Right On Columnist Patrick McIlheran, generally a right-wing guy, offers commentary and links to good reading on the Web SHARE

By of the

The Supreme Court race’s nuclear bomb gets dropped: A Democratic-leaning pressure group, the Greater Wisconsin Committee – it’s where Gov. Jim Doyle sent a lot of his leftover cash upon retirement – runs an TV ad ripping Justice David Prosser over a child sexual abuse case he dealt with while a prosecutor in 1979.

The ad insinuates that Prosser shielded from prosecution a Catholic priest who tried touching two boys inappropriately. The case is not new news, but the group hoping to oust Prosser from the court is plainly hoping some of the abusive priest’s infamy rubs off on the incumbent.

The inconvenient part, however, is that one of the victims has spoken out – against the ad. Troy J. Merryfield Friday released a letter saying he found the ad “offensive, inaccurate and out of context. I hope that organization,” he wrote of the Greater Wisconsin Committee, “will remove the ad.”

Merryfield says, in a change from what he was alleging a few years back, that Prosser didn't prosecute the priest because he didn’t have enough evidence to convict and he didn’t want Merryfield and his brother, another victim, to be traumatized by having to testify. He points out that the priest was later successfully prosecuted once police found more evidence, including new testimony from Merryfield and his brother: “As adults,” he writes, "my brother and I were much more comfortable being able to publicly testify about some very sensitive information.”

All of which puts a dent in the notion that Prosser was shielding the priest. While ad says, “they send the priest to another community,” Prosser points out that he demanded in 1979 that the priest be taken out of ministry and sent to treatment. Merryfield, in his letter, backs this up, saying he doesn’t think officials of the Green Bay Diocese “were honest with Prosser.”

Merryfield, who lives in Virginia, tells the Journal Sentinel that he heard about the ad from his brother and felt prompted to write. “I'm so sick and tired of dirty politics,” he said.

Good luck with that: Politics on the edge of dirty appear to be here to stay, especially in Supreme Court races. Merryfield is right to object and he brings particular moral authority to do so – he was particularly upset, he wrote, to see his past used as a political tool – but his objections are unlikely to stop the honor-deficient Greater Wisconsin Committee from using his past nonetheless.

And at the risk of sounding insensitive, I’ll point out that is the right of the committee and others pulling for Prosser’s opponent, JoAnne Kloppenburg. Wisconsin just went through an argument similar to this: Justice Michael Gableman’s campaign ran a television ad that consisted of four statements, every one of them individually true but adding up together to an untrue conclusion. The ad was dishonorable, and a three-judge panel set up by the Supreme Court to judge it said so – even as it concluded that the First Amendment’s protection of political speech was so important that Gableman ought not be punished for the ad.

The same principle applies here. The anti-Prosser ad appears to be wrong or misleading on several points – it says he told police not to investigate when in fact they’d done so; it implies Prosser knew the priest had a long history of abuse, something that didn’t come to light until decades later – but the Greater Wisconsin Committee ought to be free to put its low, edge-of-dishonest argument on the air. The cure for such stuff is truth, such as Merryfield has offered in response.

That truth – that Prosser acted correctly on what information was available in 1979 – can be the standard by which voters judge the anti-Prosser case.