General Meese vs. ABA’s War on Christian Lawyers

Ellis Washington | August 8, 2016

By Ellis Washington

8 Aug. 2016

“The next generation of lawyers would all be taught Model Rule 8.4 as a binding requirement that is demanded of every attorney. New lawyers are taught to carefully obey ethics rules, not to consider challenging them as unconstitutional.”

~ Ken Klukowski, Sr. Counsel, First Liberty Institute

“Branding certain opinions on matters of race and socioeconomics [and] religious-based beliefs on marriage, abortion, and moral judgments … as so deplorable that they should trigger draconian sanctions is truly noxious to the foundational principles of a free society.”

~ Fmr. Attorney General Ed Meese

BIAS ALERT – Is the ABA obsessively biased against Christians, conservatives and Republican lawyers?

As a professor of legal ethics at the National Paralegal College and National Juris University, I was disturbed by the recent Breitbart story, Attorney General Meese: Lawyers’ Ethics Rule Is Fascist, Anti-Christian, where the former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III, appointed by President Ronald Reagan (1985-88), and leading national religious-liberty lawyer Kelly Shackelford, who is the president and CEO of First Liberty Institute, a leading law firm dedicated to championing First Amendment religious liberty rights, are fighting the partisan American Bar Association. They wrote in a detailed critical letter to the American Bar Association that “Branding certain opinions on matters of race and socioeconomics [and] religious-based beliefs on marriage, abortion, and moral judgments … as so deplorable that they should trigger draconian sanctions is truly noxious to the foundational principles of a free society.”

Meese was outraged by the ABA’s new proposed ethical restrictions on speech and religious affiliations. Soon the ABA’s House of Delegates will vote on whether to adopt the recommendation from one of its committees to revise ABA Model Rule 8.4. The proposed change would make it a legal ethics violation — meaning that a lawyer who does it can lose his license to practice law — to “discriminate on the basis of race … sexual orientation, gender identity … or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.”

This rule not only violates the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment protections against religious persecution by the government, but amounts to invidious discrimination against America’s longstanding Judeo-Christian traditions and institutions dating back to the constitutional Framers of the 1700s, and even earlier to the early 1600s where the Puritans and Pilgrims who first settled colonies in America dedicated this country to God, Natural Law and the Bible – Sacred founding principles and philosophies (that today’s Progressives dominating the Academy often ignore, pervert or deconstruct) based on Natural Law, Natural Rights and the fundamental integration of legality and morality.

General Meese and attorney Shackelford’s arguments against the new ABA rule is due partly to the official commentary that is attached to the proposed rule, mandates which push an outrageously radical Progressive agenda about what establishes “conduct related to the practice of law.” Although the new rule proposes that a lawyer cannot be disciplined for agreeing to represent any client, the rule relates to “verbal conduct” including “physical conduct” and the proposed rule can even be enacted when a lawyer is speaking to another person outside of a courtroom. (Talk about Orwellian!)

Generally speaking, the invidious discriminatory effect of Model Rule 8.4 means a lawyer criticizing for example transgender legislation or protesting Obama’s amnesty policies where illegal aliens from Mexico, South America, China, or war-torn Muslim countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are allowed into America by the millions. Affecting legal cases against these new, radical Progressive policies could be interpreted as “discriminating” on the basis of sexual preference, race and socioeconomic status (three of the prohibited classes) — which could result in the attorney forfeiting his law license to practice law if found in violation of this proposed draconian expansion of the ABA rule.

As a legal scholar I consider the ABA’s proposed expansion of Model Rule 8.4 to be patently unconstitutional and fascist and would also bring down severe penalties for faith-based lawyers whose clientele are individual Christians, Jews, churches, synagogues, or other religious institutions who find themselves persecuted by the State for their religious faith. For example, Klukowski stated several potential legal scenarios:

What if that lawyer is a member of a Southern Baptist or Roman Catholic Church? Or what about many other religions — such as Orthodox Jews? All those faiths have religious beliefs specifying that marriage is between a man and woman and that a person’s gender — their maleness or femaleness — is a fixed aspect of that person determined by Almighty God.

