TrueTomHarley

Possibly the lawyers discard some because they are not convinced that they are truth.
Or (more likely) they are not convinced that they have anything to do with the Watchtower 

If you are paid, you are clergy.
If you do it for money, you are clergy.
If you are a “mercenary minister,” you are clergy.
If you do it out of love for God and neighbor, and do not collect pay, then you are not clergy and you are NOT extended the same privileges as they for the spiritual aspects of the job. 
If you can shake the congregation down for a paycheck, then you ARE extended those privileges 
Is that what you are trying to say?
 

Will this show air in Rio Linda?

Uh oh.
The Rook Factor

It is not possible to mishandle what you never attempted to handle in the first place.
The clear implication of rulings such as this is that religious organizations ought not to look into the conduct of its members, for it is only by doing so that they can step into messes like this.
“Be like the mainline churches,” the ruling says in effect. “Preach to them on Sunday and be done with it. It’s none of your business whether they apply it or not.”
However, the verse says that it is their business. “You, the one preaching, “Do not steal,” do you steal?  You, the one saying, “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery?” If you claim that your teachings improve the moral fiber, you must have mechanisms in place to ensure that that is indeed the case, especially if your view of God is that he insists on a “clean” people.
Framed that way, the ruling is a state attempt to regulate religion and could be argued on that basis.
Plus, such thinking completely ignores the far superior role of prevention of CSA, in order to zero in exclusively on meting out punishment when it occurs, as though THAT is the means for the problem to be solved. How’s that project going, anyhow? Thirty years into the all-out CSA war, is it just about snuffed out? Or is it only the tip of the iceberg that has been revealed?
I’ll take the kids you have criticized, Caleb and Sophia, any day, for teaching parents how to protect their children.
https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/children/become-jehovahs-friend/videos/protect-your-children/
 I’ll take the 2017 Regional Conventions any day, in which every Witness in the world was assembled to hear detailed scenarios in which child sexual abuse might take place, so that parents, the obvious first line of defense, can be vigilant.

@JOHN BUTLER finds it irresistible to point out how I write books, and I hate to let him down. Perhaps from this episode another chapter can be written:
“Citing a hierarchy that ‘encourages a culture of silence,’ a Quebec Superior Court judge has authorized a class-action lawsuit for current or former Jehovah’s Witnesses in Quebec who were sexually abused by other members as minors....[The plaintiff] alleges she was repeatedly sexually abused and assaulted by her brother, 13 years older, beginning when she was only 10 months old.”
Do I understand this correctly? One child abuses another within a family, and it is the fault of the congregation elders?
The Canadian judge stated that: “The organization of Jehovah's Witnesses is very hierarchical, led by men, and encourages a culture of silence.”
Take the organization out of the picture for a moment. Are we to imagine that the mom and dad of this family would have otherwise marched their kids straight down to the police station to make sure that proper punishment was meted out?
There is a part of me that thinks what really gets in sticks in the craw of this judge is that Jehovah’s Witnesses are “hierarchical,” as though any other organization is not, and that they are “led by men,” as though anything less than a free-for-all ought to be taboo. Perhaps she even implies that men are inherently evil, so that the greatest travesty of all is to be led by them.
However, says my nemesis: “My guess is that it's not what happened within the family. It was the coverup within the Congregation.”
Well—it is not possible to mishandle what you never attempted to handle in the first place.
The clear implication of rulings such as this is that religious organizations ought not to look into the conduct of its members, for it is only by doing so that they can find themselves in such a spot as this. “Be like the mainline churches,” the ruling says in effect. “Preach to them on Sunday and be done with it. It’s none of your business whether they apply it or not.”
However, the verse Christians feel obligated to follow says that it is their business. “You, the one preaching, “Do not steal,” do you steal?  You, the one saying, “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery?” (Romans 2:21) If you claim that your teachings improve the overall moral fiber, you must have mechanisms in place to ensure that that is in fact the case, especially if your view of God is that he insists on a “clean” people, as free of misconduct as possible.
Framed in this way, the ruling is a state attempt to regulate religion, and could be argued on that basis.
Plus, such thinking completely ignores the far superior role of prevention of child sexual abuse, in order to zero in exclusively on meting out punishment when it occurs, as though that is the means by which the problem will be solved. How’s that project going, anyhow? Thirty years into the all-out war against child sexual abuse, is it just about snuffed out? Or is it only the tip of the iceberg that has been revealed?
I’ll take the kids, Caleb and Sophia, video any day, for teaching parents how to protect their children. I’ll take the 2017 Regional Conventions any day, in which every Witness in the world was assembled to hear detailed scenarios in which child sexual abuse might take place, so that parents, the obvious first line of defense, can be vigilant. Who else assembles all its members and then trains them so?
***~~~***
 
