Gene Scott vs. the FCC -- The Beat Goes On

The FCC from 1977 to around 1983 conducted a fraud investigation of my pastor Dr. Gene Scott, now deceased, on allegations from anonymous sources that he had been misusing funds raised from donors. It had decided, in its interpretation of Congressional will concerning fraud, that it had a mission to regulate and examine the financial operations of religious broadcasters owning TV stations in the US, and pursuant to that they began a campaign of fraud investigations targeting religious broadcasters that began with Gene Scott's Faith Center and with another church called the Crystal Cathedral, both located in California. At the time Dr. Scott was preaching from three on-air television stations located in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Hartford. In the process of the investigation a raid was conducted on the offices and sanctuary of Faith Center in which something like 8,000 of hours of videotapes of Gene Scott's teaching were seized valued at $250,000 at the time. The church was broken into in the middle of the night for this, doing damage to its entranceway, and no warrant was issued or served by a Federal judge authorizing this illegal entry.

In the course of this investigation the FCC demanded from Dr. Scott the names and addresses of every donor who had given anything from a penny upwards to the ministry. Scott refused, citing a First Amendment right to keep the names of the donors secret, in keeping with scripture from Matthew 6 which says that giving is to be kept secret. After he repeatedly refused to cooperate with the investigation while bitterly protesting its violations of Constitutional law, the FCC ordered him to shut down the three stations that were owned by the church, and he pulled the plug at midnight May 23, 1983.

Now, Dr. Gene Scott had always taught (and the ministry under his successor Melissa Scott to this day still teaches) that giving is an ileomasonry activity, meaning all giving is to a general fund to be designated however the pastor sees fit. In addition to this, since Gene Scott's unanimous election as pastor in 1975, donors to this ministry have never been allowed by the pastor to take tax deductions for their donations, in order to honor Matthew 6 which says to give in secret, because God rewards openly what He sees in secret. So, defrauding the donors is impossible, the donors already expect that the money they give, which is voluntary tuition to the teacher-pastor, is no longer theirs any more than the money you pay a restaurant bill with is still yours. (It's called stealing if you don't pay for your food already eaten.) Everyone who listened to the teaching long enough, whether in person or via electronic means, learned that giving is in response to the teaching of the word of God already heard, not for any other reason, and the pastor is responsible to God, not to man, to account for how it is spent just as the congregation is accountable to God for paying tithes. Everyone listening long enough who becomes motivated to give already knows this. If some moron protests that their donations are being misused, the money gets returned to him, and he loses his membership for lying about having listened to the teaching -- especially the part where it is no longer "their" money, it's God's money, Scripture orders it to be given to the priest for his living, and the priest is accountable only to God for how it is spent.

So, when the FCC broke those doors down, without a warrant, using the excuse of "compelling state interest" and violating the Fourth Amendment against warrantless, unreasonable searches and seizures, they were on a fishing expedition to try to determine that the pastor had defrauded the donors by spending "their" money on things the donors didn't authorize. 8,000 hours of teaching on the video evidence included all of the stipulations on giving, but that didn't alter the bureaucrats' course a whit; they had decided the pastor was defrauding, despite 8,000 hours of teaching they stole and never bothered to listen to, which stipulated what the money was for and ruled out the possibility of fraud.

The legal conflict with the FCC lasted from 1977 to 1989, as Gene Scott filed a lawsuit for damages against the FCC and its officers amounting to $77,777,777.77. Scott pursued it through the system to higher and higher levels until a Federal District Court judge finally told the defendants, the FCC investigators and their bosses, that they were eligible to face full civil liability under the US Code enforcing civil rights -- which meant they could be sued to the skivvies for every penny they had to their individual names. They were quick to settle out of court after that, although a friend of mine is trying to tell me Gene Scott lost this series of lawsuits. No, he appealed upstairs repeatedly and forced a settlement. That isn't a loss. But the entire episode really burned into us the reality of the ruthlessness of the Federal Government and what it is truly capable of.

