We shall know you by the company that you keep
As Michigan Attorney General and 2018 gubernatorial candidate Bill Schuette continues his crusade to deny gay and lesbian couples their civil rights and equality under state law, he finds himself with interesting company. It turns out the white nationalist Kyle Bristow has filed an amicus brief (pdf) in support of Governor Snyder and AG Schuette’s appeal the recent federal court ruling that our state’s discriminatory same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional. He’s doing it on behalf of the “Traditionalist Youth Network LLC”. Their website is HERE but I highly recommend avoiding it if racism and bigotry are triggers for you.
Here’s a bit of what their brief says:
The Traditionalist Youth Network, LLC’s amicus curiae brief is both relevant and desirable. See Fed. R. App. P. 29(b)(2).When it comes to the Traditionalist Youth Network, LLC, its mission is tradition, and since the district court’s opinion is an affront to thousands of years of the Western legal tradition and hundreds of years of the American legal tradition, the Traditionalist Youth Network, LLC, believes that it is critically important for its organization to become involved in the case by way of it submitting an amicus curiae brief to support the appellants. […]
Although the appellants are expected to make somewhat similar arguments in the instant appeal, the Traditionalist Youth Network, LLC’s brief is desirable and relevant to the disposition of the case insofar as it presents its argument by extrapolating and analyzing ancient and traditional legal principles by exploring the history of Western and American civilization. In short, the Traditionalist Youth Network, LLC’s brief presents an originalist argument that could very well be omitted from the briefs of the parties to this case since it is vogue for litigants to either be politically correct and avoid the real issues or to cite modernist pseudoscience and easily distinguishable case law based on postmodern sentiment to argue that social engineering is required—and not just permitted—by the United States Constitution. […]
While the appellants will likely not say it as bluntly as this, the Culture distorters and those who espouse their ideals flagrantly reject originalism and often treat the United States Constitution like an accordion: they frequently stretch it out to invent rights that do not exist—such as the “right” to have an abortion or the “right” to engage in sodomy or the “right” to view pornographic materials—, and they constrict it to not mean things that it certainly does—such as by denying the plain language of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.
If this hideous ranting sounds like a new lawyer riding without his training wheels for the first time, you’ve got it just right. The 28-year old is a newly-minted lawyer here in Michigan. But he has a history. Oh boy, does he ever have a history.
For example:
At 19, Mr. Bristow was elected chairman of [Michigan State University]’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter, a conservative group started in 1960 under the aegis of William F. Buckley, Jr. Mr. Bristow transformed the chapter into a lightning rod for controversy.The chapter took some traditional conservative stances, such as opposing gay rights and amnesty for illegal immigrants. It invited mainstream conservative speakers to campus, including former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo. But the group also invited Nick Griffin, a British politician and Holocaust denier who has been accused of inciting racial hatred. […]
Under Mr. Bristow, the group planned “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,” members said, to raise awareness of immigration, though it was canceled. The group held a “Koran desecration contest” and organized a “straight power” rally outside Lansing City Hall to protest an anti-discrimination ordinance that would protect gays and lesbians. The ordinance passed.
Mr. Bristow wrote a press release for the city hall protest: “YAF members find homosexuality and other forms of sexual deviancy to be disgusting. The Boy Scouts, military, and the American public need to be protected from these degenerates.”
Bristow’s extremism warranted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to label his group a “hate group”. Bristow himself has his very own page on the SPLC’s website:
Kyle Bristow first gained notoriety when he began inviting white nationalists to speak on campus while he led the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter at Michigan State University in 2006. The pugnacious college student also spearheaded anti-immigrant and anti-gay campaigns organized by YAF, prompting the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to take the unusual step of listing the campus club as a hate group. Bristow soon branched out to violent, hate-driven fiction. While attending law school in 2010, he published White Apocalypse, a novel seething with lethal white supremacist revenge fantasies against Jewish professors, Latino and American Indian activists and staffers of a group clearly modeled on the SPLC. Since then, Bristow has continued to air his extremist views in white nationalist, anti-gay media. […]In December 2013, Bristow publicly teamed with Dan Poole, a recent college-graduate and activist with the white supremacist American Freedom Party, to found The Center for the Advancement of Occidental Culture. The new group’s mission is “to advance and defend Western civilization,” opposing alleged discrimination and harassment of European Americans. Its opening online salvo, on Dec. 31, asked for original articles for its website and financial contributions. Mysteriously, just a month later, the two founders dissolved the new group as a limited liability corporation (Bristow was its chief legal officer, according to a blog post by the Anti-Defamation League) and its website went dead.
The SPLC’s site has some fun quotes from Bristow, too:
Liberalism promotes sexual perversion —especially homosexuality and miscegenation — which debases the White race. Neither homosexuals nor interracial couples, after all, produce White children.
And…
Homosexuality kills people almost to a degree worse than cigarettes. … [T]hese [pro-gay rights] groups are complicit with murder.
Congratulations, Attorney General Schuette. You have fine company in your effort to deny Michiganders their rights. I actually don’t give a damn about what sort of degenerates you hang around with. I just wish you weren’t spending my tax dollars to do it.
[CC image credit: YouwithoutMe | DeviantArt]
