I like to comment loosely related comparative law matters, so Re footnote 5 I would like to draw your attention to article 33 of Croatia's Criminal Code (that's the most common translation, but the literal translation would be Penal Law), as translated by Google Translate:
There is no criminal offense, even though its characteristics are met, if the degree of the perpetrator's guilt is low, the offense had no consequences or the consequences are insignificant, and there is no need for the perpetrator to be punished.
(I would remove the last comma, it seems to be a bit more ambiguous, but I remember finding cases that say all there has to be all of those things for it to apply, so it is a bit stricter. It seems to me to be a decent solution to the problem.)
It seems to me that modern originalists, including Scalia seem intent on reading out the 9th amendment, and doing the precise thing it forbids (privileging the enumerated rights).
Even in the US system, I think it would be a due process violation to punish someone for falling ill, and there is usually some sort of necessity or similar defence available.
There is definitively a larger role for judges in the US system (and IMO in any just system) than you seem to admit. There is also something to be said about originalism and textualism not really existing outside the US as such, maybe that should make you more doubtful of them.
(Also, am not Catholic, but maybe the Pope gave some sort of permission to Cardinals to speak about the conclave. Anyways, a local (actually from Bosnia, but neigbouring country) cardinal Puljić gave an interview after the conclave in which I think he may have said too much, I remeber him saying something like the people who supported Francis supported Prevost more or something to the effect.)
In truth, there usually *is* some law or policy that prevents these just laws from being enforced in cases where it is unjust. As Scalia himself goes on to notice:
> Some of the imperfections can be cured or mitigated by doctrines and devices other than the mauling of text, such as enforcement discretion, the rule of lenity (see § 49), deference to executive interpretation, or special doctrines applicable to special situations. For example, it may well be that the undeniable exclusion of ambulances by the text of the ordinance is countermanded by an ordinance or court-made rule exempting emergency vehicles from traffic rules.
Some of that's legitimate, some of it isn't (enforcement discretion is routinely abused), but my claim here is fairly restricted: if it gets to a judge, under the U.S. Constitution, the judges has to follow the law as it is written.
As for the Ninth Amendment, Scalia happens to discuss it in Troxel v. Granville, JUST outside the part I quoted. Here's a fuller quote:
> In my view, a right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the "unalienable Rights" with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims "all men ... are endowed by their Creator." And in my view that right is also among the "othe[r] [rights] retained by the people" which the Ninth Amendment says the Constitution's enumeration of rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage." The Declaration of Independence, however, is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to "deny or disparage" other rights is far removed from affirming anyone of them, and even further removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people. Consequently, while I would think it entirely compatible with the commitment to representative democracy set forth in the founding documents to argue, in legislative chambers or in electoral campaigns, that the State has no power to interfere with parents' authority over the rearing of their children, I do not believe that the power which the Constitution confers upon me as a judge entitles me to deny legal effect to laws that (in my view) infringe upon what is (in my view) that unenumerated right.
> ...Judicial vindication of "parental rights" under a Constitution that does not even mention them requires (as JUSTICE KENNEDY'S opinion rightly points out) not only a judicially crafted definition of parents, but also-unless, as no one believes, the parental rights are to be absolute-judicially approved assessments of "harm to the child" and judicially defined gradations of other persons (grandparents, extended family, adoptive family in an adoption later found to be invalid, long-term guardians, etc.) who may have some claim against the wishes of the parents. If we embrace this unenumerated right, I think it obvious-whether we affirm or reverse the judgment here, or remand as JUSTICE STEVENS or JUSTICE KENNEDY would do-that we will be ushering in a new regime of judicially prescribed, and federally prescribed, family law. I have no reason to believe that federal judges will be better at this than state legislatures; and state legislatures have the great advantages of doing harm in a more circumscribed area, of being able to correct their mistakes in a flash, and of being removable by the people.
