by
Stephanie Herman
Rightgrrl Co-Founder
"What sort of a close friend tapes private conversations to further
their own agenda? It is totally and utterly inexcusable behaviour,
perjury or no perjury. Loyalty and friendship mean more to your average
person than the issue of lying in court."
So went a rather unenlightened response to the Support Linda Tripp!
website last week. We've heard these rumblings before from Clinton
supporters who would rather attack Linda Tripp's ability to be a
"friend" than Bill Clinton's ability to obey the law.
But if it's true that "Loyalty and friendship mean more to your average
person than the issue of lying in court," then the average person is
certainly beneath contempt. Lying in court is a crime, isn't it?
Surely we would expect the average citizens of our country to consider
the reporting and exposing of a crime as taking precedence over any
friendship with those involved in the crime. We don't expect the wife or
mother, son or daughter of a perpetrator to give truth priority, which
is why our legal system allows a confidentiality privilege to certain
relatives of accused wrongdoers. But being that Lewinsky and Tripp are
not directly related, it would seem that Tripp's priority of truth over
friendship is warranted.
Still, that well-reasoned argument fails to convince Clinton supporters.
Perhaps they need to be reminded of David Cash Jr. -- just another
"average person" who chose to nobly ignore the crimes of a friend. In
May of 1997, Jeremy Strohmeyer raped and murdered nine-year-old Sherrice
Iverson in a Nevada casino. Cash witnessed the molestation and walked
away. Strohmeyer later told Cash that he had strangled the girl. But
Cash chose to honor his friendship with Jeremy Strohmeyer. He kept
quiet, failing to alert authorities while the child was being molested,
and again failing to alert authorities when he learned
of the murder. He certainly was loyal to his friend.
Is this the type of loyalty Clinton supporters would require of Linda
Tripp?
By the way, there is now a call for a new Good Samaritan law in Nevada,
making it a crime to fail to report child molestation. If the term "Good
Samaritan Law" rings a bell in your mind, perhaps you saw the final
episode of Seinfeld. Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer were all
arrested
for failing to report a crime and for failing to aid the victim of a
crime. Sure, Jerry et al. are likable people and all -- they're funny,
they're popular, yadda yadda. But they're also in jail, last we knew,
for ignoring a crime. We laugh when Jerry & Kramer do it, but do we also
expect Linda Tripp to ignore criminal activity?
Leo Madden, in a more enlightened response to the Support Linda Tripp!
website, offered a different take on friendship, loyalty and criminal
behavior:
Linda joins the company of Saint Thomas More, the patron saint of
lawyers, who, when asked to commit perjury out of friendship, replies to the suggestion
with these words (I paraphrase from Robert Bolt's play, A Man For All Seasons), "Out of
Friendship? And when the Just Judge condems me to the inferno for doing
something that I knew was wrong, will you join me, out of friendship?"
