Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley was appointed to the bench by Governor Scott Walker last October, but her campaign to be elected to the position is running into trouble. Recently released columns she wrote for her college newspaper 24 years ago reveal a darker side to the woman who wants to sit on the state’s highest court.
“One will be better off contracting AIDS than developing cancer, because those afflicted with the politically-correct disease will be getting all of the funding. How sad that the lives of degenerate drug addicts and queers are valued more than the innocent victims of more prevalent ailments,” Bradley wrote in one column. “The homosexuals and drug addicts who do essentially kill themselves and others through their own behavior deservedly receive none of my sympathy.”
“This brings me to my next point — why is a student government on a Catholic campus attempting to bring legitimacy to an abnormal sexual preference?” she wrote. “Heterosexual sex is very healthy in a loving marital relationship. Homosexual sex, however, kills.”
Bradley refused an interview request from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but did issue a statement expressing regret for her columns. She said the revelation is “a blatant mudslinging campaign to distract the people from the issues.”
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“To those offended by comments I made as a young college student, I apologize, and assure you that those comments are not reflective of my worldview,” the statement read. “These comments have nothing to do with who I am as a person or a jurist, and they have nothing to do with the issues facing the voters of this state.”
“These hateful and divisive writings raise serious questions about Rebecca Bradley’s fitness to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court as a fair, impartial and independent justice,” Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin told the newspaper. Baldwin is the first openly gay person to serve in the Senate.
Scot Ross, executive director of the LGBT organization One Wisconsin Now, said in a press releases, “Rebecca Bradley has revealed such a depth of hatred and contempt for people that she cannot be trusted to uphold the most basic tenet of our judicial system, that all are equal before the law.”
Bradley has refused to say whether she agrees with the Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality, but her campaign has said she would officiate a same-sex wedding. She has so far declined to reveal whether she voted in favor of the state’s constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