As for originalism in the rest of the world: I try not to be too hard on the rest of the world about that. You all have different legal systems, rooted in different constitutions, both written and unwritten. In those legal systems, perhaps the justifications for originalist-textualism do not exist. Perhaps, in those systems, the law itself prescribes a different approach (which the law can certainly do). Sometimes, unlike in our system where there is a rigid division between law crafting and law enforcement, judges in other countries legitimately play a designed role in legislation, and are allowed to be guided by their policy preferences. Perhaps judges in those system are bound by other norms and rules beyond the written law, and those judges actually follow those rules rather than just making up whatever they want. Certainly in systems with parliamentary supremacy, there are powerful, effective, republican checks on the courts which makes it much less urgent for judges to operate with a coherent, restrained judicial philosophy, since the legislature can just correct their errors. So there's lot of reasons why another country might not take up originalism, and many of them are innocent.
I have my doubts, because, when I hear about a foreign court decision, it tends to be because some court made up some radical legal conclusion about what appears to be thin air. But it is possible that originalism is unique to America because of peculiarities in the American legal system, and not because everyone else on Earth is content to be ruled by a bunch of tyrants in black robes.
Sometimes I do have doubts about whether originalism is correct, even in the American system. But if it is not correct, that doesn't tempt me toward purposivism; it tempts me toward legislative supremacy, which is one of the major alternatives the world has tried over the years.
Thanks for answering but my criticisms mostly remain. I am unsure that the stark difference between American systems and other actually exists as opposed to originalists having made it up for political reasons.
Re the law itself many Congressional statutes include explicit statements of purpose, I also remeber finding a US code section providing that it (the section) be liberally construed. I am unsure how courts approach these nowadays, but I have an (unfounded tbf) suspicion originalist judges may be ignoring those parts of the law.
The 9th and 11th amendments (underreading one and overreading the other) are the areas were conservatives are most obviously making stuff up because they don't like the constitution IMO.
Hot take: The meaning of the 9th is quite clear and it includes judicial enforcement of unenumerated rights. If you want to read out a part of the constitution because of your distaste for judges deciding stuff, you shouldn't be a judge and should resign or be impeached and removed.
One other comparatove law curriosity that I got reminded of when you mentioned legislative supremacy: it seems to me there is a much better chance of Congress successfully removing something from the courts' jurisdiction that in the UK. In a line of cases from Anisminic to Privacy International where they basically read out the ouster clause (in Anisminic they say that the ouster only applies to decision which are legally sound, not ones in error, and effectively merge jurisdiction and merits) and assune jurisdiction anyway.
The (plurality AFAIK) judgment in Privacy International also contains this wonderful paragraph: That more flexible approach to the relationship between the legislature and the courts is in my view wholly consistent with the modern constitutional settlement, as confirmed by the 2005 Act, and recognised by this court in Miller. Against that background, the judgments of this court in Cart point the way to an approach which
(pace Professor Forsyth - see para 98 above) is both pragmatic and principled. The critical step taken by this court in Cart was to confirm, what was perhaps implicit in some of the earlier cases, that it is ultimately for the courts, not the legislature, to determine the limits set by the rule of law to the power to exclude review.
So the UK courts have come very close (but maybe haven't actually since most of this stuff is in pluralities in concurrences) to denying legislative supremacy. To me this at least seems better and more honest than abusing statutory interpretation which seems to be the route they usually take here (and also took in this case AFAIK).
This comment is a bit of a mess, I meant to say there is a better chance of Congress successfully removing something from the courts' jurisdiction in the US (AFAIK Congressional power there has been interpreted as more or less absolute) than Parliament in the UK.
Perhaps they should simply not swear people to secrecy about the conclave at all. Why is that necessary to begin with?
I am not sure exactly when the rule about secrecy was first started. One can certainly find plenty of information about the voting in conclaves in centuries past in their Wikipedia articles (see, for a random example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1830–1831_conclave), indicating that either it hadn't been instituted then, or cardinals back then were ignoring any secrecy vows. If it is the latter, and cardinals have been ignoring it for centuries, is there any purpose to continuing the vow that doesn't accomplish anything?
If it's the former, and the secrecy was introduced at some later point, one must ask why it was instituted, and if those reasons are still valid. Is it actually that terrible a thing for people to know things like who were the frontrunners, especially given people do seem to know anyway? Even if there were zero leaks, again one must ask: What does no one knowing what happened actually accomplish?