“Jehovah’s Witnesses have a serious problem of child sexual abuse in their midst?”
 There are two ways of looking at this.
1.) They do not.
2.) They do, but the situation is far worse everywhere else.
One must look no farther than who is being outed as perpetrators. If you want to find deviants in most places, you look no further than the leaders. If you want the same ‘catch’ among Jehovah’s Witnesses, you must broaden your search to include, not just leaders, but everyone. A Jehovah’s Witness leader committing child sexual abuse is rare. Not unheard of, but rare. Elsewhere, it is the pattern.
Okay, if the leaders are not committing the child sexual abuse, are they nonetheless "hiding it?" How do they compare with other groups? It is a little hard to say. Nobody else has ever found it. They looked the other way, taking no interest in looking at wrongdoing within their midst. Thus, when child sexual abuse was found, it was a.) found entirely independent of religious affiliation, and b.) it was found that the leaders themselves were the abusers. How would members fare in comparison? There is no data. Nobody ever bothered to look.
Courts will go where courts will go. Will they take the above into account? Time will tell. There are few organizations with pockets--it doesn’t matter if they are religious or not--that are not being flooded with lawsuits today. In New York State, my own state, the governor has just signed into law a bill greatly lengthening the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse. Out of nowhere has appeared a major sponsor of programming I watch--a legal firm seeking to sign up clients. The ads briefly eclipsed other legal firms of accident litigation running non-stop ads of how “[So and So law firm] got me $3 million dollars, 15 times what the insurance company offered!” Put together, lawyers have become by far the premier sponsors of television. Can a society really endure that way?
Make no mistake. No one is saying that it is wrong to sue for grievances. But one must sometimes ask whether there will be any organized group on earth left standing when the suing is done. Of course, there will be some. Governments can just raise taxes to recoup legal payouts. Businesses can raise prices. But groups like the Boy Scouts, investigating bankruptcy at last report, are out of luck. One wonders how other voluntary organizations will fare.
The typical person congratulates the client who has come into an extraordinary bonanza via lawsuit. Then he opens his insurance premium bill. It calls to mind, as a rough parallel, the statement of Alexander Fraser that democracy can only endure until “the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.” The world has become a lawyers’ playground, with massive transfers of money flowing in all directions--the barristers netting a third, they being the only consistent beneficiaries.
When the rules of the game change, you can hardly blame the small players for adjusting to accommodate them. There was a time, those my age will remember, when nothing was so crass as for lawyers to advertise. It was against their universal code of conduct, possibly even against the law. It explains the phrase “ambulance chaser”—you actually had to chase an ambulance to sign up a client before another lawyer could. You couldn’t just broadcast to the whole wide world that you were scouring the earth for clients.
Someone dear to me was sued several times with regard to property, in another matter that had a very long statute of limitations. When what proved to be the final lawsuit came in, the person sought to make defense through his insurance lawyer, but that one attempted contact several times and could not get a response from the firm bringing suit. Finally, that firm admitted that they were having a hard time locating their client. Seemingly, they had left no stone unturned in seeking business and had finally found “aggrieved” ones who’s cases were so tenuous that they couldn’t even be bothered to show up and make them.
I wonder, too, whether the popular demand for public apologies isn’t largely just a PR event, or even worse, an encouraged legal strategy to secure a clear admission of guilt, thereafter better enabling future lawsuits. Few things are done for the noble ‘window-dressing’ reasons that are given. At any rate, it is worth noting that when the government of Australia apologized for decades of child sexual abuse, and opposers praised that apology to the heavens because they thought they could thereby embarrass Jehovah’s Witnesses, the victims nonetheless rejected it as ‘too little, too late.’ Better than any apology is prevention. Of course, it is good to call in the grief counselors in the aftermath of a school shooting. But it is far better not to need them in the first place.
The situation is a far cry from the Quebec of 70 years ago, during which 400 Jehovah's Witnesses generated 1600 arrests, on charges as minor as peddling without a license but as major as sedition. A key case involving sedition was lost before the Supreme Court of Canada, but was overturned on a rarely-used provision of "rehearing," at which the Court acknowledged that Witness literature and ministry included nothing that incited to violence--a necessary ingredient of sedition--but only contained that which made a powerful faction squirm. The situation is much different today, with altogether different charges, and the game is barely recognizable. But deep within, is the underlying intent not nonetheless the same, cloaked behind a veneer of righteous indignation?

