Part of the Colorful Backdrop to Our Story

ARGUMENT



“When a Methodist bishop publicly boasted about his stock market profits, the indignation of the idealist who had once become a minister to help the poor boiled over. The bishop's financial speculations are 'just another proof of the decay of the church as a religious institution and its transformation into a handmaiden of the capitalist system.' he (Leland Olds) wrote. Religions now preach 'the principles of the exploiting class.'"

-- from Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro
(Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002; page 236)



I.


If this case were merely about an unpaid debt, then that debt would have been paid long ago and this case would never have been brought.
But this case was brought, and that's because it is about far more than an unpaid debt. At its heart, this case is about organized religion's inappropriate and ultimately unconstitutional influence over due process, i.e. over the legitimate functioning of a number of democratic institutions, in modern America. The realization of this fact is a revelation which has dawned upon me only recently, as I've performed my unavoidable postmortem upon the corpse that was my seminary career.
I enrolled at the seminary in the summer of 1983 because I believed then (and believe now more than ever) that the institutions of Christianity are desperately in need of reform. In brief, I wished then (and still wish) to carry on those reforms of Christianity begun by folks like Martin Luther in the 16th century and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 20th century. Now, nearly 20 years later, I have tumbled to the realization of the likelihood that the institutions of 21st century Christianity can never be reformed from within until they experience an ungentle nudging and massaging from without -- to a large extent by the judicial systems of the world's great democracies. This case is a sparkling case in point -- as are the current court cases involving pedepheliacal Catholic priests, and the current court case involving government endorsement of one particular religious creed to the exclusion of others in the "under God" decision by the 9th Circuit
in California. I enrolled in seminary to participate in the ineluctable reform of Christianity toward its evolution into a more democratic, humanistic and paradoxically secular instrument of humankind's search for the god/ess within itself.
Appellee's counsel's key contentions in his 7/30/02 Appellee Brief to this Court (with all of which, it may be reasonably inferred from its 9/07/01 Summary Judgment ruling against me, the district court has agreed) prelogically presuppose that we live in a perfect world. To quote Dr. Pangloss's song in Leonard Bernstein's musical adaptation of Voltaire's Candide:
Once one dismisses the rest of all possible worlds,
One finds that this is the best of all possible worlds.

