Schuette Denounces Amicus Brief from Group Tied to White Nationalist Movement

Thanks, but no thanks.

That's what Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said in response to a group with ties to a white nationalist movement that filed an amicus brief supporting  his appeal of U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman’s ruling striking down as unconstitutional the state’s voter-backed ban on same-sex marriage.

Actually, Schuette put it much more strongly. Denouncing the brief in a statement published in The Detroit News, he said:

"There is no place in this discussion for derogatory language, and anything like it will be completely disregarded by the Department of Attorney General. The Sixth Circuit should use this brief to line a birdcage, because that's all it's good for."

At issue is the brief the Traditionalist Youth Network filed last week with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that the “totality of history of the Western and American traditions demonstrates quite clearly that same-sex conduct can be penalized,” MLive reports.

Kyle Bristow, the attorney who filed the brief on behalf of the Traditionalist Youth Network, is the former leader of Young Americans for Freedom at Michigan State University in the mid-2000s when the group brought a series of controversial speakers to campus for a so-called “straight power” rally outside Lansing City Hall in 2006.

As a law student at Michigan State in 2010, Bristow published “White Apocalypse,” a novel the Southern Poverty Law Center described as “seething with lethal white supremacist revenge fantasies against Jewish professors, Latino and American Indian activists and staffers of a group clearly modeled on the SPLC.”

On its “Hatewatch” blog, the SPLC wrote “the pugnacious college student also spearheaded anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT campaigns organized by YAF, prompting the Southern Poverty Law Center ... to take the unusual step of listing the campus club as a hate group.”

In his new role as legal counsel for the Traditionalist Youth Network, argued in his amicus brief that legalized gay marriage would be a “mockery” of historical customs and cultures.

"If a state cannot be permitted to define marriage as simply as constituting one man and one woman, then our culture will be taken down a very slippery slope that will see pedophiles, polygamists, zoophiles, those in incestuous relationships, and every other sexual deviant with proclivities now known or to be invented to challenge laws that, likewise, prevent them from marrying whom – what – they wish," he wrote.