 

Please go to court hearings and see how many times an elder is the perpetrator. Then go to those of other groups, where you will find that it is nobody but their leaders coming under legal fire.
It is the court hearings where one must look. For lawyers will take the cases that seem easiest to win over those where allegations are more tenuous. For all I know, you wrote many of the stories at lambs. But it is the ones that lawyers adopt because they seem provable that count.
And very few are  elders as perpetrators.

It is not possible to mishandle what you never attempted to handle in the first place.
The clear implication of rulings such as this is that religious organizations ought not to look into the conduct of its members, for it is only by doing so that they can step into messes like this.
“Be like the mainline churches,” the ruling says in effect. “Preach to them on Sunday and be done with it. It’s none of your business whether they apply it or not.”
However, the verse says that it is their business. “You, the one preaching, “Do not steal,” do you steal?  You, the one saying, “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery?” If you claim that your teachings improve the moral fiber, you must have mechanisms in place to ensure that that is indeed the case, especially if your view of God is that he insists on a “clean” people.
Framed that way, the ruling is a state attempt to regulate religion and could be argued on that basis.
Plus, such thinking completely ignores the far superior role of prevention of CSA, in order to zero in exclusively on meting out punishment when it occurs, as though THAT is the means for the problem to be solved. How’s that project going, anyhow? Thirty years into the all-out CSA war, is it just about snuffed out? Or is it only the tip of the iceberg that has been revealed?
I’ll take the kids you have criticized, Caleb and Sophia, any day, for teaching parents how to protect their children.
https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/children/become-jehovahs-friend/videos/protect-your-children/
 I’ll take the 2017 Regional Conventions any day, in which every Witness in the world was assembled to hear detailed scenarios in which child sexual abuse might take place, so that parents, the obvious first line of defense, can be vigilant.

Let me get this straight. One child abuses another within a family, and it is the fault of the congregation elders?
Is it alleged that:
Take them out of the picture for a moment. Are we to imagine that the mom and dad of this family would have otherwise marched their kids straight down to the police station to make sure justice was done? 
There is a part of me that thinks what really gets in sticks in the craw of this judge is that Jehovah’s Witnesses are “hierarchical”, whatever that is supposed to mean, and that they are “led by men,” as though anything less than a free-for-all is evil.
Perhaps it is even implied that men are inherently evil, so that the greatest travesty of all is to be led by them.
 

If I come across someone in the ministry, church person or not, who does some kind of good works - say, running a soup kitchen, I do nothing but say good things about it. It is undeniably a good work, and we are not doing it.
I don’t say anything about painting the Titanic. I don’t say anything about Jesus instructing his disciples to put first the kingdom proclaiming work. I’ll get to those things, but only later. It is a matter of prioritizing and of building connections with the one I am speaking with.
Would he advise helping people, @Srecko Sostar? The side he has chosen doesn’t even know how to do it. In the US, there are two political parties. Both say they want to help people. Neither says that they want to hurt them. Yet they incessantly squabble and between them nothing gets done. 
Google the one about the Red Cross raising half a billion dollars in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake and then squandering almost all of it:
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes
How is that world he has chosen doing in its goal to fight injustice and suffering? Does he almost have it snuffed out?
Jehovah’s Witnesses direct their blows where they will do the most good - publicizing what is the permanent solution. He shouldn’t go patronizing them as though he’s found a better way. If anthing, his is the course that comes up short. Our people are not so naive as to think that human rulership will remedy suffering and injustice. If anything, it is the cause of it.
Paul says it. You do good towards all & especially those related to you in the faith.

