Gross Moral Turpitude
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| Crimes of moral turpitude
still exist in America, particularly with respect to immigration
and contract law. |
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| By
Debby Long |
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“The man who has no sense of history, is
like a man who has no ears or eyes” - Adolf Hitler
Gross Moral Turpitude sounds like an accusation Cotton Mather
would have made in Salem, Massachusetts when condemning a
12-year-old girl to the gallows for practicing witchcraft. The
proof of her crime was based upon his “spectral evidence”
(evidence based upon dreams and visions) and “oracular
observations” (divine revelation through human mediums).
Crimes of moral turpitude still exist in America, particularly
with respect to immigration and contract law. But unlike 17th
Century Massachusetts, we apply a legal code and not a
theocratic one to convict criminals, though our Supreme Court is
currently encumbered by a majority of Fundamentalist Christian
dogmatists.
Moral turpitude is described as an act that "refers generally to
conduct that shocks the public conscience as being inherently
base, vile, or depraved, contrary to the rules of morality and
the duties owed between man and man, either one's fellow man or
society in general." The person committing moral turpitude
should have had either an "evil intent" or been acting
recklessly. It includes crimes such as embezzlement, blackmail,
and extortion. If the crime is fraud, the behavior includes:
bribery, perjury and tax evasion. If the crime is insurrection
or rebellion, the behavior includes: attempted insurrection,
aiding and abetting insurrection, being an accessory, and
participating in insurrection or rebellion.
So, because our “public conscience” has continuously been
shocked for the last 4 years by the former President of the
United States, Donald Trump, it seems entirely reasonable to
consider whether he has been a Procrustean President - one who
uses an arbitrary standard to measure success, while completely
disregarding the obvious harm that results from his efforts.
Covid denialism instantly comes to mind, where Donald Trump
placed his desired poll numbers ahead of the scientifically
predicted massive death toll from Covid-19 – a plague for which
he refused to use government resources to respond. He chose
75,000,000 people casting their vote for him in 2024 – versus -
the over 600,000 human deaths that resulted from his campaign to
discredit scientific findings and the measures necessary to
contain the epidemic. Gross Moral Turpitude.
And if the crime is: embezzlement, blackmail, and extortion,
then Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky and Georgia
Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, instantly come to mind.
Let’s not fuggedaboutit.
But if the crime is attempting, aiding, and abetting an
insurrection against the United States: we can all look in the
mirror and check to see if we have eyes and ears, because we
watched the insurrection play out in real time on January 6th,
2021 - on television . We heard it in his speech before the mob
of armed and dangerous supporters that he had cultivated, and we
saw him tell that mob that he would accompany them to the
Capitol. We saw with our own eyes as his supporters threatened
the lives of government legislators and employees. We saw him do
it. His intent was unambiguous. “Stop the steal. Be there. It’ll
be wild”.
Henry Kissinger wrote of Richard Nixon in 1982:
“To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality
out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that
superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and
every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of
biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the
presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the
limits of human presumption was necessary.”
An object lesson of the limits of human presumption, indeed.
If the impeachment of Richard Nixon for his participation in the
Watergate affair was a fate of “biblical proportions”, then what
should we call the fate of Donald Trump for his crimes - the
crimes that led up to and included the Insurrection of January
6th, 2021? And what should be the fates of the Republican
legislators and the members of his administration who aided and
abetted Trump’s insurrection?
In an article written by Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker,
she quotes Carlton F. W. Larson, a scholar on treason and a law
professor at the University of California, Davis saying, “During
Trump’s Presidency, Larson told me, his colleagues teased him by
asking, “Is it treason yet?” He always said no. But the
insurrection of January 6th changed his answer at least with
regard to Trump’s followers who attacked the Capitol in an
attempt to stop Congress’s certification of the election. ‘It’s
very clear that would have been seen as ‘levying war,’ he said.”
Seditious conspiracy.
Donald Trump is not merely an extortionist, a tax cheat, or an
insurrectionist who actively attempted to reverse the results of
a presidential election in 2020 to illegally award the
presidency back to him. Donald Trump is guilty of conduct that
shocks the public conscience as being inherently base, vile, or
depraved, contrary to the rules of morality and the duties owed
between man and man, either one's fellow man or society in
general." Donald Trump should be in prison and not permitted to
lead a major political party in America. Donald Trump is a
traitor, and any American citizen who has eyes and ears knows
that his crimes are motivated by “evil intent and
“recklessness”. Over 600,000 dead and still rising, five dead in
a failed coup attempt, and never-ending lies concerning the
lethality of this plague are, indeed, crimes of biblical
proportions.
“Murder has no tongue, but miraculously it still finds a way to
speak”. – Hamlet, Shakespeare, 1601 |
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