Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
The man who is backing Paula Jones' lawsuit against President Clinton says he is not in for the politics, but for the constitutional issue at stake. An examination of his record suggests otherwise.
Jan 13, 1998 |
The case reaches a new milestone later this week when the president is scheduled to be deposed by lawyers, a proceeding that Jones says she will attend. "This case is not about politics," Whitehead told Salon. "It is about the guiding philosophy in the United States that all people are equal before the law."
Framing the case this way has special appeal for Whitehead, who named his Virginia institute after Samuel Rutherford, a 17th century Scottish minister and rector at St. Andrews University. In 1661, the English Parliament accused Rutherford of high treason for suggesting that the rule of law bears on the conduct of every man, including the monarch, thereby challenging the prevailing Divine Right of Kings doctrine. The elderly Rutherford already lay on his deathbed when the summons arrived to appear before his accusers. "I have got a summons already before a superior judge and judiciary, and ere your day arrive, I will be where few kings and great folks come," he is said to have taunted Parliament.
Critics charge that such high-minded constitutionalism is merely a front. They say Whitehead is running a legal defense fund for anti-gay activists, Christian fundamentalists who want to erase the separation between church and state and neo-Nazis running for public office. Clinton's attorney, Robert Bennett, calls the Rutherford Institute "an extremist organization (that is) trying to humiliate the president."
Bennett has subpoenaed the names of the organization's donors and its files in an attempt to prove his charge. The institute filed an affidavit in federal court earlier this month calling Bennett's subpoena a "witch hunt" whose purpose was to "intimidate, injure and harass" the organization. But A. Eric Johnston, a Rutherford board member, may have inadvertently bolstered Bennett's argument when he wrote in the institute's affidavit that donations "are most often accompanied with letters which express political, social, philosophical or religious viewpoints. The contributors often are quite frank and personal in the remarks. They are not legally trained. They would not understand ... that redacted donor lists or letters have been turned over in discovery. Many of these people also fear big government so they will experience the fear of government harassment. They will only understand redaction to mean that their privacy and confidentiality has been violated ... Consequently they will stop giving to The Rutherford Institute in the future."
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