Anti-Gay Prince William Clerk Petitions SCOTUS in Bostic Case

Gay hater, Michele McQuigg

Nasty, homophobic, cow Christofascist Michele McQuigg, Circuit Court Clerk for Prince William County, Virginia, through her extremist counsel from the miss named Alliance Defending Freedom (a group that in reality wants a Christian theocracy) has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear her appeal of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling which affirmed the unconstitutionality of Virginia anti-gay animus motivated Marshall-Newman Amendment and related statutes.   If I hold special animosity towards McQuigg, it is because she intervened in this case for the sole purpose of defending hate inspired discrimination against same sex couples.  Whatever I may think of Norfolk Circuit Court Clerk George Schaefer, he was sued in Bostic v. Rainey and did not voluntarily seek out litigation.  Not McQuigg, she sought to be involved and one can only hope that history views her akin to white robed KKK members seeking to deprive blacks of their legal rights.  Here are details from the Daily Press on McQuigg's mission of hate (the filing can be found here):

Prince William County Circuit Court Clerk Michèle B. McQuigg — being represented by an Arizona-based conservative Christian legal organization — filed a formal petition on Friday asking the high court to reverse two recent federal court rulings throwing out Virginia's gay marriage ban.

Lawyers with that organization, the Alliance Defending Freedom, said the court decisions are telling Virginia and its citizens they must "redefine marriage from a gendered (man-woman) institution to a genderless (any two persons) institution."

"Whether the Constitution itself requires such a fundamental redefinition of marriage is an exceedingly important question that should be settled by this Court," the petition says. "The time for answering that question — the time for deciding whether the People throughout the various States are free to affirm their chosen marriage policy — is now."

Though McQuigg was not initially sued in the case, she "intervened" as a defendant in January after signals that newly-elected Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring "would renounce … defense of the challenged marriage laws," the Alliance said.

Since then, McQuigg, who issues marriage licenses as part of her job, has become the Virginia ban's most outspoken defender in the case.

"Throughout this litigation, McQuigg alone has raised and defended all of Virginia's compelling interests in regulating marriage as the union of a man and a woman," Friday's appeal says. Because of that, the Alliance asserts, the Supreme Court would "benefit" by granting a hearing "through this petition."

Indeed, some of the language in McQuigg's petition casts the issue in broad historical terms.

"For millennia, marriage has served the vital social purposes of steering naturally procreative relationships into committed unions and connecting children to both their mother and their father," the filing says. "Man-woman couples, unlike any other relationships, uniquely implicate these important societal interests."

As passed in a 1975 law and 2006 state constitutional amendment, the ban also outlaws civil unions, bars adoption by same-sex couples, “voids” the recognition of gay marriages from other states and doesn't grant property, medical and contract rights to same-sex couples.

Friday's filing was the third "petition for a writ of certiorari" asking the high court to take up the case.

The first came Aug. 8 by the Virginia Attorney General's Office, asking the high court to affirm the lower court decisions. The second was Aug. 22 by Norfolk Circuit Court Clerk George E. Schaefer III, who contends states should be free to define marriage.

If the Supreme Court agrees to take up the issue, a hearing could be set as early as next spring. Ultimately, the court could uphold 31 existing state bans on same-sex marriage, or could outlaw all the bans at once.

And in a separate kind of filing on Wednesday, the case's plaintiffs — despite winning in the lower courts — also exhorted the court to hear the matter.