When Wendy Davis, the embattled Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas, suggested that her opponent, state Attorney General Greg Abbott, was against interracial marriages, I was pretty sure she had hit rock bottom. I mean, what could be lower than tweeting a scurrilous and deliberately misleading attack like this?
Here’s what’s at stake in this election. Vote today. #MyTexasVotes pic.twitter.com/PQ1bT0sijC
— Wendy Davis (@WendyDavisTexas) October 20, 2014
The Davis campaign answered that question a few hours later with this press release:
Yes, Texas, Wendy Davis believes that if Greg Abbott is elected governor, he will take away all your B.O.B.s (battery operated boyfriends).
Apparently, Davis got the idea for her interracial marriage attack from a question the San Antonio Express-News editorial board asked Abbott — to wit, whether he would have opposed interracial marriage 50 years ago if he had been the Texas attorney general at the time. Davis couldn’t have gotten it from the fact that Abbott is married to a granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, which in itself is a strong indication of how Abbott feels about mixed-ethnic and mixed-racial marriages.
When he was asked the ridiculous question of how he would have handled interracial marriages 50 years ago, Abbott responded:
Right now, if there was a ban on interracial marriage, that’s already been ruled unconstitutional … and all I can do is deal with the issues that are before me … the job of an attorney general is to represent and defend in court the laws of their client, which is the state Legislature, unless and until a court strikes it down.
When Peggy Fikac, the reporter, told Abbott his answer was unclear, he replied:
Actually, the reason why you’re uncertain about it is because I didn’t answer the question. And I can’t go back and answer some hypothetical question like that.
The only thing to learn from this line of questioning is that unlike Eric Holder, who has defied laws passed by Congress and signed by the President, Abbott believes in the more traditional (read legal) obligations of an Attorney General. Chief among them is to uphold the law. Which brings us to the B.O.B. part of Davis’s latest charge.
She found that charge in an article in the Texas Observer which said in part:
In 2008, Abbott chose to defend the state’s ban on the sale of sex toys, a case that emerged from the fallout of Lawrence v. Texas. Over the years, Abbott has deployed novel legal arguments against gay marriage. But this wasn’t a case about gay marriage, a subject that still animates sincere moral disagreements. This was a case about every American’s god-given right to buy dildos.
At the time, anti-sex toy laws were widely understood to be unconstitutional, but Abbott suited up for battle. The state, his lieutenants argued with straight faces before the 5th Circuit, had an interest in “discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex and the pursuit of sexual gratification unrelated to procreation.” The state of Texas has a pressing interest, Abbott said, in discouraging you from masturbating or blowing your boyfriend. [Those are the author’s words, not Abbott’s. That was just six years ago.
The Attorney General’s role is as lawyer for the state. As such, he is required to support legislation passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor. If he had not represented the state of Texas in the law suit he would have been just as wrong as Eric Holder when he refused to represent the U.S. Government in the suit against the Defense of Marriage Act.
For Davis to bring Abbot’s opinion of dildos into a campaign is just a reflection of the desperation (from an election point of view) she feels.
Cross-posted at The Lid
