Just a few hours after the Supreme Court struck down bans on gay marriage last month, former Missouri GOP chairman and current Eagle Forum president Ed Martin joined Iowa talk radio host Steve Deace to discuss the decision, which he said should lead to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s impeachment for acting like the “king of America.”
Martin compared marriage equality opponents to David fighting Goliath, who “taunted Israel like the Supreme Court taunted us with this ruling.”
Saying that merely electing a new president or pressuring Congress won’t be enough to respond to the marriage equality ruling, he said, “David didn’t fight Goliath in the way that Goliath wanted. He fought in a different set of terms. And I will tell you, one thing that has not been invoked in a meaningful way is the doctrine of, is how to limit the judiciary with impeachment.”
“I think we’re to that point” of impeachment, he said, explaining that while the four more liberal justices are “corrupt in terms of their worldview,” Kennedy “has really put himself up as the king of America in a way that the founders would have recognized as a discussion point for an impeachable offense.”
Claiming that evangelical churches are full of “posers” on cultural issues, Deace suggested that the Christian Right should emulate the Southern Baptist Convention’s crackdown on moderates in the 1960s, when, he said, “they exposed and purged all posers.”
Martin responded that he couldn’t speak for churches, but that if the GOP tries to “water down marriage,” that will be “the end of the Republican Party.”
Martin then, bizarrely, compared the emergence of the Republican Party in the 1860s to fight back efforts to extend slavery to the current Republican Party’s “retreat” on the issue of the Confederate flag.
“People have been trying to do that, what they did for years, and our people retreated and surrendered within like two days,” he said of the flag issue. “I’ve never seen the speed with which the culture put our people into rapid retreat. They didn’t even make meaningful arguments about the loss of life and the brother against brother and what the Confederacy meant. They just retreated to the space they were pointed to.”
“It’s an extraordinary moment, but the tide can shift, as you say, if we get back to first principles,” he added.