I happen to know that every single person in the township where you live is a child abuser.
But it is kept hidden, kept quiet, kept secret.
Sheesh.

Well...probably...who isn’t? What! Are you going to tell me that you are as concerned about MY suffering as you would be that of a family member?
And just because I acknowledge you will be MOST concerned with the suffering of family, that does not mean that you are UNCONCERNED with the suffering of everyone else. Why would you try to spin it that way with Jehovah’s Witnesses?
 It is no more than Galatians 6:10
“Really, then, as long as we have time favorable for it, let us work what is good toward all, but especially toward those related to [us] in the faith.”
What’s wrong with that?

I didn’t overreact even a little bit. The person making accusations always pleads for more “balance” when his accusations are rejected.
There is nothing wrong with writing Russia with regard to the primary cause and not writing Russia with regard to every other cause.
 

There are two ways of looking at this.
1.) It has not been.
2.) it has been, but it is far worse everywhere else.
One must look no farther than who is being outed as perpetrators. If you want to find deviants in most places, you look no further than the leaders. If you want the same ‘catch’ among Jehovah’s Witnesses, you must broaden your search to include, not just leaders, but everyone. 
An JW leader committing CSA is rare. Not unheard of, but rare. Elsewhere it is the pattern.

Sigh...how can people be so ridiculous? NOBODY floods the field with letters for every cause under the sun. EVERYONE does it for the cause they hold most dear.

This Winnie the Pooh business is not playing well in China:

I opened a service meeting part once with that experience of a hostile householder telling our brother to talk to his dog if he wanted to speak with anybody. Whereupon the brother knelt and did just that, after which he straightened up and told the householder:  “You’re dog wants a double-sub.”
Young Stevie, who nobody thought was paying the slightest bit attention, seemingly asleep, said to his parents: “What’s Brother Harley talking about? Dogs can’t talk!”

Still, I’ll put off the verse for as long as I can.
”they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, while they were in need, in tribulation, mistreated;  and the world was not worthy of them. They wandered about in deserts and mountains and caves and dens of the earth.”

I wrote about this video:
At a supposedly confidential 2017 meeting of elders, leaked for Internet perusal by a self-styled freedom fighter—a meeting dealing with the ramifications of child sexual abuse litigation, a Witness representative stated: “Well, we know that the scene of this world is changing, and we know Satan’s coming after us, and he’s going to go for us legally. We can see by the way things are shaping up.” It is not hard to imagine what certain ones are doing with the explanation that “Satan’s coming after us.”
How could he say it? With religion in general, it is the misconduct of leaders that has come home to haunt them. With Jehovah’s Witnesses, it is misconduct of members whose cases allegedly were mishandled. God help us if the members of other faiths are put under the magnifying glass, as with Jehovah’s Witnesses. On the other side of the world, Jehovah’s Witness are banned in Russia for reasons having nothing to do with child sexual abuse—the topic was entirely absent, as government and media partnered to whip the public into a froth, hurling many virulent accusations against the faith—but never that one.
There, it is “professing the superiority of one’s religion.” There it is being Western spies disguised as a religion. There it is blood transfusions, and should a Witness refuse one and thereafter die, the death is invariably attributed to the refusal, with leaders of the faith likened to murderers. Surely, somewhere along the line it should be acknowledged that Jehovah’s Witnesses have absolutely no deaths at all attributed to illicit drug abuse, overdrinking, and tobacco use, save only for when someone is slipping into old habits. All things considered, they are, far and away, the ‘safest’ religion out there. Yet they are said to be the murderers.
Keep in mind that we are speaking of the faith whose members are universally recognized as ‘pacifist,’ who will on no account resort to violence or support war efforts. It is highly unusual for a large group of people to have absolutely no blood on their hands in this regard, but they do not. Is it so crazy for the Witness spokesman to say: “Satan is coming after us?” Given the foregoing, it would be crazy for him not to. One thing that we know about opposers: they will always overplay their hand.

And “deservings got nothing to do with it.”
KA-BLAM!!!

I believe it works that the lawyers charge a certain percentage, no less than a third. However, costs of the trial come out of the client’s share, not the lawyer.
Legal costs can be astronomical. “Expert witnesses” of various sorts do not testify for free, nor do any sort of private investigators, nor fact-finders, but often make a very lucrative living out of so testifying. 
Everyone has their hand out, and I have heard of cases (anecdotal evidence only, and unrelated to CSA) in which the client’s net share is very small indeed.

