John Boehner Thinks Gay Marriage Should Be Banned Because Of Polygamy
Paul Clement, a high profile attorney hand-picked by John Boehner — who is spending 1.5 million tax dollars to defend a federal ban on gay marriage — Â is arguing DOMA must live because of polygamy.
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner, decided last year to invest $1.5 million — your tax dollars — to defend DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act that bans the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages, after President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder both declared the 1996 law to be unconstitutional. Literally dozens of federal judges have weighed in since — and agreed with the President.
Speaker Boehner tasked the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG) to defend DOMA, and appointed a handpicked high profile private attorney, Paul Clement, to defend challenges to DOMA in federal court. Clement’s batting average for all the DOMA cases he’s defended is .000. Clement, who also famously lost the fight to strike down Obamacare, is a a former United States Solicitor General who served under President George W. Bush.
Now, Paul Clement, hand-picked by John Boehner, is arguing that DOMA must live because of polygamy.
In the heartbreaking case of Windsor v. United States, Edie Windsor, an 83-year old widow who is fighting — and has won in several federal courts — a “death tax” of $363,000 that, if the federal government recognized her legal marriage to her wife who passed away, she would not have pay. Windsor married Thea Syper two years before her death, although the couple had been together for 40 years.
“The lawyer [Paul Clement] for House Republican leaders had to reach all the way back to 1885 today when asked where the ‘traditional understanding’ of marriage could be found in federal case law — referring to a case dealing with polygamy in the Utah territory,” Chris Geidner, writing at Buzzfeed yesterday, reported on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals trial in New York:
That case, decided about polygamy in Utah before women were guaranteed the right to vote, came only 20 years after the end of the Civil War and more than 80 years before the court would strike down bans on interracial marriage. Today, it was one of the underlying arguments in House Republican leaders’ case that the Supreme Court recognizes a “traditional understanding” of marriage that the Defense of Marriage Act is seeking to uphold.
…
The arguments were at points similar to arguments heard in April before the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which determined that the law is unconstitutional. Today’s arguments, however, included an admission by Clement that if courts decide that laws targeting gays and lesbians should be viewed skeptically, like those based on race or sex, then it would be more difficult to justify DOMA.
“That said, I’ll try it,†Clement told the judges, noting that “there’s no way to preserve the definition of marriage [as one man and one woman] other than by preserving the definition. It becomes somewhat circular.â€
Geidner examines broad issues of DOMA and scrutiny — how the courts decide what standards to use in determining whether or not DOMA is unconstitutional — and concludes with this:
More than 30 years before the U.S. Constitution would be amended to prohibit voting discrimination based on sex, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a law that required those in the Utah territory to take an oath that included a statement that the male was violating bigamy or polygamy prohibitions.
The case, which cited the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision declaring that slaves were not citizens under the U.S. Constitution as evidence of governmental powers in the territories, was mentioned by Clement. It’s the case, he told Judge Chester Straub, a Clinton appointee to the bench, where the Supreme Court referenced the “traditional understanding” of marriage.
The 1885 case takes a hard line on the role of marriage in the post-Civil War nation, in reference to the practice of polygamy in the Utah territory.
The court wrote that “no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth … than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family [is] consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony.”
That definition of marriage, the court wrote in 1885, is “the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guaranty of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement.”
Steven Thrasher, writing “For Elderly Gay Widow Edith Windsor, The GOP Is All For High Taxes,” today in The Daily Beast, notes:
“When Barack Obama proved unwilling to hound an octogenarian widow for a tax bill she never should have been charged, House Speaker John Boehner proved more than willing to take up the task—even at a cost to taxpayers of far more than the money she owed.”
Death and taxes, and GOP hate and ignorance. Four things that you can aways count on.
Image circa 1877, via Wikipedia: Brigham Young’s 12 widows lament. Caricature in a newspaper about Mormon polygamy. Text: “In memoriam Brigham Young. And the place which knew him once shall know him no more.” It references the apocryphal “long bed” story (and illustration) found in chapter 15 of Mark Twain‘s 1872 book Roughing It.
Related:
Breaking: 145 House Democrats File Amicus Brief Denouncing DOMA
Breaking: DOMA Declared Unconstitutional Again — By A Bush Appointee
Fighting DOMA, Edie Windsor Now Takes Her Case To The Supreme Court
Breaking: DOMA Ruled ‘Unconstitutional’ In Lesbian Estate Tax Case
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A federal judge in Texas known for a ruling that attempted to ban a widely-used abortion drug is citing an extremist anti-LGBTQ group in his ruling allowing a ban on drag shows to stay in place.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former attorney for an anti-LGBTQ conservative Christian legal organization, and a member of the Federalist Society, in his 26-page ruling dated Thursday cited the “About” page of Gays Against Groomers to claim, “it’s unclear how drag shows unmistakably communicate advocacy for LGBT rights.”
