Indiana Gazette from Indiana, Pennsylvania • Page 8

Gazette wants to be the friend of eveiy man, tbs pronmlgator of all that's right, a -welcome guest In the 6 to tovslld up, not tear down; to help, not to hinder; and to assist eveiy worthy parson to the community -without Jftfllfitm 189O The Indiana, PA Gazette Sunday, February 11,1996 A-8 Simpson keeps coming back By BILL THOMPSON Fort Worth Star-Telegram This O.J. Simpson character won't go away, will he? About the time we think we've heard the last of him, here he comes again back in the news, back in the limelight, back on the offensive in his one-man crusade to convince the world that he's not a coldblooded killer. He makes videotapes and hawks them on television. He calls TV shows, newspapers and radio programs to plead his case. He says it over and over again: "I did not commit these crimes." It is an odd enterprise, to say the least, this relentless quest for vindication by a man who probably ought to be thoroughly satisfied just knowing he beat the rap in a double-murder trial that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.

But it is obvious that his acquittal in October on charges that he murdered his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman was not nearly enough for Simpson. It is obvious that a simple verdict of "not guilty" in the so-called trial of the century fell far short of Simpson's needs and expectations. Simpson craves much more than a legal findmg of "not guilty" in a Los Angeles courtroom; he yearns to be found "innocent" in the court of public opinion. He wants his former fans to revere him the way they used to. He wants people to smile when they hear the name 0.

J. or see his face on television. He wants people to think" kind thoughts about him, the way they did when he was sprinting through airports in the Hertz rental car commercials and taking pratfalls in the "Naked Gun" movies. O.J. Simpson wants his life back.

And why shouldn't he? It was a wonderful life, full of fame and fortune and the good will of a society that worships celebrity. He had two significant skills: a breathtaking but highly perishable talent for running with a football under his arm, and an amazing knack for making people like him. But that leaves him in rather dire straits these days: He's too old to play football, and because of the murder trial, an awful lot of people don't like him at all. Simpson's problem is that large numbers of Americans apparently believe that the jury in his murder trial got hoodwinked. The consensus in this country, which once looked upon him as one of the good guys, is that 0.

J. is as guilty as sin acquittal or no acquittal. Even some of us who agreed with the jury's verdict those of us, that is, who simply didn't believe that prosecutors proved Simpson guilty beyond a reasonable doubt can't help but wonder if 0. J. got away with murder.

How do we explain all that blood his and the victims' in places where it shouldn't have been? And those conflicting stories about where he was and what he was doing? So many questions. And the most persistent question of all: If 0. J. didn't do it, who did? In a TV interview Monday, Simpson offered a theory: "I have no doubt in my mind, no doubt whatsoever, that the answer to these murders are in the world of Faye Resnick." Well, maybe. Or maybe not.

Resnick is an admitted drug abuser who lived with Nicole Brown Simpson shortly before she was killed. As far as we know, there is no evidence that Resnick or her world had the slightest connection with the slayings. When Simpson was acquitted, he vowed to search for the "real killer," and so he goes on television all these months later and conjures up some unknown acquaintance of Resnick. He needs to search harder. His detractors figure that Simpson's continuing media blitz is either a scam designed to sell his videotape and-or a desperate act of denial by a man who knows he is guilty but wants to con the rest of us into thinking he is innocent.

But what if it's something else? What if Simpson is telling the truth? How would you feel if you were accused of a crime you didn't commit, were found not guilty in a court of law, and then discovered that virtually everyone on the planet believed you were guilty? I'm not saying that's what happened to O.J. Simpson. But it's something to think about. Bill Thompson is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In Dork Ages on HIV policy ByTOMTEEPEN Cox News Service Southern legislatures are bringing back chain gangs it turns out the region was just kidding about that New South stuff and now the Congress of the United States has taken up the medieval business of demonizing illness.

We're going backward, folks. Time was when popular hysteria believed wretched new diseases were hurled against humankind as punishment for its errancies. Priests were not always above exploiting the fear. But Leeuwenhoek "first spotted "very small animalcules" through his microscope back in 1674, for goodness sakes, and Pasteur, Koch and Lister had germ theory pretty much nailed by the mid-1800s. The ill are no longer ostracized as moral pariahs except by a few remaining primitive tribes ruled by superstition.

Such as those that inhabit the U.S. House and Senate. Both have voted to force the armed services to discharge their 1,049 members known to have HIV, the AIDS virus. The legislation leaves the discharged with only limited medical benefits and cuts off dependents of the approximately one-half are married. It also will discourage other members from seeking early diagnosis and the treatments that can prolong their lives.