A few more comments:
"Indeed, since I wrote this passage, Archbishop Guy de Kermiel of Toulouse appointed a priest who was convicted of raping a teen boy in 2006 to the prestigious office of diocesan chancellor. The bishop said that he acted out of “mercy.”"
This was a bad one. Even if we suppose the priest was completely repentant, simple PR considerations should have precluded this appointment. Desire to avoid scandal--both in the Catholic moral sense and the more colloquial sense of the word--by itself should have prompted the bishop to not do this. At least another bishop did criticize him for this, but I don't think that resulted in any retraction of the appointment yet.
In regards to this footnote:
“Of course, the Pope is obligated to obey divine law at all times, same as everybody else. The pope can derogate from a day of fasting or move the date of Easter, but he can’t get drunk and hire prostitutes.
Well, he can, it’s been tried, but he’ll go to Hell.”
This then links to a page about Alexander VI that among other things refers to the Banquet of Chestnuts, the incident you refer to. The problem is, you refer to this as if it's definite fact ("it's been tried"), when it's actually questionable whether this event occurred. Various historians view the account with skepticism; true, others seem to find it more credible, but there are still real questions as to whether this ever happened as described (see, for example, the Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banquet_of_Chestnuts and while I know it's tempting to not be too trustful of Wikipedia given the fact anyone can edit it, I don't think it's a site that has a particularly pro-religious bias--and again, it simply is echoing the skepticism of historians).
This is not to say that other accusations of Alexander VI which do have more evidence for them are not true--but this one seems questionable to use as an example given the uncertainty about whether it actually happened. If "Well, he can, it's been tried" had been reworded to something like "Well, he can, and one was accused of this", that would have been preferable.
"Perhaps they should simply not swear people to secrecy about the conclave at all. Why is that necessary to begin with?"
That's an entirely fair question, but my point was that it's the law, and they're just... ignoring it. If it's a bad law that ought to be repealed, then it should be repealed, and they should ask for its repeal. They can even do so publicly! Instead, they're just semi-openly disobeying it in flagrant ways. This is a profound scandal that can, in time, gravely undermine the Church's capacity to function. It infects everything. It's gotta stop.
But, at the object level, do we actually need a conclave secrecy requirement? Eh. In democracies, you usually impose secrecy to prevent accountability from the voters / lobbying groups, and I suspect similar here: the biggest threat to the liberty of the Church in much of the medieval/early modern was overweening kings who wanted strict control over how their cardinals voted and acted, and secrecy (somewhat) foiled that. But modern cardinals are accountable to nobody at all except the pope himself, who was almost certainly at the conclave anyway.
I know that the results of many conclaves have been gathered long after the fact because cardinals are allowed to take and keep notes, especially vote tallies. When they die, those documents are sometimes found among their effects and circulate. This appears to be both unintentional and legal, but the fact that the "found it in his personal effects" loophole has been open for so long without anyone fixing it suggests you might be on to something by asking whether the law is necessary at all.
I know the details of Banquet of Chestnuts are controversial, so I phrased my paragraph to make this rather restrained claim: Alexander VI got drunk and hired prostitutes. You don't *have* to believe the salacious details about chestnuts being strewn about and a copulation competition to believe this limited claim. Looking at the full sweep of Alex VI's papacy, I would be surprised if I learned that he had hired no prostitutes that night and *stunned* if I learned that he never made use of one during his papacy. He had SO MANY mistresses! (And, indeed, Giovanna dei Cattanei may have dabbled in the trade herself. She was certainly proximate to it.)
Perhaps this is still unfair of me. However, the Church broke me in the late 2000s. I am no longer willing to bend over backwards to carefully parse the specific allegations of sexual misconduct committed by pervert clerics whose record of sexual misconduct is open, notorious, and thoroughly documented. If, at the Pearly Gates, St. Peter tells me I judged too rashly, and that, instead of accusing Alex VI of prostitution, I should have accused him of decades of fornication, then I will indeed apologize.
I like to comment loosely related comparative law matters, so Re footnote 5 I would like to draw your attention to article 33 of Croatia's Criminal Code (that's the most common translation, but the literal translation would be Penal Law), as translated by Google Translate:
There is no criminal offense, even though its characteristics are met, if the degree of the perpetrator's guilt is low, the offense had no consequences or the consequences are insignificant, and there is no need for the perpetrator to be punished.
