Wisconsin voters didn’t know just how smart they were back in 2020, when they elected Jill Karofsky to the state Supreme Court, and booted Dan Kelly off of it. He got the job in 2016, when then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, appointed him, then lost when he had to run for the job. Like the proverbial bad penny, though, he’s back and could get that seat in next month’s election.
When I say “bad penny,” I mean far-right extremist monster aligned with group spending millions in dark money pushing an ugly, antisemitic campaign to stoke fear and division. Turns out, that’s completely on point for Kelly, who in his pre-court days (2012-15) racked up an impressive number of off-the-political-spectrum conservative opinions expressed on a blog called “Hang Together.”
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Abortion, he wrote, “takes the life of an unborn child.” He said that abortion rights groups and all of the people in favor of keeping abortion legal know it’s “harming children” but still fight for it. “Why? To preserve sexual libertinism.” See, it’s all about people—women, in particular—who just want to have sex for all the reasons people want to have sex besides making babies.
So you won’t be surprised to discover same-sex marriage is about “using the power of the state to compel others to legitimize the same-sex couples’ personal arrangements. But that forced legitimization is itself an illegitimate exercise of state power.”
Can you donate $10—or maybe $20, even—to Judge Protaseiwicz’s campaign to win back the Wisconsin Supreme Court?
If he makes it onto the court, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul’s challenge to the state’s 174-year old abortion ban will fail. That ancient law, which outlaws the procedure even in cases of rape or incest, will take effect. If the U.S. Supreme Court decides to overturn marriage equality—and you know that’s on their wish list—the Wisconsin Supreme Court would be right behind them.
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That’s just the beginning of Kelly’s war on the 20th century, however. He condemns every bit of social progress the country has made, including Social Security. It’s another form of welfare, he wrote way back when, and further indication that the country is “sliding into socialism.” And it’s all the government’s fault for “stealing” from real Americans to give money to people who are “allergic to the idea that there is a necessary connection between work and what it produces” and who “don’t create enough to sustain themselves during their working years.” That’s why he also condemns people getting Social Security and Medicare who “have chosen to retire without sufficient assets to support themselves.”
“Welfare recipients do not receive their checks as manna from heaven,” Kelly wrote. “Someone created that wealth and then the government forcibly took it.” These programs force the people paying taxes to be victims of “involuntary servitude.”
Do you want to know his idea of slavery? No, you don’t, but here you go anyway. From a chapter he wrote for a 2014 book on American philosopher John Rawls, regarding affirmative action: “Affirmative action and slavery differ, obviously, in significant ways. … But it’s more a question of degree than principle, for they both spring from the same taproot,” Kelly wrote. “Neither can exist without the foundational principle that it is acceptable to force someone into an unwanted economic relationship. Morally, and as a matter of law, they are the same.”
Just the same.
This man is dangerous. A Wisconsin Supreme Court with him in the majority wouldn’t just rocket Wisconsin back to the political dark ages, it could put the Republicans in this critical swing state in a position to install Donald Trump as president in 2024.
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