White Supremacist Group Files Brief Supporting Michigan Gay Marriage Ban

There's an old saying that you will be known by the company you keep  - it certainly applies to Michigan GOP Attorney General Bill Schuette and Michigan GOP Governor Rick Snyder who are defending Michigan's ban on same sex marriage after the ban was struck down as unconstitutional.  Why so you might ask?  Because in addition to being joined by the ugliest elements of the Christofascist ranks, a white supremacy group has now also filed a brief supporting the state's wrong headed position endorsing anti-gay discrimination.  I have said repeatedly that the GOP base has become a joint venture of racists and religious extremists and this brief and other aspects of this case is underscoring this reality.  Here are highlights from the Southern Poverty Law Center which monitors hate groups:

In an amicus brief filed yesterday in federal court in Michigan, the Traditionalist Youth Network (TYN) –– a student organization concerned with promoting white identity –– has taken up the mantle of defending the “sanctity of marriage” against “Culture distorters” who seek to reject “originalism.”

The brief was filed in the case of April DeBoer, a nurse in Hazel Park, Mich., who sued the state after she and her partner, Jayne Rowse, were prohibited from adopting their three children jointly because they did not have a legal marriage. Last week, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman ruled in their favor, striking down the Michigan Marriage Act as unconstitutional. But his decision was temporarily put on hold by an appeals court.

The defense of “traditional” marriage represents something of a shift in focus for TYN, which has historically concerned itself with “Tribe and Tradition” and encouraging young people to unite against “decadence, individualism, Marxism and Modernity.” Its co-founder, Matthew Heimbach, rose from the ranks of white nationalism and has aligned himself more closely with racist activists than with conservative groups standing against same-sex marriage.

The brief . . . claim[s] that the judge’s ruling is an “affront to thousands of years of the Western legal tradition and hundreds of years of the American legal tradition.”

“While the appellants will likely not say it as bluntly as this,” the brief said, “the Culture distorters and those who espouse their ideals flagrantly reject originalism and often treat the United States Constitution like an accordion: they frequently stretch it out to invent rights that do not exist –– such as the ‘right’ to have an abortion or the ‘right’ to engage in sodomy or the ‘right’ to view pornographic materials.”

After several telephone conversations between Hatewatch and TYN leaders on Wednesday, Parrott published a short piece titled “TradYouth Stands for Traditional Marriage” on the group’s website to explain the shift.

“The recent campaign in favor of homosexual ‘marriage’ is merely one battle in [the Left’s] generational campaign against the ties that bind our peoples,” Parrott wrote, tying a defense of a traditional marriage to the white nationalist cause.
[T]he brief lists Kyle Bristow as TYN’s lead attorney. . . . . While attending law school in 2010, he published White Apocalypse, a novel seething with lethal white supremacist revenge fantasies against Jewish professors, Latino and American Indian activists and staffers of a group clearly modeled on the SPLC. Since then, Bristow has continued to air his extremist views in white nationalist, anti-gay media.

Among the claims made in the brief are the following:

·       [S]ame-sex marriage is an affront to the health, safety, morals, and public welfare of the residents of the State of Michigan which is why the Western and American legal traditions have proscribed sodomy much less same-sex marriage for thousands and hundreds of years, respectively.

·       If a state cannot be permitted to define marriage as simply as constituting one man and one woman, then our culture will be taken down a very slippery slope that will see pedophiles, polygamists, zoophiles, those in incestuous relationships, and every other sexual deviant with proclivities now known or to be invented to challenge laws that, likewise, prevent them from marrying whom or what they wish.

·       Not satisfied with exercising their newfound right in private, homosexuals have come out of the closet and into the courtroom in attempt to further normalize their conduct by demanding more rights that are not in accordance with history. Amazingly, the Culture distorters have marched forward so relentlessly in the culture war that sodomy has not only been legalized, but now those who practice sodomy are demanding to be permitted to marry one another which the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan was happy to oblige.