Taxpayers continue to pay for Republican Gov. Butch Otter’s tenacious defense of the state’s unconstitutional same-sex marriage ban.
Butch Otter is rabidly against same-sex marriage. The just re-elected Republican governor won in part by pulling out all the stops to defend Idaho’s ban on same-sex marriage, despite a federal judge striking it down as unconstitutional.
Couples have been marrying now since mid-October, but that hasn’t stopped the 72-year old former Army man from spending about a half-million dollars of taxpayer money – not including state salaries and expenses – to fighting the feds. And he’s hired Washington, D.C. attorney Gene Schaerr to do his dirty work. Schaerr helped Utah lose its attempt to thwart equal marriage.
Now, Gov. Otter is taking his show on the road, to Washington, D.C. The State today petitionied the U.S. Supreme Court to take its case, “to resolve a question of critical importance to the states, their citizens and especially their children: Whether the federal Constitution prohibits a state from maintaining the traditional understanding and definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.”
Otter thinks he can win, which is amusing since the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Idaho, famously slapped down the exact same argument he is pushing in front to the nation’s top court: children do best with a mom and a dad. The Spokesman-Review today classifies Otter’s argument as claiming that limiting marriage to different-sex couples “sends a message to heterosexual couples that they should stay together and raise children.”
Sounding like a page from the flawed Regnerus anti-gay “study,” Otter’s petition actually states that if same-sex couples marry, “more children of heterosexual couples will likely grow up without the active influence of one or both biological parents, and will therefore face an increased risk of crime, emotional and psychological difficulties, poor performance in school and other ills.â€
The 9th Circuit has been there, done that – and hilariously said no.
“We seriously doubt that allowing committed same-sex couples to settle down in legally recognized marriages will drive opposite-sex couples to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll,” the Court already ruled.
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