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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, May 9, 1980
Page 11
In effect, the State is going to supervise and operate churches. In
order to prot€�t themselves, directors of churches will have to go to the
State and actually get prior permission for expenditures in order to avoid
being second-guessed by the Attorney General's office. Such review and
second-guessing could, in the future, be done by State officials in the
Attorney General's office who might be political hacks, legal incompe
tents who dropped out from the legal profession, atheists, communists,
gays or those who have never managed anything more than a weekly paycheck
in all their lives. These people will then, as grand high priests, be
running the churches by giving their hierarchical approval or disapproval
to all church activities in the State, based on their misjudgment, pre
judice, or pure corruption. It is upon this basis you will run your
California church or else answer to the full weight and power of the
State!
Why Summary Judgment Denied
A summary judgment is a procedure whereby a party to a lawsuit may file
affidavits or rely on other verified facts in an attempt to show that
there are no "triable issues of material fact'' in the case. The opposing
side [in our case the Attorney General] must then file affidavits or
point out other verified facts which would give rise to a triable issue
of material fact. Should it be found there are no material factual
issues, then the case can be decided by the court immediately upon the
"issues of law." This procedure was established to ferret out baseless
claims and save the time and expense of a trial.
As I am one of the attorneys for the Church and one of the named defend
ants in the State action, we filed a motion on my behalf for summary
judgment during April, 1979. We filed an affidavit specifically denying
each and every allegation the State charged against me. Even though the
State did not come forth with a single affidavit as required by law, L.A.
Superior Court Judge Johnson still denied the motion. He did so on the
grounds that the motion was "premature." There is no law to sustain
such a denial. The law provides that my motion could be made any time
after 60 days after the case was filed. The motion was not heard until
3 1/2 months after the case was filed--certainly not "premature" by
existing law.
We filed a second motion for my summary judgment just recently. This
time we accumulated over 1100 affidavits from directors, church and
college employees and our Legal Office employees in order to render even
more factitious the court's denial.
Since 1,000 of the affidavits were by church employees, we were not
desirous of filing them for public inspection.
(We wanted to prevent
dissidents from obtaining all the employees' names as a mailing list.)
The Church was willing to give the affidavits to the Attorney General,
but only with the restriction that he not show the affidavits or give
out the names to the dissidents as the Attorney General's office had
wanted to do with the Church's mailing list last year. Therefore I made
a request of the court to order the Attorney General not to disclose the
names and to seal the affidavits in the court file.
Even though the request for these restrictions in no way adversely
affected the Attorney General, he objected to the names being kept con
fidential if filed, and Judge Weil of the Superior Court arbitrarily so
ruled.