Wisconsin Supreme Court justice apologizes for anti-gay opinion pieces (25 years ago)

sconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley on Monday apologized for anti-gay opinion pieces she wrote as a college student 24 years ago, saying she is embarrassed by the content and tone and that they do not reflect her worldview or current work as a judge.

The liberal group One Wisconsin Now revealed one column and two letters to the editor that Bradley wrote in February and November 1992 when she was a student at Marquette University. They were published in the Marquette Tribune, the student newspaper.

Bradley faces state Appeals Court Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg in the April 5 election for a 10-year term on the state's highest court.

In her writings, Bradley describes homosexuals as "queers," compares them with drug addicts, saying they "essentially kill themselves and others through their own behavior." She describes newly elected president Bill Clinton as "queer-loving" and says his 1992 victory "proves that the majority of voters are either totally stupid or entirely evil."

She also describes homosexuality as "an abnormal sexual preference" and says those who support it are "dumb" and "degenerates who basically commit suicide through their behavior."

Bradley, who is 44 now and was 20 and 21 when the pieces in question were written, backed away from the comments Monday.

I grew up and was educated in Wisconsin, and still maintain my bar license there, so I follow politics and the judiciary there fairly closely. This is disturbing, in that it seems once again, Republicans are bringing a knife to a gunfight in terms of campaigning.

I have less problem with what she wrote back then than most may have, but what is revealing is how the opposing side strategically plays something like this. Bradley was appointed to the short term remaining for Justice Crooks seat months ago, so the folks backing Kloppenburg must have known about this material then (it was from the 1990's, still retrievable), and yet it conveniently is dropped into the media 4 weeks before the vote on this seat.

Kloppenburg is older, attended Yale about a decade earlier than Bradley attended law school. The timing makes all the difference in terms of recoverability of material. Pre-internet writings in a variety of forums (student newspapers, etc.) may be largely irretrievable from the 70's or 80's or earlier, but so much easier to find in the 90's and forward for a younger candidate.

Note to the GOP - wake up and anticipate stuff like this. You can either strategically plan for this or react to it when it hits you in the face. The former is much better than the latter.

As to her remarks... Not artfully put, but she has a point, which even holds today.

In 1986 I attended a lecture series by the Nobel prize winning geneticist and virologist Howard Temin. He presented on the topic of AIDS, describing the epidemiological information then available and then describing his own work, which essentially blueprinted the mechanism (reverse transcription RNA) for a virus like HIV about a decade earlier. I'll never forget his description of the at risk populations and the proportions of the then currently seropositive who fell into the groups. The groups were men who had sex with other men, IV drug users, hemophiliacs and a small proportion of folks who fell into "unknown". The CDC had a survey protocol which caused them to go back and re-interview the "unknowns" and to repeat the survey questions. [Gays and IV drug users were not perfectly forthright on the first or second pass.] On re-survey the unknowns broke down into gay men/IV drug users and unknowns in the same proportion as the first go round. Repeated yet again, the same breakdowns appeared, until ultimately you were left with a small share (<2%)that were truly unknown. The proportion that were men having sex with other men about 67%, IV drug users - around 25-28%, hemophiliacs were a very small percentage, and declining rapidly in those early days as they attrited. The small remainder were those classified as “unknown origin.”

What has been amazing over the decades has been how constant these risk factors have been. They are known, they appear every where, you see PSA's about it until you are about sick of the matter. No one who is not living under a rock in the present world, and the world from the 1990's forward, fails to understand how this is transmitted.

Now, Wisconsin participated in the multi-state Tobaccos Settlement in the 1990's. That was essentially a suit to recover damages from the tobacco companies for the cost of caring for people who developed cancer, emphysema, you name it, all related to tobacco use. The idea was to recover damages from the seller of a legal product, to compensate for the health care costs engendered by behavioral choices of individuals who chose to smoke.

I think that Bradley might have been getting at the parallel in the enormous cost of the AIDS epidemic, and the cost of care for those with AIDS, which somewhat like smoking, falls generally onto the taxpayers and is the result of behavioral choices. With cigarette smoking you still see suits by and on behalf of smokers who claimed not to know the dangers, which is preposterous. Likewise, with AIDS, everyone knows how it is transmitted and who are the at risk populations.

If that wasn’t her point, let it be mine. In the case of tobacco, despite the fact that it is legal to sell tobacco, you have juicy target that can be made responsible. With AIDS, there can only be sympathy and more federal funding, never any assignment of responsibility. In fact, with the modern drug therapies which tend to make HIV serpositivity less of a death sentence, there seems to be some evidence that gays are returning to some of the hyper promiscuous behaviors that led to the initial AIDS epidemic. So, as long as the taxpayers can fund the drug therapies, they can go out clubbing as much as they want.

Now you cannot come close to criticizing gays for promiscuous behavior, even though some of the same justification is there as was in the tobacco settlement.

Look at the way that Tammy Baldwin jumped on this, look at the remarks of Kloppenburg and others. This was orchestrated. This is the way Democrats play ball, even on judicial elections. I have not seen the reaction to this from the GOP yet. They need to get their act together and counter-punch, and defend Bradley, or get ready to see Kloppenburg on the bench for at least 10 years.

Word to the GOP: Gays may have won same sex marriage, but that does not mean they are finished. They have remarkable sophistication and tenacity in the legal battles they pursue. They have remarkable reach and power in terms of intimidation (e.g., Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla.) Do not play softball with these guys and never fail to anticipate where they may enter a campaign, even a judicial campaign.

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