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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, October 18, 1979
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EXCERPTS FROM TUCSON MINISTERIAL LUNCHEON COMMENTS
(Editor's Note: At a Ministerial Luncheon in Tucson, October 8th, Mr. Rader
spoke, in Mr. Armstrong's absence, about several important aspects of the
California controversy and the challenges the Church plans to meet head on
in this conflict. Following are excerpts of his comments which we feel
will be of special interest to the ministry at large.)
I appreciated the questions concerning the lawsuit at yesterday's luncheon.
We had anticipated that there would be these dark areas. We'll just have
to do a better job of communicating to you fully with a wealth of detail
and raw material about these events. We'll be better eyeball witnesses
for you in print, because you are not any more informed out there in other
places of the country than some of the reporters are who interviewed me
here in Tucson. They are kind of catching their news about the case by
the wire services, and the wire services are in themselves a distillation
of what is happening.
A Complex Legal Action
As I was mentioning to the people here at the tab , most lawyers--I mean
lawyers who are in practice--would have difficulty following the legal
maneuvers in the case. This is a very complicated legal action, and most
lawyers have never been confronted with a problem even remotely similar
to this. Consequently, most of the things that are being done are things
which most lawyers will never do once in their lives. And we are doing
it in a massive way across the country, and taking every step to thwart
the efforts of the state to continue to wrong us while an appellate court
eventually grabs hold of it.
Now a word like "writ" is shorthand for another expression which would be
totally inexplicable to most laymen, like a "writ of certiorari.
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What
would that mean to you? Or a "writ of mandamus"? What would that mean?
Or a "writ of prohibition?" You ask 90% of the lawyers and they will not
be able to tell you what it is, so we shorthanded it by saying a "writ."
Well, a writ is different than an appellate brief. You have an automatic
right by law to make an appeal, and the court must hear your appeal. That's
why you have appellate courts and you have inferior {loweE.7 courts.
But a "writ" is something extraordinary, the result being that the court
to whom the writ is addressed can view the writ with its discretionary
authority. It's like asking somebody for an appointment. He doesn't have
to see you. It's up to him. You have no right as a matter of law to
demand that he see you or even listen to you. But first, to have your
case make any impression on him, he has to listen to you. But before he
listens to you, he has to agree to see you. And that's what happened last
week in the Supreme Court /when a writ of certiorari was turned down with-
out commen!/.
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Five months ago we filed our "writ of certiorari" with the Supreme Court
the United States. We said, "Look, we would like an appointment to have
you hear this case. We want to get you all together, and we want you to
run through this thing with us," and the brief that we filed was designed
to get them to say: "0.K., we're going to spare the time and we're going
to see you.
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