The membership of that Baptist lawyer, Catholic lawyer, or Jewish lawyer could be treated the same as if the lawyer belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Since Model Rule 8.4 treats sexual orientation and gender identity as being on the same level as race, belonging to a church or synagogue that holds to millennia-old traditional beliefs on marriage and sexuality could lead to that attorney losing his law license.

The intended effect by the ABA’s fascist rule is that many states will rapidly comply with this new mandate, and practicing Christians in those states will doubtlessly be besieged and sued by various State institutions, effectively purging these faith-based lawyers from the legal profession in a similar way 80 years ago the fascist National Socialist Party of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime targeting German Christians in the 1930s and 40s (like German theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller and many others), for systematic discrimination for failing to join the Nazi Party (at its height only 7-10% of German citizens had Nazi Party membership), or prohibiting German Jews from membership to the bar, medical professions and high academic profession like colleges and universities.

Like Nazi law 80 years ago, the proposed ABA rule is targeted and comprehensive, draconian and ruthless in every respect in uprooting enemies of the State, including, “Any person who hears an attorney speak, sees what the attorney has written, or is even aware of where the attorney goes to church, can file a bar complaint with the highest court of that state.”

Model Rule 8.4 does not automatically carry any force of law, therefore although the ABA is a private association, not every lawyer is a member of the Bar as Klukowski writes, for example, less than one-third of America’s 1.3 million lawyers, about 400,000 are ABA members. The result: due to many biased rules like the proposed revision of Model Rule 8.4 with its built-in Leftist bias against conservatives, Republicans, Christians, Jewish, or other religious lawyers, the majority of U.S. lawyers like me are averse to belonging to such an overtly partisan group as the ABA.

The ABA’s anti-Christian bias is part of a much larger, comprehensive strategy to purge America and Europe of their Judeo-Christian traditions and institutions or what I’ve called this existential strategy of the Democrat Socialist Party’s ‘Long March through the Institutions’. For example, as far back as the late 1870s and 80s the Left began pushing an aggressive Humanist, Progressive and Evolution Atheist agenda to systematically take over all of America’s Judeo-Christian institutions like the America Medical Association and the American Bar Association, (which originally had a moral and overtly Christian worldview). Under the ABA law licenses are granted through the Supreme court of all 50 states, including the District of Columbia, and each state promulgating its own version of ethics rules. Nevertheless, the majority of state ethics rules originate directly from ABA’s Model Rules or, at the least, ABA rules are the beginning point from which the states create their own ethical rules.

The Machiavellian and purposeful intent of Model Rule 8.4 is that even if a bar complaint is unsuccessful in getting a faith-based attorney disbarred, attorney defendants accused of rule violations will still be compelled to suffer unjust financial burdens; to hire and pay for an attorney who specializes in legal ethics and typically disciplinary committee hearings on behalf of lawyers who are found in violation of the ethical rules. The pernicious effect of this revised Rule 8.4 is that all of these disciplinary hearings generate a negative paper trail, where despite the innocence of the lawyer in not falling afoul of the ABA rules, the disciplinary hearings ipso facto gives an appearance of impropriety that unethical conduct was engaged in.

That slanderous implication alone, even if unsubstantiated in a court of law, is enough to question a lawyer’s character and destroy his legal career. Radio host, Rush Limbaugh for over 25 years warned society that the Progressive Left doesn’t care about procedure, but only results – “It’s not the nature of the evidence” Rush said, “It’s the seriousness of the charge” that animates Democrat Socialists. Another historical example is that during the apotheosis of liberalism known as the French Revolution (1789-99), the lawyer/leader of the Left’s State-sponsored genocide against the monarchy and bourgeoisie, Christianity and the French Catholic Church, Robespierre infamously said – There are no crimes, only criminals. Tragically in 2016, the ABA is following this fascist tradition against religious liberty and Christianity.

Regarding the issue of student indoctrination under this rule, it is well established by myself and many other legal scholars who study and write on legal ethics that particularly since the 1870s that the Democrat Socialist Party has exercised increasing hegemony in education; especially dominance in higher education (e.g., college, university, law schools, medical schools, business schools, graduate schools). Thus, as Breitbart writer Ken Klukowski wrote, “This rule would also be used to indoctrinate law students. Even though ABA is a private organization, all but a few states require a person to receive a law degree from an ABA-accredited law school in order to qualify to sit for those states’ bar exams to get a law license.”

