Tuesday, March 3, 2015

NE AG Don Peterson on gay marriage ruling:
'I don't think we can dictate our laws based upon the emotional arguments of a certain class of people'



While the headline quote (6:51 in video) may have been Peterson's most offensive, as it casually dismissed the legal, social and monetary damage directly visited by the state's gay marriage ban on the 50,000 (conservatively reckoned) gay people who call Nebraska home, his most cringe-worthy assertions (at 9:47 about law-unto-themselves county clerks) seem to have been lifted from the Roy Moore Alabama  Cookbook of Jurisprudence & Civil Disobedience, and might even be interpreted as a subtle invitation to Nebraska county clerks to engage in obstructionism, should proceedings in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals not go Peterson's way and gay marriage were to become a reality in Nebraska sooner rather than later:
Well, I think each county clerk has to speak with their county attorney and take counsel. We in the Attorney General's office are not in a position to advise county clerks. They have to rely upon the counsel of their county attorneys. The other thing that's somewhat difficult about it, if you want to get into the weeds... Rule 65 of the federal rules, basically [says] that an injunction applies to those parties identified in the lawsuit and in this particular case, certainly they have not identified all 93 county court clerks, so there's a question of whether or not the court's injunction, ah temporary injunction, would apply to those not identified as clerks.

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