South Carolina & Tennessee Asshats Say Same-Sex Marriage Is Like Forced Sterilization

In South Carolina you can go from being proud of your state — as I was for a moment last week when Nikki Haley took Donald [t]Rump to task … though without mentioning his name — to being embarrassed to say, “I live in South Carolina.”

This is one of those embarrassments.

Of course, the thing I’m embarrassed about is the same thing they — and by ‘they,’ I mean the GOP — are trying to do in Tennessee, so it’s doubly embarrassing to be lumped with that particular nest of batsh*t crazy politicians.

But … in both South Carolina and Tennessee, the Republicans have introduced anti-LGBT bills that are just vile, sick, and, well, outright lies. Both bills seek to nullify the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which found that state bans on same-sex marriage violate the equal protection and due process clauses of the federal Constitution. 

And these new bills in these two states — both called the Natural Marriage Defense Act[s] … because only heterosexual marriage is natural, and then only for heterosexuals — would bar state officials from recognizing the marriages of same-sex couples, thereby making all those same-sex marriages that have occurred in these two states since last June, and in South Carolina since 2014, gone, done, vanished; they never happened. The new bills would basically “unmarry” all same-sex couples in these two states.

And they would make it illegal for state officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and require the states' attorneys general to defend any official who is sued, or ordered by a federal judge to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

Both bills contain this clause:

"[T]he United States Supreme Court is not infallible and has issued lawless decisions which are repulsive to the Constitution and natural law, including Buck v. Bell, Korematsu v. United States, Roe v. Wade, and, most recently, Obergefell v. Hodges."

Repulsive. That’s what I think of these bills, and these legislators. But what’s even more disgusting are the other bills they are using as a comparison to the “repulsive” Obergefell v. Hodges:

Buck v. Bell was a 1927 decision in which the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, "for the protection and health of the state.”

Korematsu v. United States was a decision upholding the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II regardless of citizenship.

Yes, same-sex marriage is on the same level as forced sterilization and internment camps.

That Tennessee bill is authored by GOP state Representative Mark Pody [left] who says that God directed him to file it.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I believe I’m supposed to be speaking to the unsaved, to the people that are performing same-sex marriages, to the people involved in same-sex marriage, it is wicked, it is wrong and I am doing the best I can to warn them. I believe that Nashville, Tennessee, is the time and the place that we put down the stake and we say, 'No more!'"

The South Carolina bill is authored by GOP Representatives Bill Chumley [middle] and Mike Burns [right]; Chumley is known in South Carolina as the Republican who blamed the nine victims of that terrorist attack on the Church in Charleston for their own deaths, suggesting that they should have been armed inside that church:

"I represent the people, and the people have shown several times that they are opposed to this, and are in favor of traditional marriage.  Apparently, [four justices] believe like we do. I do believe that something that's a close vote like that sends a message, it's not cut and dry."

Now, in all fairness, and seriousness, and intelligence, both these bills have little chance of passing, or even if passed, have little chance of ever accomplishing what these wingnuts propose. The Supremacy Clause in the Constitution states that “all laws made furthering the Constitution … are the “supreme law of the land,” so state officials don't have the authority to nullify federal laws or court rulings. 

States may challenge those federal laws and Constitutional interpretations in court, but the Supreme Court, like the Great and Powerful Oz, has spoken.

But I worry about this continued rabid anti-LGBT feeling in this country, because it continues the hate, and riles the haters, who, if they simply took a moment to listen and learn, would understand that no one, not one single person in any state in this country, or around the world, has been hurt, or lessened or degraded because two men, or two women, can marry.

NCRM