Pennsylvania Attorney Gen. won't fight gay marriage lawsuit

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New York Times

Pennsylvania’s Attorney General Won’t Fight Gay Marriage Lawsuit
By TRIP GABRIEL
Published: July 11, 2013

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Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Kathleen Kane, said on Thursday that she would not defend the state against a lawsuit to overturn a ban on same-sex marriage.
Related

A.C.L.U. Sues Pennsylvania Over Ban on Gay Marriage (July 10, 2013)

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Ms. Kane, a Democrat, traveled from Harrisburg, where the suit was filed in Federal District Court on Tuesday, to make her announcement at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. She quoted from Pennsylvania’s Constitution forbidding discrimination “against any person” and said that “disparate treatment” based on race, religion and ethnic origin were no longer tolerated, and “it is now the time here in Pennsylvania to end another wave of discrimination.”

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union with 23 plaintiffs, including 10 gay and lesbian couples, two teenage children of one couple and a widow who lost her partner of 29 years, cites a ruling last month by the Supreme Court striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

It was the first of a wave of lawsuits that activists are planning to file to expand the number of states allowing same-sex marriage, including in Virginia and North Carolina.

Attorneys general in Illinois and California have previously declined to defend their states in similar cases. In Pennsylvania, the general counsel’s office of Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, was seen as likely to pick up the defense.

Ms. Kane, who was elected attorney general last year and has been mentioned as a possible future candidate for governor, struck a political note in her brief announcement to an audience that cheered and applauded her decision.

“I looked at it this way, the governor’s going to be O.K.,” she said. She wondered, she added, who would represent “the Daves and Robbies, who represents the Emilys and Amys?”

“As attorney general,” she said, “I choose you.”

[TheNotoriousAMP]

Happy to see the attorney general making a stand like this, but not sure how good of a precedent (attorney generals not defending the state is far from new) this has been setting. At the moment a lot of it has been on DOMA, but the attorney general is supposed to be the state's legal beagle and what happens when the shoe is on the other foot? An employee of the state not doing their job for political reasons is troublesome to me, even though I may agree with her reasons.

[Feil]

So what if the shoe was on the other foot? Would you want a white supremacist "defending" anti-discrimination laws? Would you want a Randian Objectivist "defending" government regulation of industry? Recusing yourself from a position that you can't defend in good conscience isn't a refusal to do your job, it's making sure that your job gets done right. It's not like a pharmacist, where birth control pills that you get from a prolife fundamentalist work just as well as birth control that you get at a Planned Parenthood clinic. If a person believes that a law is wrong, they are going to be less effective at defending it than someone who does not. It's perfectly possible for an Attorney General to believe in upholding the law in general and prosecuting those who broke the law without believing that every individual law is defensible.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Attorney General office in PA is supposed to provide legal opinions on matters of law and state regulations. If they don't believe a law is constitutional they are actually obligated to say so. Also its an elected position in PA, which is why a Democrat has the job, so one expects more then less of this sort of thing.

[Simon_Jester]

Skimmer, to clarify:

Are you criticizing the fact that the Pennsylvania attorney general is stating that they won't fight the ALCU suit? Or are you approving of their decision to inform the state government that they can't/won't do so, because in their opinion the ban is unconstitutional?