The reader here knows full well that this is not the best of all possible worlds. And yet, in his implicit besmirching of my character in his Reply Brief, appellee's counsel demands that the Court pretend along with him that it is.
Most notably, appellee's counsel wants this Court to believe that anyone who has a cause of action against a party who has damaged them can afford to pursue that cause of action in the courts to seek relief and/or redress. In a perfect world, such equal protection under the law exists. But only in a perfect world. In the real world, the human universe of verifiable molecular facts (the stuff of authentic jurisprudence), the suggestion that I could somehow have afforded to sue the culpable seminary operatives at any time between 1984 and Judgment Day (or even to have brought criminal charges against them without being damaged even further than I already was) is a slanderous suggestion, as it insinuates that my not doing is somehow indicative of a willful negligence on my part, a character flaw.
Once again (as I already opened this door in my Appellant Brief), both District Judge Fernando J. Gaitan in his Summary Judgment ruling and appellee's counsel David DeTar Newbert in his August 2001 Reply Suggestions to the district court have chosen to confuse impotence with negligence. Such a confusion is not only commonplace in modern America, it has been at the bitter root of an almost universally practiced blame-the-victim classism, throughout the course of human history. This is a verifiable historical fact; oceans of material evidence abound to prove that what I'm saying here is true. As true as the laws of gravity, of motion or of thermodynamics.
But what appellee's counsel has insinuated in his Appellee Brief to be my negligence turns out to be, in fact, my impotence. Only in a perfect world could any truly indigent student borrower reasonably be expected to have:
1. Afforded to have hired, in the spring of 1984, a qualified attorney to pursue what may or may not have been a successful appeal to the seminary's verifiably corrupt APDC for his or her (or my) reinstatement as a candidate for the Methodist ministry.
2. Afforded to have landed on his or her feet back in Wichita (or wherever) and to have bought the time (as the middle class does) to have embarked upon a new career in what amounted to, in the mid-1980's, a town with no viable jobs to offer an indigent person -- and, thereby, to begin paying back the government loan at issue here.
3. Afforded to have hired a qualified attorney to successfully sue the enormously wealthy and influential Methodist Church, and/or the seminary, and/or the seminary operatives whose malfeasance had destroyed their life -- and/or to have bought the time (the way the middle class can) to pursue criminal charges against the same.
4. Afforded to have hired a qualified attorney to plead their case to whatever agents of the plaintiff (i.e. the U.S. Secretary of Education) may or may not have been made available to them -- bearing in mind that appellee's counsel himself has expounded at length in more than one forum that no provision for debt relief (no matter how justified) existed or exists.
5. Afforded, at any time between 1984 and Judgment Day (or their winning the lottery), to have repaid the government loan at issue here, while struggling to merely survive [as I have!] below the poverty line, frequently homeless and without an automobile. [See: Defense Exhibits Q and R: Defendant's Sworn Statements (affidavits to the district court), Parts I & II, dated 5/18/01 and 7/19/01 respectively.]
6. Afforded to have hired a qualified attorney to put up anything resembling an adequate defense to the plaintiff's original 4/25/00 law suit -- (Case No. 00-CV-385FJG), the one out of which the appeal before this Court was born -- a defense which would have included the time-consuming, expensive and expertly guided calling of material witnesses, taking of depositions, processing of dozens of interrogatories, investigation of internal seminary documents, and case-law research, for example. [Any truly indigent student borrower, such as myself, not even having adequate access to the Internet -- a latter-day Grand Canyon of socio-economic class distinction in itself.]
7. Afforded to hire a qualified attorney to represent them in an appellate case such as this one -- legal representation which would possess the competence, for instance, to compose a Reply Brief which would argue their case more convincingly than I am here arguing mine.
But the world we live in, the world which has provided the context for the events relevant to the instant case, is not a perfect world -- the best of all possible worlds. It is, instead, the historically verifiable molecular human world in which impotence is not to be confused with negligence, the REAL world, in which any truly indigent student borrower must be understood by any unbiased observer to be truly OPTIONLESS. And yet appellee’s counsel wants this Court to pretend along with him that all seven of the above-listed courses of action were available to me as viable, feasible options, which my make-believe negligence - rather than my factually verifiable economic and social impotence - kept me from exercising.

II.

On page 10 of his 7/30/02 Appellee Brief, appellee's counsel makes the following assertion:
Thus, a claim against a school for having inadequate equipment, unqualified teachers or for failing to provide a good academic program is not a defense to repayment of a guaranteed student loan because the borrower's loan contract with the lender and the enrollment contract with the school are two separate transactions.

While it is true, by definition, that a student borrower's interaction with a school and their interaction with a lending institution (governmental or otherwise) are "two separate transactions," this does not necessarily nor automatically mean that they are wholly unrelated or unconnected transactions, interactions and/or relationships. They can, in fact, be CAUSALLY related and bound together. Such was verifiably the case in the chain of events which triggered the case in question here, as I have already testified in my sworn affidavits to the district court.

