SC Wants to Discriminate Against Women and Gays

This is truly unbelievable. As far as I’m concerned South Carolina can get booted out of the union. Nothing but trash there.

One key problem with originalism—the theory that the Constitution should be interpreted as its drafters understood it—is that the men who wrote our constitution had some pretty barbaric views about humanity. The author of the Bill of Rights, James Madison, owned hundreds of slaves. The same Congress that passed the 14^th Amendment segregated schools and opposed women’s suffrage. Under originalist theory, almost every landmark equality case, including Brown v. Board of Education, is almost certainly wrong. Few originalists, however, have the courage to admit that their theory would lead to an appallingly unequal and unjust America.

South Carolina, it turns out, is the glittering exception to this cowardice. In a jaw-dropping amicus brief recently filed with the Supreme Court, the state’s attorney general argues for a truly originalist understanding of the 14^th Amendment, insisting that the Constitution permits discrimination not just against gays, but also against women. This argument is as morally abhorrent as it is historically accurate. And South Carolina deserves some credit for having the chutzpah to raise it.

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Top Anti-Gay Lawyer Inadvertently Tells Court That Brown v. Board of Education Was Wrongly Decided

Wow.

Monte Neil Stewart is the lead attorney defending Nevada’s practice of anti-gay marriage discrimination and he’s a member of the legal team defending similar discrimination in Utah. He also just told a federal appeals court that Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided and we should return to the days when public school discrimination was allowed.

Stewart didn’t say so in explicit terms, but that’s the clear consequence of an argument he just presented to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, as part of his effort to defeat marriage equality in that state. Although both Nevada’s Democratic Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and its Republican Governor Brian Sandoval agree that their state’s marriage discrimination law cannot “withstand legal scrutiny,” Stewart continues to defend unequal treatment for same-sex couples as the attorney for the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage.

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