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| Ryan T. Anderson |
Some conservatives are not happy with yesterday's deliberations in front of the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals where state attorneys defending marriage equality bans in Wisconsin and Indiana got practically ripped by the three judge panel.
Chris Geidner of Buzzfeed called it "the most lopsided arguments over marriage bans at a federal appeals court this year . . ." while I said we can expect to hear whining about "activist judges" spewing from the right.
I didn't know it would come this soon.
Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation has slowly but steadily become the new defender of marriage equality bans on a supposedly intellectual basis. He sent out the following tweet outlining a complaint about one of the judges:
"Posner is a bully ... [other] judges, even who disagree with the lawyers, managed to be courteous and respectful." http://t.co/9UR0Yv3ylq
— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanT_Anderson) August 27, 2014
Anderson's tweet was referring to Justice Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee who was the most aggressive in skewering the defenders of the marriage equality ban during yesterday's trial.
If the judges rule in our favor, I expect other besides Anderson will be pulling the "he was an activist bully" card against Posner. But what folks like Anderson mischaracterize (probably deliberately) as bullying is an adherence to facts and lack of patience for people with virtually no argument to support their point of view.
In other words, don't blame the judge because your argument is lousy.
Correction - it was the 7th district. The 6th as during the first week of August.
ReplyDeleteIt was the 7th Circuit
ReplyDeleteThanks. I made the correction ;p
ReplyDeleteThat's funny. Because religious zealots like Ryan Anderson are "bullies" for passing anti-gay laws that ACTUALLY harm people's lives -- which is NOT the same thing as hurting an attorney's feelings in a courtroom.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I found most remarkable from the audio was Posner's gentle persistence. His voice is lyrical, he speaks slowly enough to give attorneys time to compose their response.
ReplyDeleteIt was important to him, it struck me, that everybody in the room had read all of the briefs and knew (or at least, should have) where they stood within a long recent record in federal courts. Having that breadth of knowledge, he persisted in asking questions relevant to the attorneys' filings which hadn't yet been asked.
It was not going to be a stage for grandstanding, where attorneys repeated their old, repetitive claims. He insisted that they step up to fill in the gaping holes in their arguments.
Yeah, just like a schoolyard bully pummeling his prey for their lunch money.
About time the judges demanded some real reasons, not the same bile they have all been spewing. Of course, there is no real reason.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet they never claim Scalia is a bully.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard when you don't really have anything kind of objective, quantifiable evidence of the broad claims your making. So, when one is asked for the evidence supporting the claims, and you have none, I guess it does feel kind of like you're getting the crap beat out of you.
They all thought it was in the bag with the Regnerus study...that they finally had "evidence." Well, that didn't work out so well for them, so they're left with nothing but platitudes.