Appellee's counsel has implied throughout the course of this case that
these two separate (but inextricably connected) interactions might be geometrically represented by two straight parallel lines. I would beg to differ and argue that a better case can be made for the interaction of the student borrower with the plaintiff (Secretary of Education) and the interaction of the student borrower with the seminary (school) might be more accurately represented geometrically by an equilateral triangle. (The reader may wish to refer back to the reference I first made to this idea on pages 5 and 6 of my 6/20/02 Appellant Brief to this Court.)
The claim I am making against the seminary in question is far more serious and far-reaching in its ramifications than any complaint about inadequate equipment or unqualified teachers, for example. At the heart of my argument is the contention that the seminary CAUSED my loan default. Specific details of how it is that this is the case can be found in both my Appellant Brief and in both parts of my aforementioned sworn affidavits. The simplest way I can distill this idea is this:
Had the seminary's administration not defrauded me the way it did by denying me contractually guaranteed due process, the loan default at issue here would not have occurred. That's a verifiable fact, plain and simple.
Back in 1983, when the government loaned an indigent student money to attend school, an implicit set of understandings pre-existed among the parties involved. One of these warranted understandings was that the indigent student borrower, being indigent, would be making use of the education they received as a direct result of the government loan as their sole means for repaying that loan. The process was never intended by the government to be a crap-shoot. No indigent student borrower in their right mind would have regarded the process as a crap-shoot. And any school with the degree of integrity which both of the other two parties (the student and the government) had sound warrant to infer they were doing business with would have made sure that the process would not be a crap-shoot.
And therein lies the rub. My seminary experience was very much a crap-shoot. And the reason it was a crap-shoot was that, as I have already shown in discovery, the seminary operatives lacked the integrity to hold up their third of the aforementioned triangle. In doing so, they not only let the student (me) down; they let the government down. For logically, the government either expected the seminary folks to be honest or dishonest -- one or the other. I believe that members of this Court will tend to concur with me in taking it as a given that the government, the plaintiff, expected the seminary to be honest rather than dishonest in its dealings.

III.

At around the noon hour, one April day in 1984, as my classmate Reva Rimmer and I were about to enter the seminary dining hall to participate in the usual community noontime meal, we ran into Dr. Susan Vogel, who was at that time Dean of Students. She just happened to be standing, if I recall correctly, near the dining hall entrance in the foyer. I asked her if I might have a word with her. She indicated that that would be acceptable. So she and I and Reva stepped over into a quieter side room, out of public earshot.
This was several days after what turned out to be my last meeting with the seminary's APDC (Academic and Professional Development Committee), the tribunal which upper-classpersons snidely referred to as “The Spanish Inquisition.” I was understandably concerned and confused by the fact that the APDC had not mentioned to me any specific accusation which might have been made against me nor focused any of their questioning on any area of my past behavior which could have provided me with any helpful clue as to what their purpose in calling me might possibly have been.
When the three of us were alone and, as I say, out of public earshot, I asked Dr. Vogel who was saying what about me. In other words, of what had I been accused and by whom. Her reply to me will echo in my memory for as long as there is breath in my body. Standing not more than three feet away from me -- and with Reva just as close, as the third component of the equilateral triangle -- Susan Vogel looked me in the eye with the most earnest, compassionate and believable expression you can imagine and said in her most earnest, compassionate and believable Dean of Students voice:
"Galen, if you’re not doing anything these people are saying,
you’ve got nothing to worry about."
Now, you tell me, Gentle Reader: just what bits of vital of information did Dr. Vogel reveal to us in that one simple phrase? Let's see:
1. That there was, in fact, a “they.”
2. That this “they” were, indeed, accusing me of something.
3. That she wasn't going to reveal to us who they were or what they were accusing me of. (An act of criminal fraud probably worthy of 6 months in prison and a $10,000 fine...not to mention civil relief to a tune more than sufficient to have enabled me to repay my government loan and had enough left over to pay my attorney [the one I couldn't afford -- in the real world of real optionless poverty] and begin a new career in a field more suited to my financial needs -- such as law school.)
4. That if I was (as I happened, in fact, to be) innocent of any wrongdoing, then my career in the Methodist ministry was secure.
5. That -- having "nothing to worry about" -- I didn't need to take any further action in the matter, since (by clear implication) she and the rest of the seminary administration would safeguard me from any slanderous abuses.
6. That Dr. Vogel herself (by clear implication) considered it to be a legitimate component of the "Due Process" contractually guaranteed to me as a paying customer for me to be accused of wrongdoing without being informed of what or by whom or being allowed to face my accuser to answer the accusations. (And for the APDC to act on this denial of due process, thereby making it impossible for me to ever be able to afford to repay the debt in question here.)
7. That Dr. Vogel (by warranted inference) was protecting somebody, which she obviously wouldn't do without some sort of compelling reason, some strong motive. (Certainly, it is quite plausible that her motive in keeping hidden from me the identity of my slanderer was her animal drive for self-preservation [to sacrifice my career...my future...my ability to survive as an organism] to save her own career, which very well could
have been fatally jeopardized at that point, had the truth of the matter become known.)
I try hard to assume nothing -- to make no assumptions. However, not being an attorney myself, and lacking any formal legal training whatsoever, and yet being forced to represent myself pro se in the instant case (a cruel joke -- to assume that I should be the least bit qualified to perform this daunting task), I have no choice but to make a number of warranted inferences. One of these warranted inferences is that the reader of this Reply Brief has already read and familiarized themselves with the chronologically previous documents in this case. Thus, I shall infer, correctly or incorrectly, that you, Gentle Reader, are already thoroughly familiar with a key item of discovery captioned "Defense Exhibit A," a letter I wrote to Dr. Larry Wagley, Chairperson of the seminary’s APDC, on May 15, 1984, in which I made reference to this brief but critical exchange between Dr. Vogel and myself, which had taken place only a few weeks earlier. You'll find it on page 5, but please allow me to quote the passage in question here:
Throughout the entirety of the school year, I have been denied the right to face and respond to my accusers. Each time I confronted Dr. Vogel about this problem, her response was, “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” or “Don’t worry, Galen, we have due process here,” or “If you’re not doing anything that these people are saying, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” While I will readily admit that I made a grave mistake in trusting Susan Vogel (even after a significant number of students here had warned me not to), I had little alternative, for it is abundantly clear that she wields more real power within the St. Paul community than does any other party, including Dean Dale Dunlap or even President McElvaney.