(I would remove the last comma, it seems to be a bit more ambiguous, but I remember finding cases that say all there has to be all of those things for it to apply, so it is a bit stricter. It seems to me to be a decent solution to the problem.)
It seems to me that modern originalists, including Scalia seem intent on reading out the 9th amendment, and doing the precise thing it forbids (privileging the enumerated rights).
Even in the US system, I think it would be a due process violation to punish someone for falling ill, and there is usually some sort of necessity or similar defence available.
There is definitively a larger role for judges in the US system (and IMO in any just system) than you seem to admit. There is also something to be said about originalism and textualism not really existing outside the US as such, maybe that should make you more doubtful of them.
(Also, am not Catholic, but maybe the Pope gave some sort of permission to Cardinals to speak about the conclave. Anyways, a local (actually from Bosnia, but neigbouring country) cardinal Puljić gave an interview after the conclave in which I think he may have said too much, I remeber him saying something like the people who supported Francis supported Prevost more or something to the effect.)
Ah, I misread, the offense would be helping the person who fell ill. I still think there is usually a necessity defence available in such situations.
In truth, there usually *is* some law or policy that prevents these just laws from being enforced in cases where it is unjust. As Scalia himself goes on to notice:
> Some of the imperfections can be cured or mitigated by doctrines and devices other than the mauling of text, such as enforcement discretion, the rule of lenity (see § 49), deference to executive interpretation, or special doctrines applicable to special situations. For example, it may well be that the undeniable exclusion of ambulances by the text of the ordinance is countermanded by an ordinance or court-made rule exempting emergency vehicles from traffic rules.
Some of that's legitimate, some of it isn't (enforcement discretion is routinely abused), but my claim here is fairly restricted: if it gets to a judge, under the U.S. Constitution, the judges has to follow the law as it is written.
As for the Ninth Amendment, Scalia happens to discuss it in Troxel v. Granville, JUST outside the part I quoted. Here's a fuller quote:
> In my view, a right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the "unalienable Rights" with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims "all men ... are endowed by their Creator." And in my view that right is also among the "othe[r] [rights] retained by the people" which the Ninth Amendment says the Constitution's enumeration of rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage." The Declaration of Independence, however, is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to "deny or disparage" other rights is far removed from affirming anyone of them, and even further removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people. Consequently, while I would think it entirely compatible with the commitment to representative democracy set forth in the founding documents to argue, in legislative chambers or in electoral campaigns, that the State has no power to interfere with parents' authority over the rearing of their children, I do not believe that the power which the Constitution confers upon me as a judge entitles me to deny legal effect to laws that (in my view) infringe upon what is (in my view) that unenumerated right.
> ...Judicial vindication of "parental rights" under a Constitution that does not even mention them requires (as JUSTICE KENNEDY'S opinion rightly points out) not only a judicially crafted definition of parents, but also-unless, as no one believes, the parental rights are to be absolute-judicially approved assessments of "harm to the child" and judicially defined gradations of other persons (grandparents, extended family, adoptive family in an adoption later found to be invalid, long-term guardians, etc.) who may have some claim against the wishes of the parents. If we embrace this unenumerated right, I think it obvious-whether we affirm or reverse the judgment here, or remand as JUSTICE STEVENS or JUSTICE KENNEDY would do-that we will be ushering in a new regime of judicially prescribed, and federally prescribed, family law. I have no reason to believe that federal judges will be better at this than state legislatures; and state legislatures have the great advantages of doing harm in a more circumscribed area, of being able to correct their mistakes in a flash, and of being removable by the people.