I believe it works that the lawyers charge a certain percentage, no less than a third. However, costs of the trial come out of the client’s share, not the lawyer.
Legal costs can be astronomical. “Expert witnesses” of various sorts do not testify for free, nor do any sort of private investigators, nor fact-finders, but often make a very lucrative living out of so testifying. 
Everyone has their hand out, and I have heard of cases (anecdotal evidence only, and unrelated to CSA) in which the client’s net share is very small indeed.

And “deservings got nothing to do with it.”
KA-BLAM!!!

I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t accept payout for merely being TrueTom.
When the rules of the game change, you can hardly blame the small players for adjusting to accommodate them. There was a time, I think you will remember it, too, when nothing was so crass as for lawyers to advertise. It was against their universal code of conduct, possibly even against the law. It explains the phrase “ambulance chaser” - you actually had to chase an ambulance to sign up a client before another lawyer did. You couldn’t just broadcast to the whole wide world that you were scouring the earth for clients.
Someone dear to me was sued several times with regard to rental property, in another matter that had a very long statute of limitations. When what proved to be the final lawsuit came in, the person sought to make defense through his own lawyer. That lawyer contacted several times but could not get a response from the firm bringing suit. Finally that firm admitted that they were having a hard time locating their client. In other words, they were leaving no stone unturned in desperately seeking business and had finally found “aggrieved” ones who’s cases were so tenuous that they couldn’t even be bothered to show up.
This may be your interpretation. I have seen many disfellowshipped ones go through the process and return. Nobody looks down upon them. It causes pure joy to the congregation that normal association may soon resume.
Think of it as a game, if you like, admittedly silly in some respects, but forced upon humans because they cannot read hearts. It is like a teen I knew very well who was disfellowshipped. He lived in the family home throughout. When on one super-cold morning he parked in the KH lot and strode toward the building without a coat, I broke all protocol and said “I know that there’s no contact and all, but did they even have to take your coat?”
He liked that one, and in not too long a time he was reinstated.

I don’t admire him. I use him. And I think he is okay with that.
I also have sought to understand him.
If anything, I admire you & and a few other very similar personas, for the tenacity to defend the current governing arrangement, which I also defend. But admiring or not admiring has little to do with anything. If my goal is to admire and not admire and to demonstrate my loyalty or lack thereof, then I hang out exclusively with the real flesh and blood people of my circuit, who all like me, barring perhaps a few who think me a windbag. (but how can they be faulted for that?)
He spills a lot of dirt. I would never spill the dirt that he does. And lest John B start frothing over this, it must be pointed out that everyone everywhere in every field of activity has some dirt that they could spill. It will always be a question of whether they choose to do it or not.)
But the fact is that he is not going away. So how do I come to grips with that? Should I simply repeat ‘Liar! liar!’ when the tone of his writing does not suggest lying? Notice what I said (and you quoted):
I didn’t say that his information was accurate. I said that HE deems it accurate. I didn’t say that John was right. I said that there were times when HE thought he was right.
There is much I like about JWI, but also much I don’t like. I think he is too swayed by the pretentions of journalism that the cockroaches disappear when you shine the bright light of journalism upon them. I think they just go somewhere else, leaving the illusion that something has been solved, which presently enough generally turns out to be but an illusion.
I hate to say it. I really really really really hate to say it, but I think someone I might truly like in person is @James Thomas Rook Jr.if you could only muzzle him, which seems unlikely at present. He is unpretentious, and that is a quality I am drawn to.
The Internet is not the congregation. You cannot make it behave as though it is. Brothers look like fools when they insist upon it. In a sense of strict organizational loyalty, none of us should be here, you no more (or less) than JWI. (or me)
I hope that the brothers enjoy what I write, but rarely are they my main intended audience. Nor, when I address villains, are they my intended audience. It is the unaligned & often misinformed people that I seek to address, and the relative success or futility of this will probably never be known.) To that end, I sometimes distance myself from certain loyal ones who declare their loyalty (often with heat) but otherwise bring little to the table. (and I don’t think of you as one of them- you bring plenty to the table) In real life, I would hang out with them. But the Internet is not real life.