On page 12 of his 7/30/02 Appellee Brief, appellee's counsel makes the following assertion:
If defendant had a problem with St. Paul School's conduct, the correct avenue to address that issue would have been via an administrative complaint pursuant to the school's procedures or a lawsuit against the school. The instant suit for collection of his student loan is the wrong forum to raise his belated claims.

He then footnotes this contention thus:

Education argued below the applicability of Doctrine of Laches as a bar against defendant raising arguments about St. Paul's alleged misconduct as a defense to repayment of his student loan for the first time sixteen years after the alleged incident. The district court did not address the Doctrine of Laches.


The first time I ever in my life even heard of the Doctrine of Laches was last summer in a conversation with appellee's counsel in his office in the federal courthouse here in Kansas City, MO. He explained it to me very patiently with a parable of a broken window that wasn't complained about until many years -- too many years -- had passed. Even though, as he states here, the district court did not address the applicability of the Doctrine of Laches, I did -- twice -- first, on pages 8 & 9 of my 7/19/01 Second Sworn Statement to the district court and, the second time, on pages 10 - 15 of my 6/20/02 Appellant Brief to this Court. While it's true that neither of these times did I use the term "Doctrine of Laches," that was simply because it is such an unfamiliar, esoteric term of art to me that I don't feel comfortable speaking its name. I refer to it here only because it appears to be a relatively important issue to appellee's counsel. And as such, I feel that I've already addressed it sufficiently. However, as just one of several further examples of my timely complaint to the only available authority, here is the paragraph immediately previous to the one I quoted above from my 5/15/84 letter to Larry Wagley:
To date I have been denied due process. There is overwhelming evidence to indicate that the APDC’s dealings with me have not been at all in good faith, but instead that I have been the continual target of a witch-hunt, a frame-up, character assassination, backbiting, rumor, slander, and gossip. It is my contention that the APDC has decided to terminate my registration not because of evidence (agenda) but because of unverifiable rumor (hidden agenda). The most sensible means for remedying this unspeakable injustice is for the APDC to reverse itself.

