Bill Pryor want’s to outlaw what?!

Even cute baby tigers agree: Bill Pryor sucks worse than a quantum black hole.

William Pryor: Unfit to Serve. Part III.

I don’t bloggregate much, but when someone else has done all the heavy lifting, there seems little point in trying to slap my watercolors all over their magnificent tapestry. So here is a brief list of the Sins of William Pryor from American Progress, bulleted by me only for brevity, so go to the site and check it all out at full length in glorious Technicolor.

This is followed by a few snippets from an excellent, extended evisceration of Pryor by Jeffrey St. Clair. Again, I have only taken a few bits for flavor: I urge you to go read the whole, grand epic.

And the very end, I add a little bit of snuff.

First, American Progress:

Partisanship Takes Pryor-ity
…
While the President claims that the stonewalling of his nominations is "hurting our judicial system," since he took office federal judicial vacancies are down from 9.9% to 4.6%. William Pryor's nomination was blocked for one reason - his extremist views render him unqualified to sit on the federal bench.

PRYOR - HOSTILE TO CIVIL RIGHTS: Pryor testified before the Senate Judiciary committee in 1997 that he believed that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) was "an affront to federalism and an expensive burden that has far outlived its usefulness" and should be repealed. …

PRYOR - HOSTILE TO WOMEN'S RIGHTS: Pryor considers Roe v. Wade to be "the worst abomination of constitutional law in our nation's history." Further, he has defended restrictions on abortion in Alabama even when they lacked "the constitutionally required exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman." …

PRYOR - HOSTILE TO GAYS AND LESBIANS: Pryor filed a amicus brief with the Supreme Court that equates private consensual sex between same-sex couples with "activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia." Pryor argued that a Texas law specifically prohibiting private homosexuals should remain on the books even if it is unenforceable because the state should not be required to accept that homosexual activity "does not expose both the individual and the public to deleterious spiritual and physical consequences." …

PRYOR - OPPOSES GENUINE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: Pryor refers to the constitutional prohibition on government interference with religion as "the so-called wall of separation between church and state." In a 1997 speech, he stated "the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are rooted in a Christian perspective of the nature of government and the nature of man. The challenge of the next millennium will be to preserve the American experiment by restoring its Christian perspective." …

Second, from St. Clair

Killer Bill Pryor's Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
When Bill Pryor was running for re-election as Attorney General for the state of Alabama in 2002, he demanded that the execution dates of 8 prisoners be moved up so that they could be put to death prior to the fall vote.
"Bill Pryor's a pretty harsh guy," says Barbara Howard, a defense attorney from Montgomery who handles death penalty cases. "I suspect he did this as a political ploy."…
…
Pryor is so maniacally devoted to the death penalty that he objected loudly to the recent Supreme Court decision in the Atkins case ruling that executing mentally retarded and brain damaged people violated the Constitution.
The would-be federal appellate judge finds nothing wrong with having court-appointed, low paid, inexperienced and often incompetent lawyers defend death penalty cases, even when they snooze off during testimony or fail to cross-examine key witnesses against their clients.
Pryor also tartly dismisses allegations of racial bias in the administration of the death penalty as a diversionary tactic by out of state (read northern and Jewish) defense lawyers. At gatherings of the Federalist Society, he gripes endlessly about the appeals process available to the condemned and has vowed to do everything in his power to truncate appeals and accelerate executions.
From his perch in Montgomery, Pryor ridiculed the Supreme Court's decision in Ring v. Arizona, which ruled that only juries can impose the death penalty. He contends that juries are too susceptible to emotional appeals for leniency from crafty defense lawyers, thus he backs Alabama's arcane and vicious law allowing judge's to impose the death penalty even when a jury has recommended life in prison. President Bush claims that Pryor is squarely in the tradition of his two favorite Supremes, Scalia and Thomas. But even Scalia, God's willing executioner, voted to defend the right of juries in the Ring case.
Pryor, a pious father of two, even thinks that children should be sentenced to death and he has done so in record fashion: Alabama has now sentenced more juveniles to death on a per capita basis than any other states.
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Under Pryor's gruesome reign, Alabama has been sending more people to death row than any other state, surpassing even kill-happy Texas. And the people who go to death row are predominately poor black men.
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The application of the death penalty in Alabama is racist at its core. In Alabama, blacks account for 12 percent of the population. Yet, more than 70 percent of the inmates on Alabama's death row are black. George Wallace's view of racial relations seems downright humanitarian next to Pryor's coarse version.
Still when push comes to shove, Pryor is willing to kill just about anyone to prove a point. On May 10, 2002, he gloated over the electrocution of Lynda Lyons, the first woman executed in Alabama in the last 45 years.
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At a "Save the Commandments" rally on the steps of the Alabama Supreme Court, Pryor railed against the ACLU like a crazed prophet from the Old Testament: "God has chosen, through his son Jesus Christ, this time and this place for all Christians to save our country and our courts."
To argue the state's losing case in favor of Moore's religious monument, Pryor hired Herb Titus, the founding dean of Pat Robertson's law school. This was not the first time Pryor had recruited lawyers from Robertson's operation. A year earlier he tapped Jay Sekulow to serve as his assistant attorney general. Sekulow, who was assigned to handle school prayer cases, previously had headed Robertson's legal outfit, the American Center for Law and Justice.
"Pryor's political career has literally been a crusade to 'Christianize' America through government action," says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United. "He wants to overturn a half-century of court rulings upholding religious liberty and other fundamental constitutional protections."
While Pryor argues that child convicts should be put to death with dispatch, he fervently draws the line at fetuses. "I will never forget January 22, 1973, the day seven members of our highest court ripped the Constitution up and ripped out the life of millions of unborn children," Pryor said in 1997. Indeed, he opposes abortion in almost every instance, including rape and incest. Pryor even backed a ludicrous bill in the Alabama legislature that would have appointed a lawyer to act as a guardian ad litem for the fetus of any woman considering an abortion.
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Once those fetuses reach term, though, Pryor washes his hands of them, especially if they are poor or black. As attorney general he tried to undermine a consent decree aimed at improving Alabama's notorious state child welfare system, which stored troubled kids in abusive foster homes and wretched psychiatric wards. When asked about his maneuvers to shirk the requirements of the consent decree, Pryor cloaked it in the addled rhetoric of states rights. "It matters not to me whether the actions would leave children unprotected," Pryor said. "My job is to make sure that the state of Alabama isn't run by federal courts. My job isn't to come here and help children."
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Pryor's certainly no leftist, but he sure is wild-eyed, especially when it comes to sexual relations. He holds the ignominious honor of being the only attorney general to file a brief attacking the Violence Against Women Act. Ever the defender of prudish virtue, Pryor threw himself into a defense of Alabama's Dildo Law, which forbade the sale of vibrators. Dredging deep into the recesses of Federalist Society legal theory, Pryor argued that there is no right to privacy in Alabama and that the state had the authority to outlaw any kind of pleasure devices it wanted, even when accompanied by a doctor's prescription. Naturally, Pryor is unwilling to apply the same legal mumbo jumbo to assault weapons.
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Bill Pryor is Tom DeLay in Judicial Drag, no more and no less. George Bush did not randomly pick Pryor’s name out of a hat, or even an upturned pointy, white hood. Bush has backed Pryor to the hilt because Pryor stands as a proxy for exactly the kind of nation that the Right Wing Republicans want to erect on the corpse of the America we all used to know and love.