This brief discourse on the function of the Ninth Amendment in American case law fits with my broader understanding of the Ninth's original meaning, which was largely shaped by Michael McConnell's "The Ninth Amendment in Light of Text and History": https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/publication/259408/doc/slspublic/ssrn-id1678203.pdf
As for originalism in the rest of the world: I try not to be too hard on the rest of the world about that. You all have different legal systems, rooted in different constitutions, both written and unwritten. In those legal systems, perhaps the justifications for originalist-textualism do not exist. Perhaps, in those systems, the law itself prescribes a different approach (which the law can certainly do). Sometimes, unlike in our system where there is a rigid division between law crafting and law enforcement, judges in other countries legitimately play a designed role in legislation, and are allowed to be guided by their policy preferences. Perhaps judges in those system are bound by other norms and rules beyond the written law, and those judges actually follow those rules rather than just making up whatever they want. Certainly in systems with parliamentary supremacy, there are powerful, effective, republican checks on the courts which makes it much less urgent for judges to operate with a coherent, restrained judicial philosophy, since the legislature can just correct their errors. So there's lot of reasons why another country might not take up originalism, and many of them are innocent.
I have my doubts, because, when I hear about a foreign court decision, it tends to be because some court made up some radical legal conclusion about what appears to be thin air. But it is possible that originalism is unique to America because of peculiarities in the American legal system, and not because everyone else on Earth is content to be ruled by a bunch of tyrants in black robes.
Sometimes I do have doubts about whether originalism is correct, even in the American system. But if it is not correct, that doesn't tempt me toward purposivism; it tempts me toward legislative supremacy, which is one of the major alternatives the world has tried over the years.
Thanks for answering but my criticisms mostly remain. I am unsure that the stark difference between American systems and other actually exists as opposed to originalists having made it up for political reasons.
Re the law itself many Congressional statutes include explicit statements of purpose, I also remeber finding a US code section providing that it (the section) be liberally construed. I am unsure how courts approach these nowadays, but I have an (unfounded tbf) suspicion originalist judges may be ignoring those parts of the law.
The 9th and 11th amendments (underreading one and overreading the other) are the areas were conservatives are most obviously making stuff up because they don't like the constitution IMO.
Hot take: The meaning of the 9th is quite clear and it includes judicial enforcement of unenumerated rights. If you want to read out a part of the constitution because of your distaste for judges deciding stuff, you shouldn't be a judge and should resign or be impeached and removed.
One other comparatove law curriosity that I got reminded of when you mentioned legislative supremacy: it seems to me there is a much better chance of Congress successfully removing something from the courts' jurisdiction that in the UK. In a line of cases from Anisminic to Privacy International where they basically read out the ouster clause (in Anisminic they say that the ouster only applies to decision which are legally sound, not ones in error, and effectively merge jurisdiction and merits) and assune jurisdiction anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisminic_Ltd_v_Foreign_Compensation_Commission
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Privacy_International)_v_Investigatory_Powers_Tribunal
The (plurality AFAIK) judgment in Privacy International also contains this wonderful paragraph: That more flexible approach to the relationship between the legislature and the courts is in my view wholly consistent with the modern constitutional settlement, as confirmed by the 2005 Act, and recognised by this court in Miller. Against that background, the judgments of this court in Cart point the way to an approach which
(pace Professor Forsyth - see para 98 above) is both pragmatic and principled. The critical step taken by this court in Cart was to confirm, what was perhaps implicit in some of the earlier cases, that it is ultimately for the courts, not the legislature, to determine the limits set by the rule of law to the power to exclude review.
So the UK courts have come very close (but maybe haven't actually since most of this stuff is in pluralities in concurrences) to denying legislative supremacy. To me this at least seems better and more honest than abusing statutory interpretation which seems to be the route they usually take here (and also took in this case AFAIK).
This comment is a bit of a mess, I meant to say there is a better chance of Congress successfully removing something from the courts' jurisdiction in the US (AFAIK Congressional power there has been interpreted as more or less absolute) than Parliament in the UK.
As one famous priest likes to say, "Do the Red, Say the Black". It applies outside the Liturgies as well...
Perhaps they should simply not swear people to secrecy about the conclave at all. Why is that necessary to begin with?
I am not sure exactly when the rule about secrecy was first started. One can certainly find plenty of information about the voting in conclaves in centuries past in their Wikipedia articles (see, for a random example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1830–1831_conclave), indicating that either it hadn't been instituted then, or cardinals back then were ignoring any secrecy vows. If it is the latter, and cardinals have been ignoring it for centuries, is there any purpose to continuing the vow that doesn't accomplish anything?
