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Why not? The state of Minnesota, like North Carolina, faces a marriage discrimination amendment at the polls in 2012. Minnesota Senate Majority Leader (er, former) Amy Koch (R, no surprise) had no trouble supporting legislation that would bar same-sex couples from civil marriage.
It looks like she was “pulling a Newt” regarding own domestic legal union, as she was taken to the woodshed for 1) allegedly knocking boots with someone other than her husband; and 2) allegedly doing the nasty on an ongoing basis with a subordinate, in this case a male Senate staffer. And the way she was whisked out of her leadership role is the stuff of a TV drama. (Star Trib):
Leaving a meeting at the Minneapolis Club last Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch thought she was bound for a social event in St. Paul.
Instead, sources say, Deputy Senate Majority Leader Geoff Michel hustled her into a nearby meeting room. There, he and three other GOP senators confronted her about an alleged affair with a male Senate staffer who reported to Koch. After a meeting that lasted for hours that night and resumed on Thursday morning, the Republican from Buffalo resigned her leadership post and announced she would not seek re-election.
The next afternoon, Michael Brodkorb, the Senate’s powerful communications chief, was asked by an old junior high school friend who also worked in the Senate to meet at the Moose Country restaurant in Mendota Heights. Once there, Brodkorb was shocked to see Secretary of the Senate Cal Ludeman walk in and tell him he was out of a job and barred from Senate offices.
The fresh account provides new details on what could be the most tumultuous 72 hours in state Senate history. The events snuffed out Koch’s fast legislative rise and leveled a chief aide who had helped lead the Senate’s Republican caucus and served as deputy chair of the state party.
Scott Wooledge (btw, congrats on your new gig as a front-pager at DKos!), has a piece up at Huffington Post that shows why schadenfreude — and your vote — are in order.
Under Amy Koch’s majority leadership, the Minnesota Senate voted to amend the Minnesota Constitution to declare that “a marriage between a man and a woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in Minnesota.” Koch, of course, voted for the bill herself.
And so, the amendment, having cleared the state House and Senate, will move to the voters of Minnesota on Nov. 6, 2012, who will be asked to vote on whether their fellow citizens should be (further) forbidden by law to marry the person they love.
I don’t remember voting on Amy Koch’s marriage. Is it too late?
See, some news has surfaced that begs the question: should defenders of the sanctity of marriage consider voting Koch out of their sacred matrimonial club?
But even more important than rubbing Koch’s nose in a warm pile of poo, there is lesson here. It’s call over-reaching. The marriage, panty, and bedroom police, the moralizers who spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about “protecting marriage”, banning porn, and protecting bullies in schools, never think this sh*t is going to blowback on them…except when it does. In Minnesota, boinking someone other than your spouse is against the law…
Adultery.
Subdivision 1. Acts constituting. When a married woman has sexual intercourse with a man other than her husband, whether married or not, both are guilty of adultery and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than one year or to payment of a fine of not more than $3,000, or both.
Democratic Senator Ellen Anderson thought policing the private sex lives of citizens was perhaps not in the state’s best interest and made an effort to repeal the law in 2010.
But the usual staunch defenders of marriage objected. Tom Pritchard and his organization, the Minnesota Family Council (MFC), have long been out front and center trying to protect marriage from the gays. (Pritchard also famously suggested that kids bullied to death were asking for it.)
Colleagues are ready to throw her under the bus. Sen. Bill Ingebrigtsen, (R-Alexandria), a member of the Senate subcommittee on ethical conduct, said that he’s ready to look at the lawmaker’s (and mother of one) alleged gross misconduct with a subordinate:
“Amy Koch is someone who has done a lot of good things for the caucus,” Ingebrigtsen said. “You can’t throw that out the window.” But if the allegations are true, he said, the Senate must take steps to protect the work environment. If the allegations are true, he said, Koch should resign from the Senate. “I seriously feel I certainly would step down,” he said. “If it were me, I would in a heartbeat. It’s too damaging to the public, first and foremost.”
5 Comments
Here we go again! Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
If you put yourself up on a pedestal as an example of virtue, morality, and purity, then make yourself a self-appointed guardian of all three, the better chance there is it’s already crumbling from the hypocrisy you built it on!
I thought that adultery laws were unconstitutional, via Lawrence v. Texas if not before that.
I’m surprised that apparently some states still enforce such laws.
Adultery laws and sodomy laws are two different animals. Realistically, both are cut from the same cloth, in that they both try to regulate what goes on between two consenting adults behind closed doors. I am dead against adultery, having watched it break up three of my parents’ marriages (I won’t even get into that – my one marriage ended with the death do us part clause of the vows). But a marriage is what two people make of it and is a bond between them. The state has no business poking its nose into anyone’s bedroom. Certainly adultery is grounds for divorce – a civil proceeding, just as marriage is.
None of those states that have adultery laws in their criminal statutes enforce them on a regular basis. As a matter of fact, enforcement is extremely rare. Look around and ask yourself how many times you’ve seen someone imprisoned for adultery in the last 100 years (and probably the 100 years before that).
Actually, it’s arguable that these adultery laws are unenforceable at all and therefore unconstitutional. They should be abolished.
Thank you for the plug and the congrats.
I admit, I am not above reveling in a little Schadenfreude.
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Poor Amy. It’s a bitch living in a glass house when you’ve tossed so many stones about, isn’t it?
Clearly she is not fit to raise a child. And the one child that she now is contaminating with these filthy slut values should be placed in a stable gay couple’s home.