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That ghost-hunting, never-argued-a-court-case, right-wing blogging judicial nominee of popular vote loser Donald Trump sure wanted the Senate Judiciary to think he was a blank slate, one who didn't get his name in front of Trump through nepotism. Recall that Brett Talley, nominated for a lifetime appointment in the federal judiciary, failed to mention in his application that his wife works in the administration for the guy who helps pick nominees, and failed to disclose much of his political blogging. That includes his long history of making political statements on a University of Alabama sports fan website, TideFans.com, where he's posted for years as user "BamainBoston." One of the things he wrote about there? His opposition to marriage equality.
BuzzFeed has reported that Talley seems to have written 16,381 posts over 12 years under the username BamainBoston. He identified himself by linking to a 2014 Washington Post profile of Talley under the subject line, Washington Post Did A Feature On Me. In that profile, Talley declared his personal opposition to same-sex marriage. Five months later, BamainBoston asserted his vehement opposition to constitutional equality for same-sex couples in a series of posts on TideFans.com.
"It's an absurd constitutional argument that the court is going to accept anyway," BamainBoston wrote in May 2015, addressing the argument, then pending before the Supreme Court, that same-sex couples hold a right to marry under the 14th Amendment. "Can the states have gay marriage? Sure. Does the constitution require it? Of course not."
He also asked in a post "why does the state have to permit gay marriage in the first place? What is the reason that this particular kind of relationship should have those attendant rights?"
As Slate's Mark Joseph Stern points out, the answer is an easy one: precedent. In this case, that precedent is the interracial marriage ban struck down by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia. "The court held that marriage is a fundamental right," writes, Stern, "protected by the liberty component of the Due Process Clause."
That's something a first-year law student should understand. Hell, that's something any well-informed lay person would understand. So we've got two problems here with Talley. He graduated from Harvard Law in 2007, and it seems pretty certain that Harvard would have taught Loving. But the second problem is that he decided he didn't need to declare to the Senate Judiciary Committee that there's all this writing out there of his that lays out what his wrong-headed judicial philosophy would be. That's a combination of ignorance and arrogance that really should be too much—even for a Republican.