The challenge before this Court is to not merely talk the talk of personal responsibility, which would be to employ the chillingly fashionable neo-feudalistic paradigm of letting the powerless suffer for the actions of the powerful, but rather to walk the walk of personal responsibility by holding the powerful to account for their actions, even when doing so might prove unfashionable and socially risky. For anyone to say, as appellee's counsel persists in saying, that this case should be narrowly interpreted as merely being about an unpaid student loan is to talk the talk of personal responsibility without walking the walk. It is a cowardly (but fashionable and risk-free) position to take, because it blames the victim without risking offending the powerful religious institution responsible for the circumstances which triggered this case in the first place.
I am well aware of how important precedent is in American law. I understand that any responsible jurists who find themselves in this Court's position are fully justified in not wishing to open the flood gates to a tidal wave of student borrowers claiming to have been similarly defrauded or otherwise damaged by schools with whose operatives they have had some falling out. And I respect that wish. However, the progress of American law also has a firm basis in the processing and understanding of new information. It is in the very nature of history's flow that new information will constantly be making itself available to alert observers such as the members of this Court. And with new information must needs come an appropriate adjustment in policy. Had Othello been made aware, in the nick of time, that Iago had been misinforming him about Desdemona's innocence, tragedy could have been averted and a relatively happy ending secured. Similarly, in the case of USA v. Green, tragedy can be averted and a relatively happy ending secured, if this Court is ready, willing and able to take it upon itself to process and understand the new information concerning the full range of circumstances involved in this case -- the broader context, the complete picture, if you will.

IV.

