ST. LOUIS, Mo. (FNN) — Southern Poverty Law Center founder Morris Dees filed a Federal civil rights lawsuit against the bacterial organisms of chlamydia and gonorrhea today in Federal District Court of the Eastern District of Missouri.
The suit, filed with the local assistance of St. Louis lawyers John Hook and Elizabeth Crook, seeks unspecified damages from the two organisms, for what Dees termed at a press conference on the steps of the Thomas “Integrity” Eagleton Court House in downtown St. Louis as “an irascible wave of racist hate violence against African-Americans.”
Dees cited a September 7, 2007 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which stated public health statistics showing that 90 percent of chlamydia’s and gonorrhea’s victims are African-American. “Because chlamydia and gonorrhea have chosen to target the African-American community, it is important that we send them the message that in a country that demands equal treatment under the law, and respect for diversity, that this kind of organized bigotry will not be tolerated, and will be punished,” Dees said.
It is not known whether chlamydia and gonorrhea have hired attorneys for their defense, but Fullton Moons, Esq., an expert in civil rights law at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, tells FNN that many cases like this are settled out of court.
“Usually, the defendants and their lawyers agree to a nominal amount of cash damages and to take cultural sensitivty and diversity training,” said Moons. “If these two defendants do not come to the table and negotiate a pre-trial settlement, then the SPLC in all likelihood will seek to get class action status for this lawsuit, thereby giving African-American victims of chlamydia’s and gonorrhea’s alleged torts rights to a prorated, per capita share of the amount of cash damages the jury would prescribe in earnest of a verdict of liability, after Mr. Dees’s 90% contingency fees.”
The Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 by Morris Dees and several others, and its mission is to monitor extremist hate groups, extremist individuals and extremist diseases, and their influence on the mainstream political, social, scientific, religious, ethical and moral climate in America, and to raise money to solve its own poverty.
[...] have made several tongue-in-cheek suggestions that the Southern Poverty Law Center would sue the virii and bacteria of STDs that affect blacks and other minorities more than whites, and sue [...]