Christofascist Hysteria Over Gay Marriage Continues - Will Alabama Defy SCOTUS?

One can only hope as the Christofascists become more deranged and hysterical in the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that more and more thinking Americans will realize that these "godly Christians" truly belong in a mental ward.  Preferably ones with high razor wire fences to keep the crazies locked within.  Over at Renew America, a SPLC registered hate group, on display are the spittle flecked rantings of Madeline Crabb whose bio first and foremost describes her as a "Christian."  Like most of the Christofascist authors, she has no credentials that make her competent to address issues of sexual orientation, gender identity or anything else and stripped of all the attempts at rhetorical flourish, her arguments rested solely on the Bible, a book authored by unknown writers who had a Bronze age knowledge of sexuality and thought the sun revolved around the Earth. 

In her diatribe Crabb attacks the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court as "mere men had nothing to do with creating marriage any more than they created the heavens, earth, or the very air we breathe."  Crabb, as is typical of Christofascists, conveniently ignores the fact that the Bible was authored by mere men - and ignorant uneducated ones at that - who in the case of the Old Testament had an agenda to keep Israelites separate and distinct from surrounding cultures and in the New Testament as ultimately comprised to maintain the power and control of the winning faction of the early Christians.  Here's a sample of her idiocy:

Five arrogant men and women declared themselves little gods, and chose to normalize same-sex partnerships, calling them "marriage," thus legalizing the accompanying activity that God calls an abomination: sodomy. (Actually, there's a plethora of other perverse activities homosexuals also do to "couple" that are simply too vile to speak about.) These judges supposedly "found" within the U.S. Constitution a "civil right" that for 239 years, legislators and much wiser judges were unable to find.

It would be easy to dismiss Crabb's rants as out of the mainstream Christian thought - the ravings of a lunatic if you will - yet in Alabama, two "Christian" groups are tying to convince the Alabama Supreme Court to defy the U.S. Supreme Court and ignore the Obergefell ruling.  SCOTUS blog looks at this craziness.  Here are excerpts (note the reliance on a ruling from 150+ years ago):

Asked by the Alabama Supreme Court for advice on what to do next on same-sex marriage, two conservative advocacy groups in the state have urged both direct and indirect resistance to the Supreme Court’s ruling mandating a constitutional right for gays and lesbians to wed.  The state court, the groups argued, has the constitutional power to refuse even to accept what the Justices have done, and has a constitutional duty to insulate state officials from legal risk if they do not obey the decision based on a religious objection.

The thirty-three-page brief was filed on Monday by the Alabama Policy Institution, . . . .and by the Alabama Citizens Action Program, an inter-denominational church support group, which earlier had persuaded the state’s highest court to block all of the state’s sixty-eight probate judges from issuing any marriage licenses to same-sex couples, even though all of them were under an order to do so by a federal judge in Mobile.  Depending on what the state court now does, it could set up a new federal-state collision that potentially could go to the Supreme Court.  Lower federal courts could take direct action against state trial court judges, but only the Supreme Court could review a decision by the Alabama Supreme Court on a federal constitutional issue.

The two probate judges said in short briefs that the state court had to respect and follow the binding ruling of the Supreme Court — the same position that Alabama’s attorney general has taken.

Aside from reciting at length from the Obergefell dissenters, the brief was focused heavily on the back-and-forth decisions of Wisconsin’s highest state court and the Supreme Court, over the power of a state court to order the release of an abolitionist, Sherman M. Booth, from federal custody on charges related to his role in arranging the freedom of a runway slave from Missouri.  The slave was never recaptured, but the Supreme Court, in the unanimous decision in Ableman v. Booth, ruled that the state court had no power to interfere with the prosecution of Booth. 

The Alabama groups’ brief noted that the state supreme court refused to accept the Supreme Court’s decision: “In the nearly 157 years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s purported reversal [of two state court rulings], the Wisconsin Supreme Court has never filed or accepted the U.S. Supreme Court’s mandates.”  What the state court did, the brief asserted, was done “in fidelity to the U.S. Constitution.”

When the federal courts engage in “unlawful acts,” the brief contended, state courts have the obligation to resist, even if that sets up “a collision” between state and federal courts.
The two groups devoted the last three pages of their filing to arguing that the state supreme court should do what needs to be done to insulate all state probate judges, and any members of their staffs from any punishment if they refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because of their religious opposition to such unions. 

As I have noted before, Alabama is far crazier now than when I lived there over 30 years ago.  WTF is in the water?