Governor Scott Walker is teaming up with the ultra-right wing whack jobs at Wisconsin Family Action to fight against hospital visitation rights for same-sex couples in his state. Seriously. He's attacking gay couples when they're most vulnerable -- when there's hospitalization required. Add extreme homophobia to Walker's growing resume of shame:
Gov. Scott Walker believes a new law that gives gay couples hospital visitation rights violates the state constitution and has asked a judge to allow the state to stop defending it.Same-sex couples have very few protections in Wisconsin. Walker wants to make sure they have none.
Democrats who controlled the Legislature in 2009 changed the law so that same-sex couples could sign up for domestic partnership registries with county clerks to secure some - but not all - of the rights afforded married couples.
Wisconsin Family Action sued last year in Dane County circuit court, arguing that the registries violated a 2006 amendment to the state constitution that bans gay marriage and any arrangement that is substantially similar.
Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen refused to defend the lawsuit, saying he agreed the new law violated the state constitution. Then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, hired Madison attorney Lester Pines to defend the state.
Walker, a Republican, replaced Doyle in January and fired Pines in March. On Friday, Walker filed a motion to stop defending the case.
The Obama administration addressed the hospital visitation issues at the federal level, despite DOMA. The new rules are now in effect. Note the polling and reaction to Obama's announcement back in April of 2010 (from the NYT):
Public opinion polls show that those measures are widely supported, at times by more than 8 in 10 Americans, even though fewer than half of poll respondents typically support same-sex marriage.And, that was last year. The numbers on marriage continue to improve dramatically.
“I think it’ll be relatively noncontroversial,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster in Virginia. “In this day and age, basic rights are deemed to be accorded to everyone. This allows him to give something to his base without worrying too much about backlash on the other side.”
Republican leaders and potential presidential candidates were uncommonly quiet on Friday, suggesting that Mr. Obama had located a rare bit of breathing room on a political landscape that is often crowded, contentious and noisy.
Hospital visits aren't even controversial. But, Scott Walker wants to deny any protections at the state level. He's shown himself to be anti-worker. Now, we know that he really hates the gays, too.
