Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [139]
Dade County, Florida, state attorney Janet Reno made a name for herself as one of the leading witch-hunters in the child-abuse hysteria era. In the similarly ludicrous Fells Acres case, brought by then–district attorney Scott Harshbarger in Middlesex, Massachusetts, Gerald Amirault served eighteen years in prison, and his mother and sister served eight years, for imaginary crimes. Without a shred of physical evidence to support the allegations, children coached by liberal therapists with naked dolls and “let’s pretend” games made preposterous claims of rape with butcher knives, naked children tied to trees, and animal sacrifices.
Not one child ever spontaneously claimed to have been abused. Indeed, no allegations of abuse arose until the child therapists showed up. More than a decade after their convictions, when defense lawyers played the tapes showing how child therapists had coaxed accusations from the children, reporters from Miami to Boston gasped, “Oh my God!”10
And yet mostly liberal prosecutors put innocent people in jail on the basis of fantastical stories that had been implanted by alleged therapists. It is terrifying that this could have happened in America. This was one of the most egregious mass violations of people’s rights in U.S. history. (A decade later, Reno would top it by killing nearly eighty civilians in Waco, Texas.)
Almost all of these cases were brought and defended by liberals—Janet Reno, Scott Harshbarger, and Martha Coakley. The ACLU was too busy forcing a small town in South Dakota to take down a crèche to notice the mass imprisonment of people for crimes that had never happened.
Harshbarger used the case as a launching pad to run for attorney general and then governor of Massachusetts. After losing his gubernatorial bid, he was made president of the liberal group Common Cause, where he lobbied for campaign finance reform. Janet Reno went from imprisoning innocent people in Florida to being appointed attorney general by Bill Clinton (and not imprisoning guilty people).
When similar claims of sexual molestation and ritual satanic abuse at Breezy Point day care center in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, were presented to the Republican district attorney, Alan Rubenstein, he concluded that the charges were utterly baseless. Indeed, after he discovered that the child-abuse “expert” was actually an unemployed plumber, Rubenstein warned him that if he set foot in Bucks County, he’d be arrested for fraud.11
This is not the only way liberals have used children for political gain. Liberals specialize in promoting the backstabbing children of prominent conservatives. In 2004, the Democrats featured Ronald Reagan’s son, incorrectly known as Ron Reagan Jr., speaking in favor of embryonic stem cell research, a policy that would have been detested by his staunchly pro-life father. There was no reason for anyone to care what “Ron Jr.” had to say about stem vegetables, much less stem cells—other than as a postmortem rebuke to his father.
In 2008, Ron triumphantly endorsed Barack Obama. In 2011, he wrote a book absurdly announcing that his father had Alzheimer’s as president—a medical diagnosis that was promptly dismissed by Reagan’s White House doctors, as well as disproved by his medical records.12
Most despicably, while Reagan was still alive, Playboy magazine put a full nude torso shot of Patti Reagan on its cover, with only a black man’s hands covering her breasts. “Ronald Reagan’s Renegade Daughter,” the skin magazine proclaimed.
The son of the great Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer attacked his father as a fraud and con man in a book called Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Solely because of who his father was, Schaeffer was given a platform by the Left to launch venomous