David Michael Miller
What was Scott Walker thinking?
It was back in August that Brian Hagedorn announced his run for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He had served as Walker’s chief counsel and was later appointed a state Court of Appeals judge by Walker. Hagedorn was the clear choice for the state’s highest court by the head of the state Republican Party and a governor with a good chance of being reelected, so the state’s conservative establishment immediately rallied around Hagedorn.
Which now seems like a huge mistake. This is a candidate, it appears, whom no one vetted for problems in his past.
For six weeks now Hagedorn has been mired in negative stories and controversy over his extreme views on a host of topics.
We’ve learned that back in 2006, as a married 27-year-old father of two and law student at Northwestern University, Hagedorn wrote a blog as “a fellow soldier in the culture wars,” where he condemned the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down anti-sodomy laws prohibiting sex between unmarried consulting adults, be they heterosexual or homosexual. Hagedorn called the ruling a travesty that “should render laws prohibiting bestiality unconstitutional.”
He blasted Roe v. Wade as “the worst and most unjustifiable decision in history,” called Planned Parenthood a “wicked organization,” and the NAACP “a disgrace to America.”
And Hagedorn, now 40, clearly hasn’t changed his views. The press has since reported he “helped create and serves on the board of a private Christian elementary school,” whose code of conduct bars teachers, board members, students and even their parents from being in gay relationships. In fact, students can be expelled for the “immoral sexual activity” of their parents.
Hagedorn also received $1,000 per speech for three speeches in 2015, 2016 and 2017 to an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “hate group” for supporting criminal sanctions against sodomy and the sterilization of transgender people, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
Hagedorn’s campaign declined to release the text of those speeches or answer whether he has changed his beliefs since writing his blog, so there is little reason to think he has. He has tried to argue his beliefs won’t affect his decision-making on the court, but as Hagedorn told his alma mater, Trinity College, in 2014, “My faith impacts everything I do in the workplace.”
All of which lost him the support of the Wisconsin Realtors Association, which has spent millions in campaign dollars to elect conservative candidates to the courts. Michael Theo, president and CEO of the Realtors Association, announced that as a result of “past statements and actions” by Hagedorn, his group had withdrawn its endorsement of the candidate, due to “issues with which we do not want to be associated and that directly conflict with the principles of our organization and the values of our members.”
The WRA is a huge group, and no doubt has many members who are gay or have family and friends who are gay — not to mention the many gay customers real estate agents have. Gay rights has become a mainstream position, with a 2016 Marquette Law School poll finding the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision approving gay marriage was supported by 52 percent of those polled in Wisconsin, with 40 percent opposed.
This was two years after Wisconsin’s law banning gay marriage was struck down by the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, a case where Hagedorn worked as Gov. Walker’s legal counsel to defend the state law. His views on this, as with his opposition to gay sex in the privacy of one’s home, are in conflict with what is now established court precedent.
Indeed, there are even Evangelical educational institutions that are beginning to admit LGBT students.
In short, Hagedorn’s views are not shared by the majority of voters, much less by younger millennials. And you can bet those views will be roasted repeatedly in attack ads by liberal third-party groups. Meanwhile Hagedorn is seeing more defectors: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce won’t be funneling money into Wisconsin to support the conservative candidate, a Journal Sentinel story reported. The most recent report by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign showed that 96 percent of all third-party spending in the race supported Hagedorn’s opponent, Lisa Neubauer.
Walker, of course, always opposed gay rights and same-sex marriage, from the time he first won office to the Legislature in 1993, so he doubtless approved of Hagedorn’s views. But this isn’t 1993 or even 2012, when President Barack Obama had to be nudged by Joe Biden into supporting same-sex marriage.
This is 2019, and Hagedorn’s views and actions are clearly, if not aggressively, out of the mainstream. Which helps explain why Neubauer is getting more financial support and far more endorsements from the legal community than Hagedorn. Walker and the Republican establishment failed at Politics 101: check out the background of your favored candidate.
Bruce Murphy is editor of UrbanMilwaukee.
