One Wisconsin Now has done us all a huge service by digging up the college writings of Rebecca Bradley, temporarily on the state Supreme Court and seeking a full 10-year term.
Yesterday, OWN revealed that Bradley, then known as Rebecca Grassl, had written truly hate-filled, vile, ignorant and bigoted essays about those living with HIV, the LGBT community and their allies and, incidentally, those who voted for Bill Clinton.
Today, Bradley’s college writings on abortion came out.
Turns out that she doesn’t believe that abortion should be legal, including abortions to preserve the health or life of the mother.
“Women even declare some right to control their bodies, neglecting the fact that in choosing abortion they are asserting a right to control another body, and a right to murder their own flesh and blood,” she wrote.
Before you write that off as the opinion of some immature student at a Catholic university, let me remind you that Bradley wrote an op-ed for MKE spouting much of the same garbage and directed readers to Pro-Life Wisconsin, a fringe group that equates contraception with abortion.
You can’t pin that on Bradley’s youth. She wrote that op-ed in 2006, when she was in her 30s and working as a corporate lawyer.
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Walker has shrugged off Bradley’s writings, saying that many people change their mind over the years and that nothing in her judicial record indicates that she can’t be fair or impartial on these issues.
Well, that’s because Bradley’s judicial record is so thin. Like, really thin.
You get the feeling that Walker isn’t so much bothered by Bradley’s essays, just that they became public—to the wrong people, of course. I’m sure he’s thrilled that Bradley’s conservative bona fides are made known to the right-wing crowd he hopes will vote for her on April 5.
Walker earned the endorsement of Pro-Life Wisconsin in 2010, when he first ran for governor. Rebecca Kleefisch and a slew of Republican legislators did so as well—a watershed moment for the pro-life crowd. Until then, no mainstream Republicans would be so publicly aligned with this fringe group. Instead, Republicans felt safer with the more mainstream Wisconsin Right to Life.
But Walker decided to get more radical and the Pro-Life Wisconsin era in state government began.
Walker’s and Bradley’s views on abortion and contraception are on the fringe but becoming more mainstream among Republicans. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan, along with Walker, believes in personhood, which would give constitutional rights to fertilized eggs. Think about that.
But among regular folks, allowing women to obtain a legal and safe abortion, especially an abortion to preserve the health and life of a pregnant woman or to terminate a pregnancy resulting from rape, is accepted without argument. And do we really need to go there on contraception? Really.
Likewise, most Americans view LGBTQ folks as being, well, just folks, who deserve the same rights as everyone else.
But Walker, and perhaps Bradley, aren’t so sure that members of the LGBTQ community are equal under the law—you know, that whole marriage issue. While Walker seems to have friendly relations with individual gays and lesbians, he, like the Republican Party, used the anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment as a wedge issue at the ballot box to earn more votes. And on the presidential campaign trail last year, he disagreed with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision making same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. College dropout Scott Walker knows better than the majority of the Supreme Court, you know.
So it’s no wonder that Walker isn’t criticizing Bradley’s old writings.
Her views are his views. His crowd is her crowd.
That’s why Rebecca Bradley has been groomed and risen up the ranks of the judicial system so quickly, leapfrogging over her more experienced peers.
Scott Walker backed Rebecca Bradley’s ambitions because she’s as radically right wing as he is. Bradley’s far-out right-wing ideas are a feature, not a bug.