As it does with personnel who develop other chronic or grave illnesses the approximately 4,000 with heart disease, cancer, diabetes and so on the military assigns HIV patients to appropriate stateside duties for as long as they are physically able to perform. The Pentagon opposed the forced discharges, but Congress preferred to pander to the social and religious right. And President Clinton, who objects, too, is snookered. Congress hooked the provision onto the armed forces budget bill. He can veto it only by wrecking military operations.

This nastiness is the handiwork of Rep. Robert K. Dornan, the California Republican who is visiting us from the Paleozoic Age. Dornan has dismissed AIDS victims as a class of degenerates. (Perhaps the congressman would care to explain that in person to the sergeant who contracted the disease from her husband.

Or perhaps his trademark belligerence prudently stops short of such a confrontation.) Recent polls show that the public has shed its early panic about AIDS. Most understand how it is transmitted, and how it is not. Few would deny work to physically able persons infected with HIV. Magic Johnson's return to pro basketball has raised more cheers than eyebrows. None of that poise appears in Congress, radicalized by the 1994 election.

The House not only fell in with Dornan's demagoguery, but insisted the provision remain in the final spending bill even when a queasy Senate offered the House a face-saving out. Bills with bipartisan sponsorship have been introduced in both chambers to repeal this pointless cruelty. Common decency and national self-respect would seem to require their quick adoption. The handicappers, however, say that is unlikely. Abusing military AIDS patients is now counted by some as a defense of family values, politically sacrosanct.

We live in curious times, when baiting the sick is a virtue and succoring them a sin. Tom Teepen is national correspondent of Cox Newspapers. Beware of bandits on infobahn WASHINGTON Federal and state regulators have finally thrown up a roadblock against the modern- day version of "highway robbery." One year after we first warned about scam artists using the information superhighway to peddle various investment scams, the Federal Trade Commission and 20 state securities agencies have joined forces to crack down on the crooks. Dubbed "Project Roadblock," the campaign has produced 85 law enforcement actions against bandits promoting more than a quarter of a billion dollars worth of bogus investments. Despite the stepped-up enforcement, regulators caution that the high-tech schemes are still bilking hundreds of millions of dollars from unsuspecting investors across the country.

The crooks prey mostly on elderly consumers, many of whom have risked their nest egg on the false belief that any investment connected with the information superhighway is the road to prosperity. One house-bound, elderly woman in Alexandria, was fleeced in four high-tech scams. The woman lost her life savings of which was earned over four decades of baby-sitting. Regulators note that more than a quarter of all investment dollar losses reported to a federal-state database between March and October of 1995 involved high-tech information superhighway scams. Though the scams are not perpetrated on line the crooks tout the explosive growth of the Internet to convince victims that they're get- ting involved in a get-rich-quick investment.

According to one regulator, the promoters of the scams urge unwary investors to "just sit back and ride the coattails of the information superhighway" by making money off the boom in pagers and the proliferation of pay-per-call 900 phone numbers. Here's how the two most-reported frauds work: no limit on the number of licenses, and legitimate paging operators would never buy or lease a license from an individual. The second scam involves 900- number investments. Telemarketers encourage the victim to purchase an interest in an "information provider" partnership. What the investor is not told is that information providers must pay promotional Washington By JACK ANDERSON MICHAEL B1NSTEIN United Feature Syndicate Merry-Go-Round In the first, a telemarketer offers to secure a license that covers a paging frequency in a portion of the United States.

The caller tells the investor that a fortune can be made on the resale or lease of the license. To further entice and to hurry the potential victim, the caller goes on to say that the license is coveted by major paging operators because the federal government only allows one license per market. In fact, there is costs and must also fork over fees to any endorsers used in infomercials or other advertisements. These costs sap most of the victim's stake in the investment. "If these promoters complied with state and federal requirements on disclosing risks and profits, very few investors would go within a mile of these investments," one state regulator told our associate Ed Henry.

"The truth is that these investments, if properly presented, are suitable only for sophisticated high-rollers who can afford to lose every penny that they put into them." From the files of state and federal regulators, we've pieced together some of the more egregious crooks caught by Project Roadblock: In Arizona, a California company selling shares in a 900-nurn- ber scheme told investors that their investments were "backed by a U.S. Treasury bond that secures their principal 100 percent." According to the FTC, the president of the company threatened to sue a 78-year-old woman when she refused to increase her investment. The company falsely told investors that it had already set up 300 phone lines. One mailing to investors claimed that with 300 lines, somebody who invested would get an annual return of $23,530. In fact, not a single line had been set up and investors' funds simply paid for sales commissions and expenses.

