I protest.

Attorneys general and bad laws.

Again according the Murky News, State AGs come down against gay marriages. I don't have a lot to say about these attorneys general, except that they are cowards almost to a person.

Take New Mexico AG Patricia Madrid, for example, who "wrestled with it for about an hour" and then decided that same-sex marriage was against the law. She wrestled for a whole hour? My, that was a struggle, wasn't it? It took a whole hour for her to fail to find a backbone!

Eliot Spitzer in New York, on the other hand, "personally would like to see the law changed, but must respect the law as it now stands." Of course, that's not true. Sure, these people take an oath to not only serve the people of their states but to uphold the law as well. Somehow, though, I have the feeling that "serving the people" should trump "upholding the law" when the law is clearly unfair, unequal and discriminatory. No, we mustn't "respect the law as it now stands." We have a moral obligation to oppose that law. As attorneys general, these people should at the very least fail to act, turn a blind eye or, as Lockyer has done, just take the issue to a higher authority and in the meantime do nothing.

While I don't particularly care for Lockyer, I have to admit that his action was clever and probably as moral as someone in his position could be.

Then there are the ignorant bigots, who, like Kelly Clark, the lawyer for a group of bigoted "pastors and conservative lawmakers," claim that "you don't change 4,000 years of tradition." Perhaps Clark and his fellow bigots should read a bit more history, since current marriage traditions are only perhaps a few hundred years old and are certainly nowhere near four thousand. When you go that far back, you find homosexual marriage in virtually every culture on the planet.

And ultimately there are the people like "South Carolina's Republican Attorney General Henry McMasters." This person, and I use the term in its most general sense, "questioned how any public official could knowingly break the law they swore to uphold, even if they disagreed with it."

"You can't have every elected official … in this country saying this law or that law violates the Constitution, therefore they're not going to pay attention to it. That'd be anarchy," he said.

This assertion is so mind-bogglingly stupid as to be almost impossible to address. It seems to me that there are a plethora of ways in which we could avoid "anarchy," even if every elected official in the country did start ignoring laws they didn't like. (Impeachment springs to mind. There are lots and lots of others.) In this case, however, it isn't just the elected officials saying that laws banning same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of Massachusetts very clearly brought the Constitutionality of such laws into question in the minds of every informed person in the United States. This, of course, is why the raving bigots want so much to insert their marriage ban into said document. It's the only way to make such laws Constitutional.

The real point I want to make, though, is that these Attorneys General have the same obligation that any jury has when forced to decide the guilt or innocence of someone accused of the violation of an unjust law. In such a case, when the jury truly feels that the law is unjust, they have an obligation to find the accused not guilty even if they clearly did violate that law. (It's called "jury nullification" and despite the claims of judges and prosecutors, it's one of our fundamental rights.) Similarly, when dealing with a truly unjust law, officials have the right and obligation to refuse to enforce that law.

This is a right and an obligation that, so far and with respect to same-sex marriage, no Attorney General has had the courage to exercise.