By Chris Powell
Connecticut state legislators don’t want to know — or don’t want to be seen to know — that public education has been collapsing for many years.
They don’t want to know that poverty policy is creating as much poverty as it alleviates. They don’t want to know that awarding lucrative licenses for casinos and marijuana retailing on the basis of ethnicity just enriches special interests instead of advancing social justice.
They don’t want to know that the state’s prison population is down because repeat offenders keep being released.
But thanks to the General Assembly’s Public Health Committee and particularly to its Senate chairman, Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, and the Connecticut chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, legislators have just admitted that they don’t want to know about the rape of children.
The admission came in the committee’s refusal to advance legislation that would have required notification of a minor child’s parents when she seeks an abortion, legislation in force in most states. Abortions for minors often involve a felony — rape or statutory rape — and the perpetrator is sometimes a member of the raped child’s family.
The ACLU says parental notification might “exacerbate an already volatile or dysfunctional family situation.”
Anwar elaborated to the Connecticut Mirror: “Unfortunately, there are situations where family members are involved in harming, raping, and making somebody pregnant. That’s why it’s important to not require that” — parental notification. “It may threaten someone’s well-being.”
As if someone’s well-being has not already been far more than threatened and will not continue to be more than threatened if authorities don’t intervene.
There is spectacular irony here. Connecticut law designates certain professionals as “mandated reporters,” people who are required to report to child-protection authorities their knowledge or suspicion of child abuse and are subject to prosecution if they fail. Medical doctors are among these “mandated reporters,” and Anwar himself is a medical doctor.
And yet, on behalf of his committee, Anwar has just proclaimed that it’s better if the authorities don’t know when children have become pregnant from rape, because it might mess up life in a family where life is already as messed up as it could be.
Such abused children, Anwar and most of his committee’s members think, are best left to their abusers. Most of their colleagues in the legislature probably agree.
This raises the question of whether Anwar would obey his obligation under the mandated reporter law. But since he and so many of his colleagues don’t believe in that law, they should move to repeal it and drop the pretense about caring for children.
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NO LICENSE FOR GANIM: A state Judicial Department committee on lawyer qualifications opposes by 3-2 Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim’s request for restoration of his license to practice law, which he lost after his conviction in 2003 on 16 federal charges arising from his corruption during his first stint as mayor.
The issue now will be sent to a committee of judges and may hinge on whether Ganim’s rehabilitation outweighs the disgrace he brought to the city, the state, and the legal profession.
Since he was re-elected as mayor after serving seven years in prison, Ganim’s corruption doesn’t seem to have bothered Bridgeport’s voters much, but then nothing seems to bother the city much — not the worsening crime, the educational failure, nor even the corruption of Ganim’s current administration, as indicated by the rigging of the examination for police chief so a longtime friend of the mayor would get the job.
But Connecticut is entitled to set standards higher than Bridgeport’s, and the Judicial Department should do so by rejecting Ganim’s application to practice law again.
Full forgiveness might be appropriate for an ordinary former offender who had rehabilitated himself, studied, and applied for a law license.
But since he was already a lawyer when he committed his crimes, Ganim doubly should have known better because of his obligations to both his office and the legal profession.
The shame of his misconduct during his first term in office is enough for a lifetime.
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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.
Chris Powell column 