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Dark Day for Justice
| Article
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19679 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
2,798 Words |
| Author
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Jeremiah Gutman
Jeremiah Gutman is a director of the American Civil Liberties
Union and past president of the New York Civil Liberties Union
(affiliation for identification only). He has published
several titles pertaining to civil liberties. |
INQUISITION
The Persecution and Prosecution
of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon
Carlton Sherwood
Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991
705 pp., $29.95
The publisher tells us in his preface to Carlton Sherwood's Inquisition that "[t]his is a book about religious and racial bigotry." It is, but it is also a book about perversion of justice and about that facet of the paranoid style of American politics and social attitudes that harasses, punishes, beats, imprisons, and occasionally lynches and sets fire to the homes of the strange, the new, the dissident, the different, the nonconforming.
There is a sinister, common thread linking the arsonists who burned out the family in Florida because hemophiliac youngsters had been infected with the AIDS virus with the goons who roam the streets looking for homosexuals to bash, with the thugs who patrol their neighborhoods to protect its ethnic purity, with the kidnapping deprogrammers who seize members of what they regard as "cults," with the persecutors of Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Adventists, and Witnesses, with the House Un-American Activities Committee and the McCarthy hearings, with the prosecutors of Sun Myung Moon.
I must, in fact, reveal that, in my practice as a lawyer much involved with civil liberties matters, I have represented the Unification Church and its members in various matters, including its interests during the trial of its founder, Sun Myung Moon, whose prosecution for tax evasion and the persecution of the church itself are the subject of Carlton Sherwood's book. It is, therefore, from personal and professional experience that I comment on that book.
Broader implications
Inquisition is subtitled "The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon," but the book has a broader reach. The indictment and prosecution of Reverend Moon are but one aspect of the persecution of the Unification Church and its members, commonly called "Moonies" but correctly called Unificationists or members of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.
The facts of the tax case can be simply stated. A large sum of money that the
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