Their America.

Their armed, paranoid, hateful and deeply un-Christ-like Jesusland, where we all serve their profoundly corrupt vision of God as interpreted by the likes of James Dobson and the rest of the Prophets of the Profitable. And if being in the thrall of a cabal of false and profoundly evil Republican Pharisees doesn't thrill you, well they are working very hard to make sure that the full weight of the Evangelical Federal Government – shorn of any hint of check or balance – is standing ready to stand on your neck until you comply.

And as to the point about being pro-weapon and anti-privacy, let me just add that one may indeed presume that William Pryor is totally cool with you owning a hand cannon, or an anti-tank weapon, or, presumably, thermobaric warheads and ballistic missiles. From their war on the press, to their fake news disinformation campaign, to their now-obvious attempt to Theocratize our country to their ardent defense of Manwhore Jeffy Gannon, the Right Wing has made it crystal clear that they regard the First and most important of our amendments to the constitution as an ass rag.

And the fourth.

And the fifth.

And they frankly don’t give a rat’s ass about that bit in the second about a “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” or that the 2nd was effectively a wartime amendment created during the days when were occupied by a distant empire (sort of) and citizens stood a very real chance of have their door busted down and their homes taken over by foreign troops.

You know, sort of like any given day for any give Iraqi.

They’re gun fetishists, and I wish they’d just own up to it and save us all a lot of Constitutional bother. And full disclosure compels me to say very clearly that the gun owners I know are meticulously safe, and when they’ve taken me out shooting, I had a ball. Blew the shit out of melons and targets and the time that one fucktard slung his shotgun over his shoulder like a hobo’s bindle he got yelled at by the rest of the guys.

Guns are necessary or at least relatively harmless in some circumstances and locations, and in other times and places they are a disaster, but what 99% of gun owners do with their arsenals has nothing whatsoever to do with the intentions of the framers of the Constitution.

You’d think that Strict Constructionists and Federalist Society cultists and the rest of the freaks who want strip away the Constitution itself and replace it with the Articles of Confederation would be coming down like the wrath of an Originalist God on the clowns who want to strap on a 9 mm for reasons that have everything to do with penile compensation and no relations to the defense of the country whatsoever, but no. Not so much.

You and your drunk red-neck friends can amass an arsenal capable of taking down small governments simply because you’re bigoted and paranoid and live in terror that the niggers and the jews and the feminazis and the liberal media are going to crash through your door and homosexualize you kid.

Or something.

So you can keep all the fixin’s for Helter Skelter in your woodshed, but you’d fucking well better not have an over-and-under cooter shooter in there or off to jail for you.

“Over-and-under cooter shooter”? C’mon, you know…

A happy dowel?
A humming ugly bumper?
Dad 2.0?

You know...a dildo. Remember?

Which brings us at last to…William Pryor: Unfit to Serve. Part IV.