Chapter 1: The Beginning

Supreme Court

At the beginning of Mr. Bush second mandate, by coincidence the remaining less conservative members of the Supreme Court were up for retirement. The new members appointed by the president and blessed by the mostly Republican Congress were even more conservative than the remaining members, if it's at all possible. At the same time the only woman Justice fairly conservative herself retired transforming once again the Supreme in a boys' club.

The case of Mr. John Smith against the State of Utah

Mr. John Smith, a member of the First United Christian Church sued the State of Utah for his right to marry as many wives as he could provide for. Besides being a Minister, he was a learned lawyer, a judge and a world renowned Constitutional Scholar. His case was extremely well researched and couldn't be dismissed as somebody's mad dream.

After a lengthy debate the State Supreme Court sent the matter to the Federal Supreme. The Justices submitted it to a long and exhaustive study and issued a surprising far-reaching and much debated historical decision. Mr. Smith was right. There was nothing in the whole civil edifice of law that really precluded polygamy. It was a tradition and really only a Catholic tradition. Several evangelical churches, the Muslims and other religions accepted it. The Bible accepted it. The Orthodox Jews accepted it.

The Supreme Court granted Mr. Smith his right to marry a 2nd wife, but established a set of rules that required that all involved parties had to agree to the marriage and to the rights to propriety, children and succession. Equal rights were not given to women. Polygamy was a one way street: one male and how many females he could maintain. The reasoning was the imbalance of male and female population (at that time the females represented almost 55% of the population and the rate was growing) and the need to increase the nativity rate in accelerated decline for almost a decade.

The case of Mr. Ronald Tompkins against the State of New York

This was the turning case in Sexual Harassment craze. Everybody remembers when the middle aged Mr. Tompkins was arrested under accusation of forcing sexual favors from no less than seven female members of his staff. His pleas of not guilty and being a victim of conspiracy were ridiculed and he was condemned by the liberal press and by the vociferous feminist brigade well before his case was brought to court. He spent almost one year in prison before being judged and sentenced by a female judge and a mostly female jury to a cumulative 21 years in jail, to the applause of the feminists.

This would be the end of the case if not by Mr. Tompkins' boss, Mr. Stewart Little. Mr. Tompkins worked for Mr. Little for the best part of two decades. The sexual harassment bit was simply not in his character. In Mr. Little's view, his employee was a martinet, a strict and demanding manager, sometimes a 'straight-collar'—in his wording—but extremely fair. Mr. Little couldn't remember a single biased word from Mr. Tompkins and he was a perfect gentleman when treating women. He was shy and single, loved theatre and concerts and very seldom if ever looked for female companionship. This behavior was explored by the accusation as "weird, depraved, psychotic and misogynic."

A short time after Mr. Tompkins' sentence, Mr. Little overheard by chance a dialog between two of Mr. Tompkins accusers. The dialog made him very suspicious and he decided to engage one of the best detective agencies in the city to investigate the matter. After only 15 days of thorough inquire the agency discovered and was able to prove that the seven females effectively conspired against Mr. Tompkins because he was too strict, "a pain in the ass" and probably gay. The deciding factor was his rejection of sexual advances from two of them as a bribe for letting them off from formal warning for false expense report, the very crime for which the seven women swore that he asked them for sexual favors. To complicate the matter, the detectives showed that taped evidence was in the hands of Ms. Amanda Jones, the female prosecutor and active member of "Women of America, Unite!" (WAU) They could prove also that at least one of the accusers and possibly two wanted to recant when the harsh sentence was pronounced, but were physically threatened by the remaining members of the gang and the prosecutor.

The findings were explosive. The trial was annulled be state Supreme Court, Mr. Tompkins was released and the real culprits were arrested and started to sing the true story. Under legal advice Mr. Tompkins sued the State of New York, Ms. Jones and WAU. As the result of the trial, Ms. Jones was disbarred and she and the seven female accusers were jailed, NY State was condemned to pay a nice sum to Mr. Tompkins and the secretary of Justice started an investigation into WAU activities.

More important than redressing Mr. Tompkins' wounds, the huge resonance of his case combined with hundreds of others that suddenly appeared out from the woodwork, made the Congress promote several laws that restricted and regulated the "sexual harassment" accusations. The burden of proof was reversed and witnesses had to include at least one member of opposite gender of the accuser. In practice, short of violent rape it became almost impossible to accuse somebody of sexual harassment.