(July 27, 2015 at 1:45 pm)JesusHChrist Wrote: Maybe, like the Catholic Church, the JWs will get sued for huge dollars. I don't know if there is much blood coming from that turnip though.
There would be, if the courts didn't make decisions like this one:
Quote:Now, three years later, an appeals court has eroded her courtroom victory even further by ruling that the leadership of the Jehovah’s Witnesses had no duty to warn congregants that a confessed child molester was one of their own. As a result, judges eliminated the punitive damages in the case. Conti still stands to receive $2.8 million.
The decision by the California Court of Appeal is the latest ruling in a rash of lawsuits aimed at Jehovah’s Witnesses policies directing elders to keep child abuse secret from their congregations and secular authorities.
Conti, who is no longer a Jehovah’s Witness, had sued her abuser, her former congregation in Fremont and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York – the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ parent corporation – in 2011. She claimed that Watchtower policies allowed a Witness named Jonathan Kendrick to molest her repeatedly when she was 9 and 10 years old.
The JW membership won't know about these cases unless they stumble upon them in the press, and they're likely to accept whatever explanation is given for what is happening. They are taught to trust the leadership explicitly and to assume that any other source of information is tainted by the devil. Conti is correct in her claim that Watchtower policy protects abusers; until recently they applied the "two witnesses" rule to child molestation, so that even having multiple accusers would not be sufficient to take action against a person. And their strict insistence on keeping things 'in house' so as to 'not stain the name of Jehovah' meant that their version of taking action might not include contacting the authorities.
Basically, their approach was to make sure they were protected legally and then leave the rest of it in god's hands. In effect leaving children at the mercy of their abusers.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
