When Barack Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, decided that the federal Defense of Marriage Act was something they didn’t like and they simply stopped enforcing or defending it, nothing happened to them.
When a long list of U.S. attorneys did the same thing, literally getting up at one table in a courtroom and sitting down with the opposing side in disputes over the definition of marriage, nothing happened to them either.
But if the National Organization for Marriage sees its efforts come to fruition, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring won’t be so lucky.
Herring recently announced that he was switching sides, and would be advocating for same-sex marriage in the state, prompting the NOM team to call for his impeachment.
“Attorney General Herring swore an oath to defend the constitution of the Commonwealth, yet now he is participating in a lawsuit against the very people he is sworn to represent, the citizens of Virginia who preserved marriage in their constitution. This malfeasance and neglect of duty is not only a disgrace, it’s an impeachable offense under the constitution,” said NOM President Brian Brown.
NOM spokesman Chris Plante told WND that the bottom line is not a fight over the definition of marriage or the acceptance or rejection of same-sex “marriage.”
“It means lawlessness. Every American ought to be afraid,” he said.
It means that an elected attorney general who swore an oath to defend his state’s constitution is forsaking that oath, forsaking those who elected him, and choosing “on a personal whim which laws to defend.”
Plante pondered what would happen if someone else decided to “ignore a drug law, or a firearms law” and the “outrage that would spread across society.”
“Folks in Virginia deserve better,” he said. “Herring ought to be impeached for dereliction of duty.”
The state is one of those many where voters wrote into their state constitution that marriage is between one man and one woman, he said.
The actual likelihood of an impeachment or other punitive action will depend on the state legislature, he said. But given that the Senate is controlled by the Democrats, the calls to action may be more a statement of position than an actual plan for action.
But he said voters “ought to stand up and say ‘enough is enough.’ Laws are to be obeyed.”
The fight already has circled the globe, with a United Kingdom headline stating “US: Attorney general slammed over push for gay marriage.”
“Last week, the attorney general Mark Herring said he would be filing a brief in support of the gay couples, saying that he ‘cannot and will not defend laws that violate Virginians’ rights,’” the report said.
NOM noted the problem was that Herring was “advocating directly for the side opposed to the interests of his clients, the people of Virginia.”
The marriage advocates explained it is Section 17 of the Virginia constitution that allows the impeachment of an attorney general for “malfeasance in office, corruption, neglect of duty or other high crime or misdemeanor.”
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/dereliction-of-duty-charge-leveled-against-virginia-ag/
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