Rules for Thee: Maryland Scraps 'Child Victims Act' In Two DAYS After Government Sued for BILLIONS

This writer is a Catholic, and the sexual abuse scandal was a terrible, almost unforgivable mark on the church. But the problem of abuse is not just a Catholic issue. In fact, public schools have a far more significant problem, as pointed out in 2006 by CBS News of all places:

Consider the statistics: In accordance with a requirement of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, in 2002 the Department of Education carried out a study of sexual abuse in the school system.
Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church.
'[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?' she said. 'The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.'

In response to the abuse by the Catholic Church, Maryland legislators passed the 'Child Victims Act' with the goal of, well, bankrupting the Catholic Church. They succeeded, too. The Archdiocese of Baltimore filed bankruptcy shortly after the law was passed.

But the Leftist in Maryland government forgot to exempt themselves from the law:

Maryland scrambled to gut their Child Victims Act when they found out the state government was liable for billions in damages https://t.co/4UWeMyADkD
— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) April 12, 2025

Whoops.

More from Not the Bee:

Within days of the original law being cleared by the Maryland Supreme Court, thousands of sexual abuse cases were filed against the state of Maryland's juvenile justice system.
Will Smith, a Democrat, noted that lawmakers approved the 2023 Child Victims Act in response ‘to a long fight to have justice for victims of child sex abuse, where our prior framework barred some of those claims if you were above the age of 38.
‘But what we could never have anticipated was just the sheer volume of cases that ensued.'
They thought it was JUST the Catholic Church that was the problem. They had no clue that so many government employees might be hit with suits.
Smith estimates the settlements could be upwards of $4 billion, which is as much as the state's current yearly deficit.
And in that light, the legislature quickly wrote a new law and voted to limit their liability in the cases. (And I do mean quickly - it went from draft, to committee, to the floor in the state House and Senate, and to the governor's desk in two days -- TWO DAYS.)