If it's the former, and the secrecy was introduced at some later point, one must ask why it was instituted, and if those reasons are still valid. Is it actually that terrible a thing for people to know things like who were the frontrunners, especially given people do seem to know anyway? Even if there were zero leaks, again one must ask: What does no one knowing what happened actually accomplish?
A few more comments:
"Indeed, since I wrote this passage, Archbishop Guy de Kermiel of Toulouse appointed a priest who was convicted of raping a teen boy in 2006 to the prestigious office of diocesan chancellor. The bishop said that he acted out of “mercy.”"
This was a bad one. Even if we suppose the priest was completely repentant, simple PR considerations should have precluded this appointment. Desire to avoid scandal--both in the Catholic moral sense and the more colloquial sense of the word--by itself should have prompted the bishop to not do this. At least another bishop did criticize him for this, but I don't think that resulted in any retraction of the appointment yet.
In regards to this footnote:
“Of course, the Pope is obligated to obey divine law at all times, same as everybody else. The pope can derogate from a day of fasting or move the date of Easter, but he can’t get drunk and hire prostitutes.
Well, he can, it’s been tried, but he’ll go to Hell.”
This then links to a page about Alexander VI that among other things refers to the Banquet of Chestnuts, the incident you refer to. The problem is, you refer to this as if it's definite fact ("it's been tried"), when it's actually questionable whether this event occurred. Various historians view the account with skepticism; true, others seem to find it more credible, but there are still real questions as to whether this ever happened as described (see, for example, the Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banquet_of_Chestnuts and while I know it's tempting to not be too trustful of Wikipedia given the fact anyone can edit it, I don't think it's a site that has a particularly pro-religious bias--and again, it simply is echoing the skepticism of historians).
This is not to say that other accusations of Alexander VI which do have more evidence for them are not true--but this one seems questionable to use as an example given the uncertainty about whether it actually happened. If "Well, he can, it's been tried" had been reworded to something like "Well, he can, and one was accused of this", that would have been preferable.
"Perhaps they should simply not swear people to secrecy about the conclave at all. Why is that necessary to begin with?"
That's an entirely fair question, but my point was that it's the law, and they're just... ignoring it. If it's a bad law that ought to be repealed, then it should be repealed, and they should ask for its repeal. They can even do so publicly! Instead, they're just semi-openly disobeying it in flagrant ways. This is a profound scandal that can, in time, gravely undermine the Church's capacity to function. It infects everything. It's gotta stop.
But, at the object level, do we actually need a conclave secrecy requirement? Eh. In democracies, you usually impose secrecy to prevent accountability from the voters / lobbying groups, and I suspect similar here: the biggest threat to the liberty of the Church in much of the medieval/early modern was overweening kings who wanted strict control over how their cardinals voted and acted, and secrecy (somewhat) foiled that. But modern cardinals are accountable to nobody at all except the pope himself, who was almost certainly at the conclave anyway.
I know that the results of many conclaves have been gathered long after the fact because cardinals are allowed to take and keep notes, especially vote tallies. When they die, those documents are sometimes found among their effects and circulate. This appears to be both unintentional and legal, but the fact that the "found it in his personal effects" loophole has been open for so long without anyone fixing it suggests you might be on to something by asking whether the law is necessary at all.
I know the details of Banquet of Chestnuts are controversial, so I phrased my paragraph to make this rather restrained claim: Alexander VI got drunk and hired prostitutes. You don't *have* to believe the salacious details about chestnuts being strewn about and a copulation competition to believe this limited claim. Looking at the full sweep of Alex VI's papacy, I would be surprised if I learned that he had hired no prostitutes that night and *stunned* if I learned that he never made use of one during his papacy. He had SO MANY mistresses! (And, indeed, Giovanna dei Cattanei may have dabbled in the trade herself. She was certainly proximate to it.)
Perhaps this is still unfair of me. However, the Church broke me in the late 2000s. I am no longer willing to bend over backwards to carefully parse the specific allegations of sexual misconduct committed by pervert clerics whose record of sexual misconduct is open, notorious, and thoroughly documented. If, at the Pearly Gates, St. Peter tells me I judged too rashly, and that, instead of accusing Alex VI of prostitution, I should have accused him of decades of fornication, then I will indeed apologize.