SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Victims of sexual abuse will be able to sue private schools and private employers for failing to protect them from their abuser regardless of statute of limitation considerations, under the terms of a bill that’s awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.

The potential law “would allow alleged victims younger than 31 to sue employers of abusers, extending (the) present age limit for alleged victims” by five years, reports CatholicNewsAgency.com.

The Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts figure to be the most affected by the legislation, should Brown sign it into law, as expected.

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One group that won’t have to worry about any of this is California’s public schools.

“The bill specifically exempts public schools and other government institutions from lawsuits,” CatholicNewsAgency.com reports. “It also exempts the actual perpetuators of the abuse from civil action in some cases, while leaving their employers vulnerable.”

National Review Online’s Kevin D. Williamson writes that exempting public schools from potential lawsuits – and financially debilitating settlements – is due to the political strength of California’s public sector labor unions.

The unions and their political surrogates know that without that exemption, some California school districts could lose many, many millions to families of children who suffered sexual abuse at a government-run public school. Expensive settlements would bleed school budgets dry and would likely lead to staff cuts, which would deprive California’s teacher unions of a small fortune.

The union-controlled politicians who passed this bill say they care about the children, but they apparently care more about their Big Labor buddies.

It’s difficult to know how much California’s public schools would have to pay out in sex abuse cases, but back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest it would be enormous.

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When the state lifted the statute of limitations in 2003, the Catholic Church ended up paying $1.2 billion in damages to more than 1,000 victims. Williamson suggests that figure would have been much higher, had public schools been subjected to the same rules as their Catholic school counterpart.

Williamson writes that “in the Los Angeles Unified School District alone some 600 teachers over a four-year period were fired, have resigned, or were facing sanctions because of ‘inappropriate conduct’ relating to students.”

“About 60 teachers faced punishment for outright sexual relations with students (or other minors), while others were punished for offenses such as showing pornography to students, forcing students to act out ‘master and slave’ sexual role-play scenarios, taking a student on a field trip to a sex shop, lining girls up in the classroom to judge their relative breast size before having them do jumping jacks, and old-fashioned sexual harassment. Some of these teachers had complaints in their files dating back years that had not been acted upon, while another teacher … had been in hot water at six different schools for sexual misconduct,” Williamson notes.

“If we limit ourselves to those cases of actual sexual relations, then a litt0le crude extrapolation from Los Angeles’s 662,140 students to California’s 6.2 million total public-school students suggests that, in California each year, seven to eight times as much sexual misconduct takes place in public schools as in the Catholic Church.”

Williamson concludes that the evil that’s been allowed to take place within the Catholic Church “is in all likelihood overshadowed by what is taking place in public schools in California and elsewhere. But if it comes down to the interests of a unionized government employee vs. those of a nonunionized sex-crime victim, look for the union label.”