Scott Walker is working really hard to be the most repugnant government official in the United States, isn’t he? As Margaret Hartmann at Jezebel puts it:
If you weren’t convinced Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is heinous by that time he tried to strip teachers, firefighters, social workers, and other government employees of their collective bargaining rights, this should do it: Now he’s fighting to make it so gay people can’t visit their partners in the hospital.
Yep! In the tiny mind of Scott Walker, hospital visitation rights, which are conferred under the state’s domestic partnership laws, are just a little bit too much like marriage, and the people of Wisconsin “protected” marriage, dammit! So he’s totally fine with the idea that a couple who have been together for fifty years might be denied the right to see each other before one of them takes her dying breath. Walker’s an amoral pig, basically.
A little more detail from the AP article:
Gov. Scott Walker has told a judge he wants to stop defending Wisconsin’s domestic partner registry in court because he doesn’t believe it’s constitutional.
Members of the conservative group Wisconsin Family Action filed a lawsuit last summer arguing the registry violates the state’s constitutional ban on gay marriage. Former Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat who proposed the registry as a means of granting same-sex couples more legal rights, chose to defend the measure and had filed a motion asking Dane County Circuit Judge Daniel Moeser for summary judgment upholding it. Walker, a Republican, inherited the case from Doyle when he took office in January.
You see, we expect groups with names like “Wisconsin Family Action” to be full of heartless scolds, but it’s disheartening when actual elected officials go along with their bigoted nonsense. Oh wait, we’re talking about Scott Walker, though! Yeah, this is completely expected and par for the course. It will be a joy to watch Wisconsin voters show him the door when his term is over. I’ll let Margaret at Jezebel have the last word here, because her piece on this is perfect:
Still, Walker has definitely sent a message. He’s such a passionate conservative that he’ll make gay people suffer even more during the most horrible time in their lives, because that’s what limited government is really all about.
Indeed.
