Craziness Roundup for the Week of Feb. 20, 2015

Oh man, as usual the crazy just burns. How, in the name of all that is holy, do some of these people get elected.

Tennessee
Let’s start with Republican State Representative James Van Huss of Tennessee who wants to make one small change to the constitution of the state of Tennessee.  Van Huss’ change would rewrite Article I to say, “We recognize that our liberties do not come from governments, but from Almighty God, our Creator and Savior.” Perhaps it won’t be a huge surprise that Rep. VanHuss, who also goes by the name Micah, and just for the record, is a Republican. (Maybe he should read the book of Micah sometime, especially the part in 6:8 about walking “humbly with your God.”

Alabama
According to the New Civil Rights Movement, that State of Alabama continues trying to drag itself back into the 19th century, by having the Alabama Policy Institute (API) and the Alabama Citizens Action Program, (ALCAP) both anti-gay conservative groups, filed an emergency petition for a writ of mandamus declaring the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is still in force. As you probably know, on Monday of last week, Alabama became the 37th marriage equality state, but because Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore told the state’s probate judges that the federal ruling did not apply to them.

We’ve also got a Supreme Court Justice (not Roy Moore believe it or not) Glenn Murdock has decided that if they have to have gay marriages in Alabama, he’d just as soon have no marriages. This comes in an obscure 2 page opinion by Murdock attached to an order about intervening in the issuance of marriage licenses by probate judges.

Murdock suggests that, had the state legislature known that its decision to exclude gay couples from the right to marry was unconstitutional, it might have preferred not to let anyone to be married in the state of Alabama. This potential preference for no marriages over equality matters, according to Justice Murdock, because of a prior state supreme court decision holding that, when part of a state law is struck down, the law may be declared “wholly void” if “the invalid portion is so important to the general plan and operation of the law in its entirety as reasonably to lead to the conclusion that it would not have been adopted if the legislature had perceived the invalidity of the part so held to be unconstitutional.”

In other words, if gays can get married, it makes all marriages unconstitutional in Alabama. What a bunch of childish, “I’ll pick up my balls and go home.”