“Every law school must teach legal ethics as part of its curriculum if it wants to be accredited by ABA. Because lawyers at each school might get a job anywhere across the country, those ethics classes teach the ABA Model Rules instead of the ethics rules of any one state,” wrote Klukowski. “So the next generation of lawyers would all be taught Model Rule 8.4 as a binding requirement that is demanded of every attorney. New lawyers are taught to carefully obey ethics rules, not to consider challenging them as unconstitutional.”

In conclusion, that this revised Model Rule 8.4 will invidiously discriminate against every faith-based lawyer’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, asserts General Meese and Shackelford in their letter, which also comprises an interesting revelation regarding the ABA’s motives—quoting testimony from ABA President Paulette Brown, Drucilla Ramey, and the letter’s addressee, Patricia Lee Refo, ABA House of Delegates, demonstrates that the ABA committee proposed rule revisions was enacted with the complete understanding of the tyrannical and repressive results that would ensue – to negatively affect and restrict religious liberty and to destroy the careers of faith-based lawyers.

Former Attorney General Ed Meese

In the final analysis the proposed ABA Model Rule 8.4 is consequently a willing and political partisan attempt to purge devout and practicing Christians, who are guided by their faith, to be banished from the legal vocation and to produce a legal nihilist Weltanschauung (worldview) where most lawyers would be too fearful and unwilling to handle cases representing Christians, including evangelicals, devout Catholics, or adherents of other faiths when those people’s religious freedoms are violated or threatened.

However, why do I predict that the ABA will make specific religious exceptions for practitioners of the Muslim faith? Because the dirty little secret is that for over 100 years Muslims and the Democrat Socialist Party have been philosophical allies in promoting Progressivism (Socialism) through the Ages.

“It is not an overstatement to say that this proposed rule borders on fascism,” wrote General Meese and Shackelford in their excellent and revelatory letter to the ABA. I hope that all 50 states and D.C. will reject this tyrannical law and support General Meese and President Shackelford’s fight this fascist ABA Rule 8.4 revision – all the way to the Supreme Court where a 4-4 tie no doubt will meet them, because Leftist activists on the Supreme Court almost never break ranks in their existential efforts to promote a Progressive agenda… despite what the U.S. Constitution says.

On this point, how did the U.S. come to the point in the history of the rule of law and U.S. constitutional jurisprudence where we allow 5 unelected members of the Supreme Court to decide by judicial fiat, apart from reliance on the U.S. Constitution, what the law of the land will be? In an earlier law review article I wrote in 2005 I called this the choice between – “Natural Law vs. Judicial Personal Policy Preferences.”

In the final analysis the ABA’s proposed revision of Model Rule 8.4 amounts to Socialism Slavery writ large or what Jefferson called being “ruled under a despotism of an oligarchy”; an embedding of fascist policy mandates which is binding on every state’s court system. General Meese was right on point when he said regarding this partisan law by demagogues in ABA leadership, “Branding certain opinions on matters of race and socioeconomics [and] religious-based beliefs on marriage, abortion, and moral judgments … as so deplorable that they should trigger draconian sanctions is truly noxious to the foundational principles of a free society.”

Essentially General Ed Meese is fighting the ABA and the Obama administration’s existential war against Christianity and against Christian lawyers which has existed for the past 8 years, but in reality goes back 80 years to FDR’s fascist Court Packing Plan of 1937 where the Supreme Court legislating from the bench, first mandated the legality of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unconstitutional New Deal and Welfare policies, therefore the rule of law and constitutional jurisprudence based on Natural Law is essential a deadletter and a judges “personal policy preferences” have replaced the original intent of the constitutional Framers.

The question is will evil prevail under the ABA’s proposed anti-Christian ‘Nuremberg Laws’— e.g., Model Rule 8.4, or will the Church, Jewish people, and Christians rise up united to defend their Faith?