Republican candidates just can’t quit condemning same-sex marriage
Republicans in general seem to be unable to give up talking about same-sex marriage. Although there aren’t many elections this year, the Obergefell decision by the Supreme Court continues to be an issue brought up by GOP candidates.
In the Virginia Attorney General race, Democrat Mark Herring is seeking reelection to his post. As the state’s new AG in 2014 he announced that he would not defend the state’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
“As Herring seeks re-election, that decision has become a constant source of criticism from Herring's Republican challenger, John Adams, an opponent of same-sex marriage,” said an Associated Press report.
“But Herring says he isn't fazed, noting that his position was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down such bans as unconstitutional and effectively legalized gay marriage across the country.
"’We were right on the law and we were right for Virginia's families,’ Herring told The Associated Press in a recent interview. ‘Standing up for people's rights is what an attorney general should be doing.’”
In the Alabama Senate race, Republican candidate Roy Moore has a long history of saying anti-LGBT+ things during his two terms as Chief Justice of the state’s Supreme Court. He was twice ousted from that position, once for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the judicial building, and once for telling state officials to ignore the Obergefell decision and continue to deny same-sex marriage licenses.
For more coverage of Roy Moore, visit:
Roy Moore’s bigoted past catching up to him
In Alabama Senate race, Roy Moore stirs far right base.
He is now the GOP candidate for Senate to fill the seat Jeff Sessions left to become Attorney General. The latest instance of Moore’s anti-LGBT and anti-marriage equality rhetoric surfaced this week.
In an interview he gave in 2016, Moore said that the Obergefell decision was “even worse” than the 1857 Dred Scott ruling that upheld slavery in the United States.
"In 1857 the United States Supreme Court did rule that black people were property. Of course that contradicted the Constitution, and it took a civil war to overturn it," Moore said on the Christian Emergency League's Here I Stand podcast in November, according to TalkingPointsMemo.
"But this ruling in Obergefell is even worse in a sense because it forces not only people to recognize marriage other than the institution ordained of God and recognized by nearly every state in the union, it says that you now must do away with the definition of marriage and make it between two persons of the same gender or leading on, as one of the dissenting justices said, to polygamy, to multi-partner marriages, he continued.”
“Moore wasn’t the only one on the religious right who compared Obergefell to Dred Scott. It became a talking point from Christian conservatives like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum two years ago. But Moore clearly went a step further by saying the decision was worse, not just listing it as another decision from the court he thought was terrible,” the TalkingPointsMemo report continues.
Moore faces Democrat Doug Jones in the Senate race. Many assume that Moore will win that election and be elevated to the United States Senate, but “the race looks surprisingly competitive,” according to fivethirtyeight.com, “given that President Trump won Alabama by 28 percentage points.”
Copyright The Gayly – October 25, 2017 @ 10:15 a.m. CDT.