HRC’s Horrid Choice

December 2003

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s highest profile “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender” advocacy group, recently named Massachusetts State Senator Cheryl Jacques as its new executive director. Given Jacques dreadful record on civil liberties issues and her Anita Bryant-like political exploitation of sexual hysteria, HRC’s selection is horribly inappropriate.

Jacques began her political career as an assistant prosecutor in the Middlesex County (Massachusetts) District Attorney’s office, infamous for its headline-grabbing prosecution of sex cases. Indeed, Jacques rose to prominence for her central role in the prosecution of Ray and Shirley Souza, accused in the early 90s of raping their grandchildren.

The Souzas’ case had all the hallmarks of the hysterical 1980s day-care witch hunts: very young children who “disclosed” abuse only after repeated and leading interrogations, absurd allegations (the children “reported” being kept in cages, having their grandmother’s entire head inserted into their vaginas, and drinking magic potions), “memories” recovered only after coaching from motivated therapists, no physical evidence, and already-quarrelsome family dynamics ripe for malicious false accusations. Any rational person looking at the case would conclude that the charges were ridiculous, but Jacques plowed ahead, and Ray and Shirley Souza were convicted and sentenced to 9 to 15 years. (Happily, they won their freedom just this year after serving the minimum sentence, prosecutors too embarrassed to contest their “early” release.)

Unfortunately, the Souza travesty was not an aberration for Jacques. Since being elected a state senator, Jacques has sought to expand the scope and application of Massachusetts’s “sexually dangerous persons” law. Under legislation sponsored by Jacques, anyone caught jerking off in the woods would risk having to register as a sex offender for life and be subject to lifetime incarceration in a prison euphemistically called a “treatment center.”

Jacques has also sought to expand pornography laws, to end the statute of limitations in sex cases, and to prevent defendants in sex cases having access to potentially exculpatory evidence. Privacy rights advocates have been critical of Jacques’s support of forced DNA sampling of all convicted felons, and civil libertarians have abhorred Jacques’s trumpeting of so-called “hate crimes” laws which seek to punish speech and make some classes of people “more equal” than others before the law.

And given her record of pandering to sexual hysteria, it is not surprising that Jacques has remained silent even in the face of one of the most egregious examples of anti-gay prosecutorial misconduct– a case from her own home state. At the height of the McMartin-inspired day care panic in 1984, Bernie Baran, a 19-year-old day care worker in western Massachusetts, was arrested and charged with abusing children (female) in his care. No concrete evidence was produced at Baran’s showtrial (irredeemably flawed with coached testimony, unchallenged absurd allegations, and all the other now-familiar signs of a sexual witch hunt), but the prosecution exploited Baran’s homosexuality to win a conviction, and Baran still languishes in prison– without a peep of support from Jacques, a self-proclaimed champion of justice for gay people.

By selecting Jacques as its new leader, the HRC reveals its contempt for fundamental civil liberties. As Washington becomes ever-more infested with enemies of freedom, gay people need principled advocacy of basic constitutional rights. Unfortunately, HRC– with Jacques at the helm– seems doomed to become more of the problem and less of the solution.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=851FCDBD-C486-413E-8E9F75FA1B3D867D>