E-Mail This Article to a Friend The cost of justice The legislature must override Romney’s court veto. Plus, clean needles to combat AIDS; and the Church’s hypocrisy over same-sex marriage.

GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY’s spending priorities are so out of whack that one hardly knows where to begin. Just last week, for instance, the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation issued a report showing that, for the first time in decades, the state is spending more on prisons than it is on higher education.

Still, Romney’s ongoing assault on the state’s justice system is worthy of special mention.

On the afternoon before Thanksgiving, a time when the State House was nearly empty, Romney vetoed $80 million in state spending. He cut in half a $100 million economic-stimulus package. And he excised $30 million from a $111 million supplemental budget the legislature had approved to pay for such pressing needs as human services and teacher salaries. He also cut $300,000 from the state’s arts agency, an unthinking move given the importance of the arts to the regional economy.

But fully $4.7 million of Romney’s cuts came from $10 million that the legislature had set aside for the state’s shamefully underfunded trial courts. The governor’s timing couldn’t have been worse: the legislature’s proposed spending boost was but a small gesture that wouldn’t come close to making up for the years of evisceration that preceded it. The court system is already down a reported 1200 employees over the past two years because of the fiscal crisis, and the governor continues to drag his heels on filling vacancies for judges, court clerks, and other positions.

Romney’s attempts to claim the high ground on these delays don’t hold up to scrutiny. He says he hasn’t filled open judgeships because he is developing a new, apolitical nominating system. Yet he has appointed former Suffolk County district attorney Ralph Martin as the head of his Judicial Nominating Commission, which sends exactly the opposite message. Martin is political to the core, and will do Romney’s bidding. The likely result: judges who are anti-defendant and pro-prosecution.

Romney deserves some credit for removing his correction and public-safety commissioners, as well as several other high-ranking officials. As this week’s Boston Globe series on the death of John Geoghan underscores, the Department of Correction, in particular, has failed at one of its most basic tasks: protecting the lives of the inmates forcibly entrusted to its care.

But getting rid of underperforming government employees is always politically popular. The real question is whether Romney is more interested in politics or in justice. His vetoes indicate that if he is at all interested in justice, it would be of the heavy-handed sort.

The Romney administration, of course, justified the governor’s vetoes by citing the need to control spending. That’s not wrong — especially since no one is willing to talk about a much-needed tax increase. But the economy seems to be improving, and the tight-fisted House Speaker, Tom Finneran, evidently believes the state can now afford a bit more essential spending.

Fortunately, it is likely that Romney’s vetoes will be overridden by the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature. They should be — with the court-spending veto at the top of the list, followed by the inane and foolish $300,000 cut in the state’s arts budget. Unless Romney’s intent is to demonstrate his ignorance of the proven value of the arts to the economic viability of Massachusetts, the governor cannot possibly justify these cuts.

ONE YEAR AGO, Boston mayor Tom Menino used the occasion of World AIDS Day to announce his support for a vital public-health measure: allowing anyone over the age of 18 to purchase hypodermic needles without a prescription.

But even though Massachusetts is one of just four states where over-the-counter needle sales are illegal, the legislation disappeared — so completely that, when Menino reiterated his support on the eve of this year’s World AIDS Day, it was greeted as though it were news.

Both the open sale of hypodermic needles and the free needle-exchange programs that already exist in Boston, Cambridge, Provincetown, and Northampton are necessary components of the war against AIDS. Shockingly — in this, the third decade of the AIDS crisis — needle-sharing among drug addicts remains one of the primary routes of HIV transmission.

Making it easy for addicts not to share needles is a policy that works. As reported in the Globe, the state’s Department of Public Health has found that 21.4 percent of HIV-infection cases recorded in Massachusetts between 2000 and 2002 were caused by using injected drugs — but in Boston, the proportion was just 14.6 percent. That almost certainly has something to do with needle exchange.

Proponents of over-the-counter needles argue that such sales are likely to be more politically acceptable than free needle exchange. But that is shortsighted, as Menino — who has supported needle exchanges since he was a city councilor in the late 1980s — surely knows. What we need are both. Eliminating the need for a doctor’s prescription is more likely to help addicts who function in society — people who hold jobs, and who inject themselves in the privacy of their homes rather than in dangerous shooting galleries. The only reason they can’t readily obtain clean needles is that it is illegal for them to do so. Simply eliminating the need for a prescription will solve that problem.

But it would be a tragedy if the legalization of over-the-counter needles were seized upon as an excuse to get rid of free needle-exchange programs. If anything, needle-exchange should be expanded so that addicts in urban areas such as Worcester, Springfield, Lawrence, and Brockton are served as well.

After all, the hardest cases — the down-and-out addicts who live only for their next fix — will continue to depend on the kindness of strangers bearing free needles.

OUT OF TOUCH though they may be, not only with the culture at large but with their own flock, the Catholic bishops are entitled to their opinion with regard to same-sex marriage. But they are not entitled to impose their opinion on others, Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

Yet that is precisely what they are seeking to do now that the Supreme Judicial Court has ruled, in the Goodridge case, that lesbian and gay couples in Massachusetts have a constitutional right to marry.

A letter written by the four Massachusetts bishops, led by Archbishop Seán O’Malley of Boston, calls the Goodridge decision a "national tragedy." The bishops say they want an extension of the 180-day deadline granted by the court and, ultimately, an amendment to the state Constitution banning same-sex marriage.

Think about it. Goodridge allows for civil marriages among same-sex couples, and would also allow clergy in whatever religious institutions that wish to perform legally binding marriages between two men or two women to do so. (Marriage may or may not be a religious rite; but the rules that give it legal recognition are strictly secular, based on powers granted by the state.) But the court ruling does not require the Catholic Church or any other denomination to perform same-sex marriages. Thus the "sanctity of marriage," as O’Malley et al. define it, would be preserved.

Yet the Church would force the rest of us to adhere to its own theological peculiarities. And though the Church doesn’t pay taxes, it lobbies our elected officials openly and incessantly.

One hardly needs to be reminded of how hypocritical it is for an institution such as the Catholic Church to speak out on matters of sexual morality. For a refresher, we recommend a new documentary on the matter of accused pedophile priest Paul Shanley and his enabler, Bernard Cardinal Law, that will be shown on New England Cable News this week (see "Media," This Just In, page 7).

But hypocrisy is unsurprising. What really rankles is the Church’s ongoing lack of respect for the democratic process — a process that, as the SJC properly observes, is as much about protecting the rights of minority groups such as lesbians and gay men as it is about imposing the will of the majority.

Recent polls suggest that neither the public nor the legislature is ready to follow in lockstep with Archbishop O’Malley and his band of bigoted bishops. So perhaps that’s one good thing to come out of the Church’s shattered credibility in the matter of child sexual abuse.

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