Now, in case anyone is still unclear on the main issue, the FCC's demand for donor records was a violation of the First Amendment, and it's not an attempted violation, the demand ITSELF was the first violation. As a Christian church that has a policy of members giving in secret, which follows a directive of Jesus Christ, Faith Center never forwarded donor names to the IRS for tax deductions or to government agencies for any other purpose, and giving in secret is established as a eucharist and a worship activity, per Matthew 6, Galatians 6, the book of Philippians, and many other Biblical passages. When Gene Scott refused to bow to this demand, the agency punished him with financial audits that forced the church to account for every screw, nail, and light bulb that got inserted in any orifice (except inside those of bureaucrats), and when it was still unsatisfied to find no evidence of fraud, since they could not substantiate its source of income -- secret donors -- it refused to renew Faith Center's broadcast licenses for the three stations it owned, a step that is usually reserved for station owners who are convicted of a crime or of actual civil violations of broadcasting regulations. No violations of FCC regulations by Gene Scott were ever proved. It even accused Dr. Scott of "bad faith negotiations" while it practiced extremely bad faith as constitutional officers. That's what they called his protecting the donors' First Amendment rights as worshipers and worship includes GIVING, it's a contraction of worth-ship. The FCC called protecting that "bad faith negotiation." They remind me of poo-flinging monkeys in a zoo judging chickens for crapping in a hutch!

Someone raised a point with me stating, "Often when someone’s free speech is violated, they wind up in jail and/or killed for what they say or do. Dr Scott was not locked up, gagged, censored, nor prevented from speaking out or teaching any of his work, he simply had a license non-renewed and was thus forced to move to cable where the FCC no longer had jurisdiction over his fundraising." Well, there were instances where several members of our church who were outed to government agencies, like the IRS, were severely harassed by several government agencies and some were jailed on trumped up charges such as tax evasion. In addition to this Gene Scott used to receive numerous death threats in his mail from anonymous parties -- as anonymous as the parties that incited the FCC investigation. So what, now we wait for jailing and killing for a case to be made that rights are being violated?

"Well," you might say, "that doesn't prove he wasn't defrauding the givers!" Out of what? The teaching already given? "Well," you might assert, "he ought not to have been living the wealthy lifestyle he had on the backs of the givers." First of all, that was his apostolic right, to make a living by his teaching. Scripture says "Muzzle not the ox that treads out the grain" and "Let him who is taught share materially with the one that taught him." Luther said "the law was not made for cattle." "Well," you say, "he might get rich!" So what? The Pope is rich, and the media fawn all over him whenever he comes to town. One difference between him and Gene Scott was, Gene Scott was rich before he was ever elected pastor of Faith Center.

When he came to town in 1975 he found Faith Center owing $3 million with only $19,000 cash to pay in 30 days. The church wanted him to solve this problem, and they were so desperate they unanimously (while hiding a small handful of "no" ballots) gave him a blank check granting him 15 terms of service, and he made the church take steps to solve it, because that's the responsibility of the flock, to pay the tuition and expenses of the church and its pastor, while he conducts his pastoral mission, meaning one of a shepherd, and beats the wolves off of the flock, which he did by filing against creditors from out of state for violating California laws about debt collection. And here's the second shoe dropping: The money raised from the flock mainly paid church-related expenses, even though the pastor has the literally God-given Apostolic right to spend it any way he pleases because every penny is stipulated to be tuition. Dr. Scott's salary for pastoring was one dollar a year plus expenses; when he died the church was solvent, and still is, because it is self-sufficient.

