In surprisingly harsh terms, an anonymous editorial posted today on The Hartford Courant website attacks Representative Minnie Gonzalez for a strongly worded email she sent to a constituent criticizing Rep. Rosa Rebimbas. The Hartford Courant editorial further speaks of the Gonzalez email as "insulting" and "disgraceful" and proposes that Rep. Gonzalez should be sanctioned publicly by the House.
I still have not had the opportunity to watch the CT-N video of the Friday, April 10, 2015 hearing and so I personally cannot comment upon Rep. Rosa Rebimbas' behavior on that day which resulted in this email. However, I will say that granted how frustrated victims of family court feel about the sufferings that they have endured and the need for reform, I would hardly call the email itself anything but a fairly minor blip on the screen.
Further, I think we have all experienced enough of life at this point to know when particularly rotten individuals, such as the Republicans in this particular matter, attempt to derail the focus which should be on a serious and important matter of family court injustice by hooting and hollering about a relatively minor matter, i.e. this email, and making out that it is second in terms of atrocities to the holocaust itself.
The disgrace here is not in regard to a relatively minor and uninteresting piece of hyperbole on the part of Rep. Minnie Gonzalez, the disgrace is that the Republicans did not have sufficient good judgment and character to overlook this minor disruption in the scheme of things in order to proceed with business and do the jobs that they were hired to do, particularly when we had such significantly important bills on the docket such as the one in regard to videotaping the police and in connection to protecting the victims of domestic violence.
It is laughable that The Hartford Courant would describe Rep. Minnie Gonzalez use of the Central American equivalent of "every dog has its day" or "every pig has his Saturday" as some kind of vicious "threat" against Rep. Rebimbas.
I mean, please--get real. You want to know what a real threat is? A real threat is when you get a summons from a marshall asking you to respond to a debt collection complaint from your former family court attorney including a lien on your house which will result in a foreclosure, a direct consequence of judicial abuse in your recent divorce.
That is a threat--not some silly remark about pigs.
You know, every day I get up and act as parent to my children. Every once in a while during the course of my role as a parent in these past few years, my ex husband has made threats to take me back to court and sue me for custody of my children, implying what a bad mother I am. This does not excuse me from being a parent.
Likewise, just because a few people have a hot under the collar interchange during the course of their work on the Judiciary Committee, this does not justify shutting the entire Committee down.
What is this--Kindergarten?
I was particularly disappointed to see The Hartford Courant's name on this piece of nonsense editorial, but I was not in the least surprised. Contrary to their journalistic ethics, The Hartford Courant has been maintaining a cozy relationship with the CT Judicial Branch by participating in the CT Judicial Branch's Judicial-Media Committee. This has meant that several top CEOs and journalists from The Hartford Courant, other print media around CT, and also television in the State of Connecticut have been conducting regular meetings with Judges, attorneys and other CT Judicial Branch employees ostensibly to improve the relationship between the CT Judicial Branch and the media and to increase media access to legal proceedings.
In reality, what these meetings have done is make the media a captive audience while the CT Judicial Branch has force fed it with their official lines regarding their policies, actions, and excuses for the Branch's widespread corruption. Imagine if any political party or special interest group in the State of Connecticut had anything like this kind of immediate access to members of the media--how remarkable would that be?
What The Hartford Courant is not telling you here is that such a special relationship between itself and the CT Judicial Branch is a complete violation of its journalistic ethics and represents a deeper and more widespread well of corruption than anything Rep. Minnie Gonzalez could concoct.
Many family court litigants during recent years have been talking about how important it is to get their stories out to the media and yet they have not been taken seriously when they've approached journalists with their stories.
In essence, for the last decade or more, there has been a complete media blackout on the struggles of individual litigants in the CT Family Courts although their stories of injustice and exploitation are compelling.
Why do we hear of the injustices in so many other arenas but not in the area of the corrupt CT Family Court System? I'll tell you why--because media outlets such as The Hartford Courant long ago sold out to the CT Judicial Branch for the ego enhancing privilege of rubbing shoulders with the CT Judicial leadership whom they appear to worship blindly.
They should be ashamed.
The Hartford Courant should look to itself and its own glaring flaws before daring to criticize a leader such as Rep Minnie Gonzalez who is, though clearly very human, doing the best she can to assist the most vulnerable.