Judge Kacsmaryk, appointed by Donald Trump twice before finally assuming office in 2019, suggests the First Amendment does not provide for freedom of expression for drag shows, calls drag “sexualized conduct,” and says it is “more regulable” because “children are in the audience.”
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern adds, “Kacsmaryk’s conclusion that drag is probably NOT protected by the First Amendment conflicts with decisions from Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Montana which held that drag is constitutionally protected expression. It also bristles with undisguised hostility toward LGBTQ people.”
Calling the judge “a proud Christian nationalist who flatly refuses to apply binding Supreme Court precedent when it conflicts with his extremist far-right beliefs,” Stern at Slate writes that Kacsmaryk ruled drag “may be outlawed to protect ‘the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.’ In short, he concluded that drag fails to convey a message, while explaining all the reasons why he’s offended by the message it conveys.”
Stern does not let Kacsmaryk off the hook there.
“From almost any other judge, the ruling in Spectrum WT v. Wendler would be a shocking rejection of basic free speech principles; from Kacsmaryk, it’s par for the course. This is, after all, the judge who sought to ban medication abortion nationwide, restricted minors’ access to birth control, seize control over border policy to exclude asylum-seekers, and flouted recent precedent protecting LGBTQ+ equality,” Stern says.
“He is also poised to bankrupt Planned Parenthood by compelling them to pay a $1.8 billion penalty on truly ludicrous grounds. And he is not the only Trump-appointed judge substituting his reactionary beliefs for legal analysis. We have reached a point where these lawless decisions are not only predictable but inevitable, and they show no sign of stopping: Their authors are still just settling into a decadeslong service in the federal judiciary.”
West Texas A&M University President Walter V. Wendler penned the letter that sparked the lawsuit.
Titled, “A Harmless Drag Show? No Such Thing,” Wendler wrote: “I believe every human being is created in the image of God and, therefore, a person of dignity. Being created in God’s image is the basis of Natural Law. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, prisoners of the culture of their time as are we, declared the Creator’s origin as the foundational fiber in the fabric of our nation as they breathed life into it. Does a drag show preserve a single thread of human dignity? I think not.”
Journalist Chris Geidner concludes, “It’s an extremely biased ruling by a judge who has established that he does not care about being overturned — even by the most conservative appeals court in the nation.”
U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL). largely seen as pushing Speaker Kevin McCarthy‘s Republican-majority House of Representatives toward shutting down the federal government, is praising and promoting remarks made by a freshman GOP lawmaker that appear to suggest the use of violence. U.S. Rep. Eli Crane‘s comments, posted Friday (below), call for change “through force,” remarks echoing Congressman Gaetz’s recent comments which were denounced by an expert on authoritarianism as fascistic.
“The only way we’re going to see meaningful change in this town is through force,” wrote Congressman Crane, Republican of Arizona atop a three-minute video in which he frames what is now an almost guaranteed government shutdown as a “spending fight.” In his video he says, “the only way you’re gonna get any change in this town is through force.” Gaetz in August had said, “we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.”
Congressman Crane is a former Navy SEAL. He has promoted the false “Big Lie” conspiracy theory that there was massive fraud in the election President Joe Biden won, and called “on the state legislature to decertify the 2020 election.” He is one of six House Republicans who voted against McCarthy’s speakership all 15 times in January.
“Congressman Eli Crane is a fountainhead of political courage,” said Rep. Gaetz Friday afternoon. “He holds the line.”
Crane recently came under fire for calling Black people “colored,” during debate on his legislation that would force the U.S. Armed Forces to not use any diversity requirements in its hiring practices.
Just days before he won his House seat last year, The Washington Post reported Crane had urged an “audience to look up an antisemitic sermon at a recent campaign stop.”
“Crane said that he was motivated to run because of ‘radical ideologies that are destroying this country’ and that he was most concerned about ‘Cultural Marxism,’ which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as an antisemitic baseless claim gaining traction on the American right.”
“He encouraged the audience to watch a speech by a right-wing pastor who blamed cultural change on a group of German Jewish philosophers and condemned Barack Obama for having a ‘homosexual agenda.'”
“If we don’t wake up,” Crane said, according to the Post, “if we don’t study what they’re doing, and if we don’t put people in influential positions that understand what this war is all about, what they’re trying to do and have and have the courage to call it out, we’re going to lose this country.”