I never saw the FCC try to shut down a Catholic owned TV station even with investigations against the Vatican Bank over a money laundering scheme that netted a BILLION dollars, with one cardinal hiding in the Vatican city-state to avoid prosecution for fraud! Know why? The Pope already undid one superpower -- the Soviet Union -- and he can undo another one. Don't even try to tell me the resistance of the people made that happen... It would not have been possible if the Catholic Church didn't have the capacity to reach and motivate billions around the world, or if the Pope had chosen not to speak out against Communism, as previous popes had not. It took a leader with guts, vision, and power. Especially -- POWER. I only wish there was a Protestant church with enough power to do the same thing. It'll never happen if this trinket-happy, materialistic, mentally warped society that worships the dollar, but won't do more than lip service to God, keeps being allowed to dictate to a church what a right financial relationship with God comprises. I would rather have a pastor that has the guts to tell the world to f--- off and mind its own business, and the guts to tell the world that neither the FCC nor any other non-elected government agency full of decrepit, moronic tyrants in embryo, who can't keep their private parts in their pants let alone obey the Constitution, has any business dictating what a church's rights are, or any business defining what comprises fraud or any other moral turpitude on the part of a minister of God!

Defenders of Bill of Rights should unite.

I've been observing the most nonsensical thing in American politics for the past few decades. We have the NRA defending the Second Amendment, gay rights organizations, right-to-die, and abortion rights groups defending the Ninth and Fourteenth, state's rights organizations and limited federalists defending the Tenth, nobody defending the Third, the NAACP defending the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Twenty-Fourth Amendments, women's groups defending the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, and the ACLU mostly litigating about the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments with some attention to the others except for the Second. It is amazing to me that it takes so many of these disparate groups, all acting separately from one another, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution against its sworn officers who refuse or neglect to carry out that oath. And the American people at large don't seem to have grasped that all of these Constitutional issues hang together -- if government breaches one right it can breach any of them.

What we need is an umbrella alliance comprising every organization that is devoted to defense of any part of the Constitution. The whole Constitution is under attack, from those who wield power in both the left wing and the right wing, and it is about time that both liberals and conservatives who have enough intelligence to see what is going on, get organizations like the NRA and the ACLU banded together as a permanent alliance to stop these depredations on our rights and stop governmental abuses of power and procedure.

The Decline of Honor in Prosecution

I promised to rant about prosecutors and now seems like a good time. :) I'm not a lawyer so these remarks should be taken in context with the rest of my layman's knowledge of legal history. (Leaving myself a neat exit in case some lawyer raises a logodemic argument outclassing me about the technical aspects of this subject.)

Prosecutors and defense attorneys, as probably everyone knows, go to law school to learn their trade. Now, from what I remember a law degree is not enough to qualify to be a lawyer, in fact it is not the actual license to practice law, which I understand you could still potentially get without going to law school, what's actually required is the state bar exam. (Don't even think about it though, you'll waste your money taking that bar exam.) But, in old law school teaching tradition, there were differences in the approach to teaching the ethics of prosecution and the ethics of defense. They were not originally the same ethics. The basic theory goes something like this:

A prosecutor represents the people of the state. As such he has a fiduciary obligation to seek the truth wherever it may lead. Hence, when a crime is committed and evidence is presented to him by the police, he becomes the first line of evaluation, where he has to make a decision and weigh whether there is enough evidence to justify a trial. So, that's why whenever you watch a legal drama on television, which sort of boils down the actual process in a fictional manner, the police bring some evidence of a crime, the district attorney looks at it and says "There isn't enough here to hold him, kick him loose," and the bad guy goes free for a time. The viewing audience groans because they watched the suspect commit the crime, so you have created that dramatic tension from conflict between what the DA character knows, which is only what the police give him, and what they saw the crook do.

Second round, our hero detectives come to the DA again and plead for a wiretap or search or something of the like. Now, we are into a realm where civil rights become important. A search has to satisfy the requirements of the Fourth Amendment which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures unless a warrant is issued by a judge, or so the theory used to go (in practice, this has changed drastically especially since the passage of the Patriot Act.) So anyway, in those old TV shows when Fourth Amendment rights were still "in vogue," the DA would say "I can't take this to the judge, he'll turn it down because of insufficient cause." Audience groans again, and the crook can only be tailed around by the police who are waiting to catch him doing more to substantiate the original crime, even though every TV viewer knows he's guilty and what kind of moron is that DA anyway?