In the autumn of 1984, many months after the seminary's operatives had committed their fraud against me, many months after the slanders of unnamed parties at seminary had forced me to move back to Wichita in disgrace and ignominy, had resulted in the destruction of my recent and fragile marriage, had thrown my life into optionless chaos, and had driven me into a state of poverty from which I have never recovered and likely never will recover, I finally learned a few of the details concerning three of the specific slanders which had brought about my ruin (and my consequent inability to repay my student loan).
The source of these revelations was one of my fellow seminarians, an older woman, one of my classmates, who will here remain anonymous (at least for the time being), as she eventually received her M.Div. and is (to the best of my knowledge) currently serving a church in a small community in Iowa. Whatever her current status, there is no doubt that even her name appearing on my behalf -- even in this humble Reply Brief -- would bring down upon her career much dire consequence from the Teflon gangsters and gangsterettes of the Methodist Church.
The first of the rumors which had been whispered abroad to slander me during my year at seminary was that I had been sneaking liquor into class in the morning and drinking it on the sly. Like many students, I brought a Coke to class with me in the morning to sip on during class, in lieu of coffee. There was nothing unusual or out of the ordinary about this whatsoever. But, according to the slanderous gossip my friend heard -- months after the "fact" -- I was supposedly spiking my morning Coke with bourbon. Of course, anyone who is at all familiar with the world of spirits knows that bourbon has a distinct and noticeable odor. But it is imperative that you (i.e. anyone reading this brief) understand that the majority of my fellow seminarians had (to coin a fairly accurate metaphor of the time) "just fallen off the turnip truck" -- or, more specifically, some of the most backward, repressed, ethnocentric, xenophobic turnip trucks in Regan-Era
America. There is a strong likelihood that whatever gossip monger had started this homicidal slander had no idea what bourbon even smelled like. They were obviously the very embodiment of that evil whose presence in the world had originally motivated me to dedicate myself to a ministry in the faith of my forbearers, to pry open the rusted cellar door and let the sunlight of reason and evidence-based living (i.e. of the authentic gospel of Jesus) shine down into the depths of its dank and superstitious darkness.
As was the case with all three of the vicious rumors about me, this one was, of course, totally unfounded. I never spiked my Coke. I never “drank” in class or at any other alcohol-free functions. But since I wasn't even made aware of any of these three homicidal slanders until months after the irreparable damage had been done and my life and earning potential had been wrecked by these slanders (or, more accurately, by the seminary's denying me contractually guaranteed due process, whereby I could have been made aware of these rumors and have answered them with the facts in the matter), there was no way that I could defend myself. It's pretty hard to offer much of a defense, if you don't even know that you're being accused of any wrongdoing. Eh? (I recommend that you try it sometime. That alone should cinch this case in my favor.)
The second of the three slanders with which self-interested parties at seminary committed de facto homicide against me was far more serious and far less forgivable, since it involved another innocent party, a young married woman who was a classmate of mine, whose future could have ended up being damaged almost as much as mine was. For obvious reasons, she, too, must remain anonymous for the time being. Again, it was many months after I was forced by these lies to leave seminary that I was made aware of wholly unfounded rumors which had been swirling around the seminary, concerning an extramarital affair this young woman and I were supposedly engaged in. In fact, she and I had been study partners, perhaps one or two afternoons a week, for perhaps an hour or two at a time. Being keenly aware of the presence of low-life gossip mongers among us, we had always met in a very public place, such as in a high-traffic study room or even (weather permitting) outside on the seminary lawn, in full view of the afternoon passers-by.
Alas, our discreet precautions were insufficient to allay those few among our fellow student's whose own lack of sexual fulfillment impelled their jealous tongues to wag at our expense. Had the seminary administration possessed the professionalism and spine to come to us with these rumors, then the truth could have set us all free. And I would have paid off my student loan and avoided the present unpleasantness.
So why didn't the seminary administration possess the professionalism and spine to do the right thing in this case? Probably because to do so would have meant confronting the presence of the aforementioned evil in their midst -- an evil from which they themselves stood to benefit by allowing it to prevail and from which they themselves stood to lose big-time, had they confronted it.
I'm not saying that I was sandbagged by seminary operatives simply because they believed false gossip about my sexual dalliance with my married female study partner or about my sipping booze on the sly in class. But I have every warrant to infer that it certainly contributed. Moreover, it must be remembered that these are only two of three specific slanders breathed against me by self-interested parties at seminary; God only knows how many more such damaging lies were directed against me that I shall never learn about, that I shall go to my early grave completely ignorant of.
The one remaining homicidal slander which my older female classmate did learn about in the autumn of 1984 and pass along to me involved another young woman, one whom I will name, one Susie Watson, who shared a dorm room across the hall from mine with another young female classmate of ours. According to the rumor which my informant passed along to me, I had been guilty, upon some occasion which no one seemed to be able to quite pinpoint, of (and I quote) "yelling at Susie Watson." I asked my informant when and where this yelling was supposed to have taken place. She told me that she had been told that I had allegedly come into Susie's room one evening when all of us were more of less hunkered down in our rooms studying, and had shouted at her at the top of my lungs.
If I was provided with any more detail about this alleged incident than that, it has understandably slipped my mind -- partly because of the 18 or so years which have elapsed since then and partly because it never happened. First of all, anyone who knows me at all, knows that that's not my style; I simply don't do things like that. Secondly, my informant told me in the late autumn of 1984 that, of the several of her classmates (all female) who repeated this slander to her, each gave a slightly variant but shamelessly vague rendition of it.
It might seem to you, the disinterested auditor of this narrative testimony, that my being accused of "yelling at Susie Watson" when I did no such thing is hardly worthy of mention -- until you are made aware of Susie's powerful niche in the grand scheme of things as they were at the seminary during that period. First of all, Susie was the protégé of Susan Vogel, the one seminary administrator through whose malfeasance I have most directly been prevented from repaying my student loan. Secondly, Susie and I arrived at seminary with strikingly similar and blatantly competing claims to fame. Out of a first-year class of perhaps 40, we were the only two card-carrying liberals with anything resembling outstanding credentials as feminists and human rights activists. This might appear at first like a marriage made in heaven, but it was nothing short of a recipe for disaster. Or, more accurately, a recipe for character assassination. As long as I, with my impressive dossier of national publications, masters degree, track record as a political activist, feminist and outspoken advocate for civil rights and human rights, stood in the way, Susie Watson and her mentess Susan Vogel were hard-pressed to perpetrate their fraud that Susie was everything she wanted to seem, pretty much everything that I already was.
Unless this case is unfortunately remanded to district court for trial, that's all I'm going to say about that, except to summarize that both Susie and Susan possessed ample motive, means and opportunity to do anything in their power, no matter how underhanded, un-Christian, and actionably fraudulent, to get me out of the way of Susie's rise to greater prominence and unearned credibility within the seminary's and the Methodist Church's inner circle of Liberation Theologians. And so, that's just what they did. For it had to have been Susie herself who started the homicidal slander about my having allegedly yelled at her. The homicidal game she played at my expense was the same game she played in life generally. And that was to cloak her rabid misophally (male-bashing) in the rhetoric of legitimate feminism. It was a game she shared in the Age of Reagan (the mid-1980's) with thousands of other self-serving phonies, so that it's little wonder that she got away with it so effortlessly; it was all the rage at the time, a veritable fashion statement. Like every other assertion I've put forth in this brief (and in my earlier briefs and affidavits in this case), what I've just stated here is an historically verifiable fact, not merely an opinionated anecdote.

