President Donald Trump on Friday took to Twitter to praise Wisconsin Judge Brian Hagedorn for his “surprise win” in Tuesday’s State Supreme Court election. The President might be surprised to learn the race is still too close to call, with about 6000 votes separating the two candidates in what the technically is a non-partisan race. It’s more than likely headed to a recount – even though Hagedorn immediately declared victory.
But Trump’s tweet is also a signal to his base that he remains a virulently anti-gay white supremacist, given Hagedorn’s far right wing conservative Christian beliefs and ties to a powerful anti-gay hate group.
“Congratulations to Brian Hagedorn on his big surprise win over a well funded Liberal Democrat in the Great State of Wisconsin for a very important Supreme Court seat. Republicans are producing big for Wisconsin!” Trump claimed, ignoring that Democrat Tony Evers defeated incumbent Republican Governor Scott Walker in the November election.
More importantly, President Trump once again chose to align himself with the far right fringe of his party.
Before Brian Hagedorn became Judge Hagedorn, he was Gov. Walker’s chief legal counsel, and responsible for penning Walker’s damaging union-busting law.
Hagedorn just a few years earlier had poured his extremist beliefs into a blog he kept in college. Among them, that in the eyes of the law homosexuality is the same as bestiality, as The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed.
“The idea that homosexual behavior is different than bestiality as a constitutional matter is unjustifiable,” Hagedorn wrote in 2005.
Reinforcing his homosexuality is equal to bestiality theory, Hagedorn added: “There is no right in our Constitution to have sex with whoever or whatever you want in the privacy of your own home (or barn).”
And while Hagedorn’s campaign advisor claims that when he puts on his judicial robe he becomes impartial, Hagedorn himself in 2014 said otherwise.
“My faith impacts everything I do in the workplace,” Hagedorn revealed.
Judge Hagedorn’s views on social issues don’t stop at virulent homophobia.
He has labeled Planned Parenthood a “wicked organization.”
“He has said his litmus test for voting in an election was a candidate’s position on abortion,” the Journal Sentinel added.
Hagedorn is also tied to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal firm focused on defending anti-gay Christians from laws that require them to treat LGBT people and same-sex couples especially, equally. ADF has represented several high profile cases of Christian bakers and florists who refuse to do business with same-sex couples.
ADF wants to criminalize homosexuality, likens homosexuality to pedophilia, and has worked to have transgender people sterilized, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
He studied with the ADF in college and later was paid thousands of dollars by them for speeches he made.
He also founded an anti-gay private Christian prep school that bans all same-sex relationships.
President Trump weighing in on Hagedorn’s possible win isn’t about an obscure Wisconsin Supreme Court race. It’s about telegraphing to his base that he’s still the reliably homophobic, anti-LGBT president he’s always been.