Abbott Is Not The Brightest Bulb On The Tree

(This image of Greg Abbott with infamous racist, xenophobe, and ephebophile, Ted Nugent, is from the Burnt Orange Report.)

Those who have kept up with Texas politics will know that Attorney General Greg Abbott has been particularly ineffective in that office. Instead of using his office for the benefit of the citizens of Texas, he has filed suit after suit against the federal government -- not because the federal government was violating the law or the Constitution, but because he wanted to pander to the teabaggers in his own party to further his own political career. And he has lost almost every one of those cases (wasting millions of dollars of taxpayer money).

And he seems to have learned nothing from that string of court losses. In spite of the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court recently refused to overturn (or even hear) appeals court decisions that states were violating the Constitution by banning same-sex marriages, Abbott has chosen to continue trying to defend the Texas ban on same-sex marriages. Last Friday he filed a new brief with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and in that brief he claimed:

“The State is not required to show that recognizing same-sex marriage will undermine heterosexual marriage. It is enough if one could rationally speculate that opposite-sex marriages will advance some state interest to a greater extent than same-sex marriages will.”

That is a ridiculous statement on its face. A federal judge has found the Texas ban violates the U.S. Constitution. Of course the state ill be required to show justification for its ban, and that justification must be a lot stronger than just speculation. What he is claiming, in effect, is that the bigoted desires of Texas politicians somehow trump the U.S. Constitution. Then he compounds this stupidity in the brief by saying:

“First, Texas’s marriage laws are rationally related to the State’s interest in encouraging couples to produce new offspring, which are needed to ensure economic growth and the survival of the human race. Second, Texas’s marriage laws are rationally related to the State’s interest in reducing unplanned out-of-wedlock births. By channeling procreative heterosexual intercourse into marriage, Texas’s marriage laws reduce unplanned out-of-wedlock births and the costs that those births impose on society. Recognizing same-sex marriage does not advance this interest because same-sex unions do not result in pregnancy.”

Claiming the Texas ban is to prevent out-of-wedlock children simply makes no sense. There is no way that either preventing or allowing same-sex marriages will affect the number of out-of-wedlock children born in the state. And if those marriages are banned because they can't produce children, then the state must also ban the marriages of opposite-sex couples who either can't, or don't want to have children. If the state doesn't ban those opposite-sex marriages (and it doesn't), then banning marriage for same-sex couples for that reason just discriminates against homosexuals (by imposing a restriction on them that does not apply to heterosexuals who don't want children).

Abbotts official position is both illogical and unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees all U.S. citizens will be treated equally under the law. Abbott's position counters that by claiming homosexuals are a special class that can be discriminated against.

Now Abbott is trying to become the next governor of Texas. Do we really want a man who is this stupid (and a terrible lawyer to boot) to be our next governor?