V.

When an indigent student borrower signs on with any of the government's (the plaintiff’s) student loan programs, they have, as reasonable persons, several reasonable expectations. One of those is that the process is not going to be a crap-shoot, that if they perform with sufficient merit and keep their nose clean (as I verifiably did), they will have the ability to pay back the loan.
It would not be within the realm of reasonable expectations for the indigent student borrow to be thinking, “Well, if the college treats me unjustly, then I will have neither the ability to pay back the government loan nor the product I used the loan to purchase." I defy appellee's counsel to find one indigent student borrower signing on to any government loan program for the 2002-2003 academic year who believes in even their wildest imaginings of worst-case scenarios that they could possibly end up being doubly injured -- injured by a school which would knowingly rob them of the ability to repay the loan and then injured by their own government, which would demand that they pay back the loan which the school's willful injustice has robbed them of the ability to scrape together the money to pay back.
If the government is going to participate with (and thereby indirectly subsidize, through what some might label a sort of adult voucher program) religious institutions such as seminaries and religious colleges, then the government has a responsibility to the indigent student borrowers involved - not merely as consumers, but as American citizens, who have the reasonable expectation that their government is not going to be complicitous with any type of corrupt religious institutions, through its de facto acquiescence to and/or by its providing a cloak of legitimacy for (which would amount to an arguably unconstitutional de facto ENDORSEMENT of) said religious institutions.
As I attempt to conclude my arguments in this case, it occurs to me that perhaps this case has been, after all, a critical examination of whose world is the real world. Is it the one prelogically presupposed by appellee's counsel, a perfect world in which indigent student borrowers -- both past and future -- are to be held responsible for possessing powers and resources they do not possess? Or is it the historically verifiable molecular human world in which the actual circumstances which have engendered the instant case have, in fact, taken place?
Indigent student borrowers - both past and future -- are, by definition, trapped in world of historically verifiable molecular circumstances in which "can't" means "cannot," where powerlessness is a bitter and inescapable fact of life, and where poverty's simplest functional definition is "optionlessness.” My meager grasp of jurisprudence includes this notion: that a Venn diagram wherein "Jurisprudence" is represented as one of two circles and "Social Science" is represented as the other would show an overlap of at least 85%. In other words, jurisprudence in modern America, as I conceive of it, is very closely akin to social science. I am, therefore, hopeful that, when rendering its judgment in this case, this Court will take into account all the latest findings of social science -- particularly as regards the lot of the working poor in modern America (Please see pages 17 - 25 of my 6/20/02 Appellant Brief.) Had seminary operatives employed more jurisprudential science and less self-interested superstition in determining my future, back in the spring of 1984, there would have been no need for this case to have been brought in the first place.
Outside of and beyond this case, in time and space, great questions of weight and moment will ride upon which of these realities (Dr. Pangloss’s or mine) is judged to be real. The product of such judgment will be no less monumental than the future of democracy in America. Within the instant case itself ride both the future credibility and viability of the plaintiff's loan programs, as well as the hopes, dreams and aspirations of literally tens of millions of future indigent student borrowers whose fate embodies nothing less than the future of democracy in America.


______________________________
Galen Green, Pro Se



______________________________
Respectfully Submitted