In August, while standing next to Donald Trump at a campaign rally, Congressman Gaetz said, “Mr. President, I cannot stand these people that are destroying our country. They are opening our borders. They are weaponizing our federal law enforcement against patriotic Americans who love this nation as we should.”
“But we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C. And so to all my friends here in Iowa, when you see them come for this man, know that they are coming for our movement and they are coming for all of us.”
At the time, Raw Story reported, “historian and author Ruth Ben-Ghiat called Gaetz comments alarming.”
READ MORE: Pete Buttigieg Just Testified Before Congress. It Did Not Go Well for Republicans.
“What he is saying is that they are not going to have change through elections or through legislation or through reform. They are going to have change through violence,” she warned.
“And that’s how fascists talk,” Ben-Ghiat added. “So, even if Trump is out of the picture, these are people who have adopted methods very familiar to me as a historian of fascism, that violence and corruption and lying that’s what the party is today.”
Image via Shutterstock
COMMENTARY
‘See How Easy That Is to Say?’: GOP Mocked for ‘Weaponization’ of DOJ Claims as Democratic Senator Gets Indicted
The U.S. Dept. of Justice unsealed an indictment against U.S. Senator Bob Menendez late Friday morning, accusing the New Jersey Democratic lawmaker of bribery as prosecutors showed photos of gold bars and nearly half-a-million dollars in cash stuffed into a jacket that bears his name and the seal of the U.S. Senate.
Many on the left immediately demanded Senator Menendez resign, a demand he is refusing. He will step down as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, which Senate Democrats require when a chair is criminally charged.
It took little time for liberals to mock Republicans who have been claiming President Joe Biden and Democrats in general, along with the “deep state,” have “weaponized” the Dept. of Justice against conservatives, especially after Donald Trump’s four indictments on a total of 91 criminal felonies.
“Let me get this straight,” wrote journalist and progressive SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah. “To the GOP, when DOJ indicts President Biden’s son and a senior Democratic US Senator that is great. But when DOJ indicts Donald Trump for attempting a coup and for 32 counts of Espionage that is DOJ’s ‘weaponization’ of criminal justice?!”
READ MORE: Pete Buttigieg Just Testified Before Congress. It Did Not Go Well for Republicans.
“This is the second time that Sen. Bob Menendez has been indicted for corruption. He needs to resign and allow Gov. Murphy to fill that vacancy with someone who does right by the people of New Jersey,” wrote former Human Rights Campaign press secretary Charlotte Clymer. “See how easy that is to say, GOP?”
Journalist, author, and former Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin posted video of the prosecutor announcing the indictment.
US Attorney Damian Williams shows photos of the Mercedes Benz, gold bars, and cash the government alleges Senator Robert Menendez received in bribes. pic.twitter.com/h4hYYwzKVQ
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) September 22, 2023
Boykin later sarcastically commented, “There goes Biden again weaponizing the Justice Department to prosecute political leaders in his own party.”
“President Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice has now indicted Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and *checks notes* Joe Biden’s son,” observed veteran intelligence officer, activist, and social media personality Travis Akers.
Attorney and former Republican George Conway quickly responded, saying, “senile sleepy Joe is playing 65-dimensional chess again.”
“Menendez should resign. Today,” demanded historian and author Kevin M. Kruse.
“One of the nice things about rule of law is that truly believing in it ensures that you don’t end up as a partisan hypocrite,” observed The Atlantic’s Brian Klaas, an associate professor in global politics at University College London. “If Menendez is guilty, he should go to prison as anyone else would. (And it would be prudent to resign swiftly).”
Meanwhile, some used Friday’s indictment of Sen. Menendez to focus on other political figures.
Foreign policy, national security and political affairs analyst and commentator David Rothkopf, warned, “The Memendez case should have Jared [Kushner] and Clarence [Thomas] ordering extra strength Tums today.”
Rachel Bitecofer, the political strategist and analyst also appeared to point the finger at Justice Thomas and his wife, Ginni.
You know who else hid money from the IRS and ran his bribes through his wife?! pic.twitter.com/kWJuAPCtbJ
— Rachel Bitecofer 📈🔭🇺🇲🇺🇦 (@RachelBitecofer) September 22, 2023
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‘Vulgar and Lewd’: Trump Judge Cites Extremist Group to Allow Drag Show Ban
Gaetz Praises GOP Congressman Who Echoes His Call for Change ‘Through Force’
‘Vulgar and Lewd’: Trump Judge Cites Extremist Group to Allow Drag Show Ban
Gaetz Praises GOP Congressman Who Echoes His Call for Change ‘Through Force’
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