which their relatives disapprove and subject them to round-the-clock psychological torture until that person's faith is broken or until he escapes.
From that point on, the trial against the kidnappers ceased to be an exercise of justice and became literally a religious inquisition reminiscent of the heresy trials and witch hunts of old.
Judge Owen said that Rev. Moon's testimony was crucial to the trial because it related to whether the Unification Church is a bona fide religious organization. This was an absurd statement because the New York Court of Appeals had ruled earlier (May 6, 1982) that the Unification Church is indeed a bona fide religion with religious teaching as its "primary purpose" and that its religious claims are made "in good faith" and that Rev. Moon is a legitimate religious leader.
Rev. Moon was ordered into court to testify about his beliefs and justify the existence of what was already recognized as a matter of law to be a true and legitimate religion. This was a clear and dangerous violation of the U.S. Constitution's protection of religious liberty.
What is at stake here is not merely the fate of a few "Moonies" and their controversial leader. "Deprogrammers" have also applied their faith-breaking techniques against members of Catholic monastic orders and fundamentalist Christians, even Episcopalians, whose families disapproved of the person's beliefs. In one case, a 35-year-old former schoolteacher from San Francisco was kidnapped from her home last year at her mother's request and held for 31 days in an effort to make her recant liberal political views.
Judge Owen, displaying obvious disapproval of the Unification Church and sympathy for the "deprogrammer's" view, again and again gave credit to the kidnappers' beliefs in brainwashing -- a concept which in itself is without factual basis and totally self-serving.
If anyone deserves to be scrutinized as dangerous fanatics who are a threat to freedom of thought, it is these self-styled thought police who systematically violate the rights of religious believers by subjecting them to "deprogramming." Instead, with the blessing of a District Court judge, the kidnapper who was on trial was coddled, and the spiritual leader of the plaintiff was put on trial. It was a mockery of everything that our justice system stands for.
The Appeals Court action halted the unconstitutional inquisition of Rev. Moon and rebuked Owen's abuse of judicial privilege. It sets a precedent for future religious kidnapping cases -- neither Rev. Moon nor any religious leader can be put on trial simply to put their religious beliefs to the test and hold them up to ridicule.
However, as far as the overall issue of religious freedom is concerned, it was little more than a holding action. Galen Kelly is still free to hire himself out to parents who want to "deprogram" their offspring. The practice of kidnapping people to coerce them into giving up beliefs or lifestyles their relatives disapprove of is still allowed in this land where freedom of thought is supposedly the highest freedom.
"Deprogrammers" say they are trying to protect young people from the "mind control" of the so-called "cults." In actual fact, as the recent case so clearly demonstrates, what they are doing is opening the door to mind control by the state.
When an arm of the government -- in this case a federal court -- is allowed to sit in judgment over which ideas are to be believed and which are not, we have opened the door to totalitarianism. Fortunately, the door has been slammed shut in this instance, but it will require continuing vigilance to make sure it is not opened again.
From an advertisement in the News World, May 29, 1982