Info regarding upcoming trial. (Tomorrow.)

If I were the prosecutor, I'd want to know this. But you never know....:^)

Basically what I have figured out is that when Small was an Edmund Burke Fellow at Catholic U of America (fellowship provided by a very right-wing Catholic group called Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute or CFAM for short) he co-wrote an article with Tyler Ament, another very right-wing Catholic/Republican activist who later went on to attain minor fame by creating a web site called “Wasted in Hawaii,” which excoriated the President for the cost of his Hawaiian family vacation.

The article was about their activism at the UN Youth Conference of 2011. One of their activities, documented by another CFAM Author, Lauren Funk, was flooding the UN twitter feed with anti-family planning messages for over an hour.

(Just to give you a sense of the nutball factor at CFam, I noticed a recent newsletter headline: “The Generation that Aborted will be Euthanized.”)

Ament is described as director of a CFam offshoot group called International Youth Coalition. One 2011 speaker was Lila Rose, who created a fairly notorious O’Keefe style video at Planned Parenthood offices.

It’s all small potatoes compared with what’s going on in Boston today, but here is the main point:

my thought is that Small’s association with Ament, and his activities regarding the UN (assuming he participated in the flooding of the twitter feed) present a picture of someone who has few qualms about using unorthodox and even disruptive tactics to make a political point, and further undermine his already fishy story. I believe Small disposed of those forms for political reasons. If he pleads guilty tomorrow without cross examination by the prosecuting attorney, we will never know whether those reasons reflected his personal political opinions, or whether he did it with the knowledge and encouragement of his friends or superiors. If Small protests his innocence, and his story isn’t challenged by a Republican prosecutor’s office, well, that’s even worse.

I will try to get this info out into the world tonight. It probably won’t make a bit of difference, and Small will walk away tomorrow…but really, if he disposed of those forms for political reasons, how sad that he and his crowd can get away with this stuff. One reason I feel so strongly about this is that I’m a Notre Dame grad—I don’t think this is how Catholics ought to behave.