Imagine you are in a grocery store parking lot loading groceries into your car when up behind you comes an old man. He looks confused, seems agitated and his clothes don’t fit him right. He says to you, “Don’t worry. I am mentally stable. In fact, I’m a genius.” Chances are good that your first impression will be that the man before you is, in fact, not mentally well.
So when the President of the U.S. taps America on the shoulder by way of Twitter to make such a pronouncement, it is, to say the least, very worrying.
And yet we have Trump, the idiot that millions of Americans were dumb enough to vote for. I didn’t think we could do worse than George W. Bush, but I was wrong.
And let me stop you right there if you’re about to make a “I never thought I’d miss George W. Bush” comment, spare me the nostalgia. I don’t miss him. At all. The man lied in order to start a war that we’re still god damn fighting. Not to mention the fact that he was terrible for LGBTQ rights. Many of the right-wing movers and shakers currently wreaking havoc on civil rights on behalf of Trump were fed and watered during the W. reign.
Like Brian Brown, for instance. Brown is the president of National Organization for Marriage, which was founded in 2007 in order to combat the scourge of marriage equality. And though that battle seems over with equality on the winning side, Brown and his ilk are still fighting.
And Trump has been a real gift to them. Not just Trump, though. Mitch McConnell as well.
Stealing a Supreme Court appointment from Barack Obama, McConnell managed to tee up the appointment for Trump to make in-between trips to the golf course. Which is how we wound up with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. He’s 50, so assuming he doesn’t eat Big Macs in his bed and watch TV all day like the president, he’ll likely be on the bench a long, long time.
Brown sees it as a good step toward overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that made marriage equality the law of the land.
“The Supreme Court is not our ruler, so we don’t view the Obergefell as legitimate law, it’s illegitimate law,” Brown said on a Jan. 5 podcast.
As far as he’s concerned, it’s just a matter of time before he gets a “friendly” (read: anti-LGBTQ majority) court.
“[We are] working to the point where we can get another court decision by a friendlier court that can overturn Obergefell. And that may take some time, although one important success over the last year was the appointment of a good justice to the Supreme Court,” Brown said, referring to Gorsuch, “and ultimately Obergefell is going to be overturned by getting a decision to the Supreme Court.”
The thing is, he’s not wrong. Overturning Obergefell could absolutely happen. I once read a post on Twitter by a woman assuring a gay friend worried that Trump being elected would lead to the reversal of marriage equality decision. She assured him that such a thing could never happen because once a Supreme Court ruling is made, that’s it, no going back. Except that’s not how the Supreme Court works. It is a good advertisement for why civics classes are important, however.
Brown and other Trump cheerleaders are very determined. They want to re-criminalize homosexuality and ban same-sex couples from getting married or having children. They want to punish transgender people for having the temerity to challenge their precious male/female binary. They want to abolish abortion. And of course they want tax cuts for the richest people in America.
And they will literally stop at nothing to make these things happen. They are willing to literally risk the fall of Democracy, the failure of the U.S. as a country. They are happy with a dictator, which Trump so desperately wants to be.
The only way to stop them is to throw the Republicans out of office. You. Must. Vote.
source https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2018/01/23/national-organization-for-marriage-president-views-obergefell-as-illegitimate-law/
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