Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor, co-authored an amicus brief with Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the case currently before the Supreme Court pertaining to California's infamous Proposition 8.
Naturally, the amicus brief is very Cuccinelli-esque. Gay marriage is a slippery slope to polygamy, et cetera? Check! But Michael Falcone finds the pair used "a novel justification to make their point":
“Responsible parenting is not a justification for same-sex-couple marriage, as distinguished from recognition of any other human relationships. It is instead a rationale for eliminating marriage as government recognition of a limited set of relationships. Once the natural limits that inhere in the relationship between a man and a woman can no longer sustain the definition of marriage, the conclusion that follows is that any grouping of adults would have an equal claim to marriage. See, e.g. , Jonathan Turley, One Big, Happy Polygamous Family , NY Times, July 21, 2011, at A27 (“[Polygamists] want to be allowed to create a loving family according to the values of their faith.”).”
The article that Cuccinelli and Zoeller cite is a July 2011 Op-Ed in The New York Times authored by Jonathan Turley, a law professor at The George Washington University Law School, which argues that polygamy should be decriminalized.
All of this comes at a time where Cuccinelli is reportedly working to "downplay his socially conservative background" in order to prevail in the Virginia gubernatorial race, a task that's gotten harder by an order of magnitude now that Cuccinelli's de facto running mate is E.W. Jackson. Who, by the way, is actually somehow more moderate than Cuccinelli in certain ways -- Jackson, at the very least, does not want to criminalize gay sex.
Of course, some perspective, from Falcone: "At a recent candidate forum, however, [Democratic candidate Terry] McAuliffe did not appear confident that he could do anything about Virginia’s own gay marriage ban if he were elected." That sounds about right. The best way to sum up the Virginia race is that there may not be enough support for a guy who thinks marriage equality is a slippery slope to polygamy to get him elected, but it's also not clear that taking the opposite point of view is a winner, either.
It's worth noting that it was actually men and women getting married to each other that started us down the slippery slope to same-sex marriage, but no one really ever wants to acknowledge that.
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In Supreme Court Brief, Ken Cuccinelli Warned Of A Slippery Slope From Gay Marriage To Polygamy [The Note]
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