Suing God?
So, I was just sent this news blurb about former Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chamber’s lawsuit against God. It was meant to make me smile and it did, but it also made me curious. A Google search led me to this 2006 article in Mother Jones about Chambers and his long tenure in Nebraska’s legislature.
Here is the lawsuit Chambers filed in 2007 seeking a permanent injunction against God claiming God caused “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts … resulting in the wide-spread death, destruction and terrorization of millions.”
Despite the fact that God responded to Chamber’s suit and an agent of God filed a counter-suit, the Chambers case was thrown out with prejudice because God doesn’t have an address and couldn’t be served legal notice. Not to be deterred, Chambers is now appealing to the Nebraska Supreme Court.
Apparently, Chambers filed the 2007 suit to make the point that everyone should get their day in court, even if the lawsuit might be called frivolous. Given Chambers record as a champion of social justice, I think it is appropriate to consider his case against God in light of the unbridled power corporations have amassed in recent years.
Unlike working people, corporations have limited liability and unlimited life times. If I steal your wallet, file bankruptcy, or get caught drinking and driving, I will, quite likely, meet my legal comeuppance. On the other hand, corporations, in the body of fictional personhood, can shield real corporate executives who escape the law by hopping aboard private jets and floating safely into early retirement with the help of golden parachutes. An individual who finds him or herself going head to head with corporate power will usually end up villified, psychologically broken, or at least find s/he is holding the short end of the stick. Corporations have built tremendous wealth and power under the Bush Administration.
Like labor unions and government regulations, the right to sue is a check on the power accumulated by corporate fat cats. The law, while revered, is influenced, coerced and shaped by corporate persons and is used to torments worker just as it assaulted Franz Kafka’s imagination. Unknowable and inaccessible, the law often seems neither fair nor just. Just like the country simpleton who asks to be admitted to the law in Kafka’s “Before the Law”, workers have confronted the man in the fur coat preventing them access.
It is not the letter of the law that is elusive, but the anatomy of the power that guards the law. We know the corporations and the lobbyists, the union busters and prescription peddlers matter more than the laws that are created and then are enforced or not enforced. The close of this election season reminds me that the law is still a source of hope for US workers. Yet, the machinists whose union was decimated by NAFTA or the farmworkers poisoned in the fields serve to remind me, often the power of the law displays its feathers in a show of status for workers who need the right to sue, to have their day in court, in order to penetrate the power of corporate capital.
When I type as a word document and paste, the format gets all screwed up. I will have to figure this out.
I can assist the government locate where this God guy is… he wons more houses, big houses than any one. Not even the US government has that many homes… they call them churches. It this houses, come those who are trained to hate, lie and destroy. God, rumer has it, told all his visitors to vote YES on 8… glad he is not my god.