A Florida telemarketing outfit pushing paging licenses not only falsely claimed to be a member of two trade associations, but also lied about the location of its offices. Telemarketers were instructed to say that they were calling from the company's headquarters in the World Trade Center. In fact, they were making calls from a boiler room in Florida. A firm that sold bogus paging licenses out of New York City netted over $1 million in sales last year. Another company was enticing an average of 10 customers a week for a monthly take of $200,000.

Courts rearranging details of social life By GEORGE F. WILL Washington Post Writers Group ATLANTA Northeast of here, hard by the South Carolina border, in Toccoa, Waymon Earls, a tow truck driver, and his wife Sharon have started something that demonstrates the deep roots and strong sinews, but also some ambiguities, of today's conservatism. However, the Earls don't think they started the fight they are waging here with the help of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a nonprofit public interest law firm spoiling for fights on behalf of conservative causes. The Earls think, reasonably, that they are acting in self-defense. The aggressors who started the fight are the people in the school district who, without consulting the Earls, gave the Earls' daughters, ages 14 and 15, a bag of condoms, prescriptions for birth control pills, Pap smears and tests for AIDS.

Last June the Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald quoted the Toccoa district school superintendent: "Schools are now taking over responsibilities that aren't being covered in the home. When parents won't do it, we have to." Won't do what give their teen-agers condoms? The Earls are seeking monetary damages for what they say were violations of school rules, state law and the state constitution. Furthermore, they allege violations of their rights under the U.S. Constitution, including their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion (which they say encompasses child rearing) and recognized 14th Amendment "due process" rights to parental sovereignty. The Earls say they are just trying to get policy to conform to precedents.

They cite a line of cases beginning with two from the 1920s. In one the Supreme Court overturned a Nebraska law (passed as a result of World War I hysteria) prohibiting foreign language instruction to school children. The Court said the prohibition impermissibly infringed parental child-rearing rights. In the other case, the Court overturned an Oregon law requiring parents to send children to public schools. The Court said the law unreasonably interfered with the liberty of parents "to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control." These cases were examples of "substantive due process," which those conservatives who stress judicial restraint have generally considered a contradiction in terms.

Such conservatives oppose wringing policy substance, even conservative substance, from a clause they say has merely procedural meaning. And a lawyer for the Southeastern Legal Foundation cheerfully says, "We are out to make bad law in order to provoke legislatures to repeal bad laws." The Foundation believes that for too long liberals have been defining the substance of substantive due process, so conservatives should get into the game. The Foundation has been in the game for 20 years. Similar organizations practicing conservative judicial activism yes. many conservatives do not consider that an oxymoron have Berry's World "Time for another Charisma Booster Shot, eh, senator!" proliferated since the early 1970s, when the first of them was formed with the help of a California lawyer named Ed Meese.

One can sympathize entirely with the Earls and applaud the social policies organizations like the Foundation advocate while regretting the zest with which some conservatives are succumbing to the temptation to seek judicial relief from offensive policies. That often means judicial relief from the rigors of politics. Consider the rapidly spreading movement to pass "parental rights amendments" to state constitutions. The most common formulation is: "The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children shall not be infringed." Those 17 words are rich in potential for breeding litigation about matters that should be settled by legislation, or by processes of political persuasion. Both politics and social accommodation are discouraged by casting issues in the brook-no-compromise language of rights.

Is the parental right to "direct" the "upbringing and education" of children infringed by school curricula or texts or dress codes that parents disapprove? Do we want to turn every parent's grievance into grounds for suing? Rep. Steve Largent, a freshman Republican from Oklahoma, has 125 co-sponsors for his "Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act," which says, among much else, that "no federal, state or local shall interfere with or usurp the right of a parent to direct the upbringing of the child of the parent." At first blush, that may seem unexceptional. And it is reasonable to execrate the many governmental provocations, from condom distributions to propagandizing curricula, that have moved Largent and other good people, including the Earls, to seek to codify parental rights. However, there is a competing consideration: It is injurious to democracy to write into law language certain to breed litigation that will draw courts even deeper into the unjudicial business of reviewing and rearranging the details of social life. Unless clearly labeled as a "Gazette Editorial," all opinions expressed on the Viewpoint Page are solely those of the authors.

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