PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Delaware County Daily Times
By Christine Flowers, Delaware County Daily Times
POSTED: 12/29/13
Beware of those who want to be “on the right side of history.” Sometimes, that’s just code for “the law be damned, I’ll do whatever I, the omniscient arbiter of right and wrong, want to do.”
Kathleen Kane is one of those legal systems unto herself, looking at the Pennsylvania statutes as being optional, particularly the one that bars same-sex marriage. Bruce Haynes is another, following in the attorney general’s footsteps with his crusade to issue worthless marriage licenses to hopeful spouses. The members of Philadelphia City Council were in lockstep with them, passing gun control legislation even though they knew that the state had sole jurisdiction.
In the Haynes case, the Commonwealth Court slapped him down, telling Mr. “Right Side of History” that he better go back and take a remedial course in civics. City Council also had its comeuppance by the same appeals court. As for Queen Kathleen, the jury — or rather, the judge — is still out.
But she might take some guidance from what happened this week in the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, and realize that not every moral crusader gets away with spitting on the Constitution in the pursuit of a “noble” end.
On Thursday afternoon, the appeals court overturned the child endangerment conviction of Monsignor William Lynn, who had been convicted of the charges in what appeared to many as a fatally flawed prosecution back in 2012.
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