Third round, now the police decide to take the law into their own hands, and they sneak a guy in to do a wiretap without a warrant. Bingo, they hit the jackpot, they have enough evidence for probable cause, they act on the information, locate witnesses or evidence they didn't previously have, and it's enough to justify a search. Right? Wrong! This is called "Poisoned Fruits." The DA finds out about the illegal wiretap and chain of evidence from it leading to the witnesses and evidence to support the search warrant request. He says "This is poisoned fruits, the judge will turn it down if I tell him how I got this, and if I don't and the defense finds out later, the suspect will go free in a mistrial!" Audience tears their hair out. Is there any way to get this bad guy?

All of this is because the prosecutors under the old ethical theory taught in law school have to adhere to standards in their pursuit of truth -- remember, that means if they uncover disculpatory evidence, that is, evidence that proves the innocence of a suspect, they have the fiduciary obligation to set that suspect free, drop the charges, restart the investigation with another suspect, whatever it takes to get back on course with determining truth. The practicality following the ethics is, to have the truth on your side, you have to be on the truth's side, and that means following constitutional procedure and due process of law. You may want to win the case, but if you don't have the truth, and you win based on lies or by cheating on due process, you have committed an injustice.

Defense attorneys under the old theory are not bound by the same rule. Their fiduciary obligation is not to the people of the state, it is to their clients. They also must follow due process of law but their aim is to defend the civil rights of their clients and instill reasonable doubt in a jury, because their commitment is to win the case. Now, conservatives and prosecutors have pushed things to the point where this unfair advantage of the defense attorney, who only has to win the case, not worry about whether his case is based on truth, is to be reduced to the extent possible. They have had help in this regard by the fact that prosecutors have been able to campaign on their anti-crime successes (whether actual or not, whether ethical or not) to get themselves elected or appointed to judgeships.

Hence, there has been an increasing trend for judges to be friendlier to prosecutions and more hostile to defenses, leading to a loosening of common-law and constitutional restrictions on prosecutorial and police conduct. Also, as law schools import retired judges and prosecutors as professors, there is no longer so much emphasis on teaching budding would-be prosecutors that the most important aim of a prosecution is to arrive at the truth. Now the aim is to win, and law schools get vetted on their ability to teach lawyers how to win, regardless of whether they work for the people of the state or for a client. (It also hasn't helped that progressive education theory debased colleges from teaching ethics based on traditional Western philosophies, allowing them to adopt ethical frames of reference that are more relativistic than realistic.) So, now the technicalities and other constitutional pitfalls of a police investigation and a prosecution are being brushed aside, both by relativistic legal opinions and by changes in legislation that weaken the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments, to the point where they have now become seen as an irritating inconvenience to be swatted aside for the sake of public safety, instead of remaining the Supreme Law of the Land.

So nowadays the cops and robbers' shows, exemplifying art comically imitating life, regularly feature police officers and prosecutors running roughshod over civil rights because they almost always "know" who's guilty, or are REALLY GOOD at finding information, and because that dirty creep is guilty he deserves what he gets and the audience gets what it wants -- with the only real dramatic conflicts being about finding the bad guy, and you get these cookie cutter endings: the police shoot him as he reaches for his piece, or he gets browbeaten -- or literally beaten -- by some brilliant interrogator until he fesses up, confronted by all the evidence the police obtained illegally anyway and couldn't use until he corroborated it, or it's a Mr. Big situation where the bad guy is really rich and pays higher ups to cover him while he tries escaping to South America and gets caught by intrepid rebellious cops who cheated due process to find out where his flight was gonna take off from. The end justifies the means is the new message and practice. The reality is this is the beginning of a fascist dictatorship.