Del. Bob Marshall Continues to Reveal Anti-Gay Animus

One of the ironies of the U.S. District Court case in Bostic v. Rainey was that past comments of Del. Bob Marshall and Ken Cuccinelli were utilized by the plaintiffs to document that anti-gay animus was the real motivation behind passage of the heinous Marshall-Newman Amendment.  Apparently (at least in my view), the certifiably insane Bob Marshall still hasn't learned to keep his mouth shut and to stop making statements that prove the the case that anti-gay hatred and nothing else was the motivation behind passage of Virginia's gay marriage ban and Marshall's continued jihad to keep LGBT Virginians inferior under the law.  Faced with the reality that even the generally delusional Virginia GOP leadership doesn't want to bring impeachment charges against Attorney General Mark Herring, yesterday Marshall when on a deranged screed yesterday seeking to ramp up anti-gay hatred even further.  The Richmond Times Dispatch has details.  Note who some black pastors continue to allow themselves to be manipulated like circus dogs by Marshall and Virginia Christofascists who long for the "good old days" of Jim Crow.   These pastors need to have "I am a moron" tattooed on their foreheads. Here are highlights:

Allowing gay couples in Virginia to marry would result in “significant alteration, change and radical modification of every aspect of both individual, family and tax law in Virginia,” Del. Robert G. Marshall, R-Prince William, warned at a news conference in Richmond on Tuesday.

“Every church and every Catholic or Protestant hospital will lose its tax (exempt) status. There is no restricting once it happens. This has effects that I can’t even contemplate at this time,” Marshall said.

The delegate stood at the state Capitol with several African-American church leaders who have united behind the Republican’s push to impeach Attorney General Mark R. Herring for his refusal to defend Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban in court.

“If people simply think that the so-called same-sex marriage is just a circumstance of whether two people are cohabiting in the same residence, they are profoundly mistaken,” said Marshall, a co-sponsor of the 2006 amendment to the state Constitution that defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Congress does not grant tax-exempt status to organizations that are racially discriminatory such as the Ku Klux Klan, and organizations that do not support same-sex marriage once it is legal would face the same fate, Marshall said.

“If the courts decide that the 14th Amendment requires same-sex marriage, no church in Virginia will keep its status (and) every charity that’s feeding the poor, clothing the poor, funding medical care, repairing houses — all that will be gone,” Marshall said.

Carl Tobias, a constitutional law professor at the University of Richmond, said that even if there were any arguable grounds for impeachment, the state Senate would never convict.

“This is a huge distraction when the General Assembly has critical matters before it like a possible shutdown of state government,” said Tobias, one of three constitutional law professors who filed a court brief in April backing Herring’s refusal to defend Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban.

Herring spokesman Michael Kelly said these “unsubstantiated and untrue claims” come as “court after court concludes, as Herring did,” that bans on marriage equality are unconstitutional. 

Someone needs to have Marshall committed to a mental institution.