This Professor’s Ridiculous Homophobic Rant Warns of ‘Lesbian Margaritas’ and ‘Gay Swordfish Platters’
Gerard Bradley is a professor of law at Notre Dame and he’s not a fan of marriage equality. In a recent law exam, he asked his students to determine whether or not Justice Kennedy’s opinion in the seminal Obergefell v. Hodges ruling — the one that gave the United States marriage equality — made “coherent sense.” If Bradley’s view wasn’t already obvious, he then published a homophobic screed that made things perfectly clear.
Bradley’s piece for Public Discourse, the online magazine of the religious legal think tank the Witherspoon Institute, was titled “Learning to Live With Same-Sex Marriage?”
(We like that question mark in the headline. It makes it sound as if he’s not happy in his own, perhaps legally mandated, same-sex marriage. After all, if you’re not in a same-sex marriage, it’s surprisingly easy to “learn to live” with the concept.)
The essay opens with the story of him asking his students if these two following paragraphs of Justice Kennedy’s opinion make “coherent sense.” (Honestly, the two paragraphs seem pretty straightforward to us.):
Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here… when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied.
Still, Bradley claims his “students struggled with that one.” He then talks about the Masterpiece Cakeshop case in which a Colorado bakery refused to create a cake for a same-sex couple’s 2012 wedding reception. Bradley says the case is “a perfect vehicle for establishing that the First Amendment does justify some limits on making everyone bow to the same-sex marriage idol.” (Where can we get one of these idols?)
While Bradley’s argument is dodgy and full of anti-gay right-wing talking points, we have to admit that the man has a way with words. He describes the Masterpiece case as applying only to wedding vendors whose work is “artistic speech,” saying that bartenders and caterers are exempt, “at least so long as they do not invent a specifically lesbian Margarita or a ‘gay’ swordfish platter.”
We’re also proud to announce that Hornet’s crack research team is very close to perfecting the gay swordfish platter; sadly, we’re still years away from a lesbian Margarita.
