Stanley Scism

Books and magazines have inspired ministers for centuries. Paul Hasser of Centre for Liturgy of St. Louis University, Missouri, USA, says he as a boy saw priests read Sunday sermons directly from books.

How times change! Now the Internet, also, with sermons posted online provides inspiration and sometimes temptation to copy without attributing the original author, but the ethics of the people now demand honesty in stating which thoughts are one’s own and which are not. E. Glenn Wagner (pastor of evangelical Calvary Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA) and Robert Hamm (pastor of United Church of Christ in Keene, New Hampshire, USA) both admitted plagiarizing whole sermons, and both resigned.

Now, in Poland, a priest caught plagiarizing can face stiff fines or even three years in prison, so Wieslaw Przyczyna and other editors affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church published To Plagiarize or Not to Plagiarize to show priests how to use other sermons while not quoting verbatim without crediting sources. He says, ‘You need to give a clear signal: the text is not mine.’

PROTECTING CREATIVITY v OPPORTUNITY. Thomas Jefferson, inventor and America’s first commissioner of patents, said government should protect inventions ‘worth to the public and embarrassment of an exclusive patent.’ Business method patents, such as Priceline’s for selling airline tickets by auction, were first recognized in 1998.

LIBEL and SLANDER. Is or is not a critical statement, if accurate, still libel or slander? English libel law says a plaintiff must only prove the statement defamatory; the defendant must justify it, usually as being true or fair. In America in 1733, a court case acquinted a defendant on grounds that his statement was true. British law has reached lengths such that a Ukrainian tycoon sued in London an American-owned Ukrainian paper that had only 100 British subscribers. If anyone wonders how Britain came to this pretty pass, one need only peruse the British tabloids.

FREEDOM. America emphasizes freedom as an ideal more than any other nation. ‘Liberty or death.’ ‘Live free or die.’ ‘Land of the free.’ ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty! I’m free at last.’ Woodrow Wilson and George Bush both said they had a mission to spread freedom.

Freedom House, founded in 1941 by Americans worried about fascism, now watches freedom worldwide, and points out that in America:

a. ‘the number of documents classified as secret has jumped from 8.7m in 2001 to 14.2m in 2005, a 60% increase’;

b. ‘decades-old information has been reclassified. Researchers report that it is much more difficult and time-consuming to obtain information under the Freedom of Information Act’;

c. ‘Government whistleblowers have repeatedly been punished or fired—even when they have been trying to expose threats to national security that their bosses preferred to overlook’ and sites examples of Richard Levernier, border agents and airport baggage-handlers and security people, and that the Office of Special Counsel, ‘established to enforce laws designed to protect the rights of such people, is widely regarded as “inept and even hostile to whistle-blowers”.’

d. America’s incarceration rate was 1.39/1000 people in 1980, 7.5/1000 by 2006. 5.6m Americans (1/37 of the adults) has been in jail. More prisons are built, yet prisons operate at 131% of capacity. America also bans felons, and sometimes ex-felons, from voting, such that at any time 2% of America’s adults can’t vote due to past criminal convictions.

e. And American can get crazy about this: ‘Christopher Ratte, professor of archaeology, recently tried to buy his seven-year old son a bottle of lemonade at a baseball game. He was handed a bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, an alcoholic drink, by mistake. Officials noticed the boy sipping the drink and immediately whisked him off to hospital. He was fine. But the family was condemned to legal hell: the police at first put the seven-year-old into a foster home and a judge ruled that he could go home only if his father moved out. It took several days of legal wrangling to reunite the family’ (Economist 2008 May 10, p47).