Rebecca Bradley Repeatedly Embraces Judicial Role Model Who Shared Her Extremist Views

MADISON, Wis. — In attempting to distance herself from a series of articles expressing her vile, extreme homophobia and animus to birth control and women’s reproductive health rights, Wisconsin State Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley has claimed her views have changed. Yet she reiterated her admiration for deceased U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who expressed similar views to those in Bradley’s writings.

“Rebecca Bradley is desperately trying to convince the public she does not hold extreme and out of touch views on members of the LGBTQ community and women’s health care,” commented One Wisconsin Now Research Director Jenni Dye. “But she expressed those sentiments in her own words, in her own writing and even today touts as her judicial role model a jurist whose writings reveal extreme and out of touch views on equality and women’s health.”

Rebecca Bradley is on record in newspaper writings calling gays “degenerates” and “queers” who engage in “abnormal and immoral” behavior. Meanwhile Scalia, the model for her judicial philosophy, in a 2003 dissenting opinion in a case striking down laws banning discrimination against gay people argued that states ought to be able to ban behavior he termed immoral and compared laws banning gay sex to those prohibiting incest, bestiality and even murder.

In her writings Bradley also compared supporters of abortion rights to Nazi sympathizers during the Holocaust and said women who opt to have abortions have been “brainwashed.” She has referred women to a radical anti-abortion group that opposes abortion even to save the life of the pregnant woman. More recently she wrote a newspaper column in favor of allowing pharmacists the right to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions from doctors. In that column, Bradley actually directly compared use of birth control to murder.

Again, her extremism on birth control and abortion is mirrored by her role model, Scalia. He believed a major abortion rights decision should be overturned, leading to the procedure being banned in all cases, even rape or incest. In addition, in arguments before the court on a case involving insurance coverage of contraception, Scalia seemed to concur that some forms of birth control could be classified as causing abortions.

Dye concluded, “Rebecca Bradley is, like her political patron Gov. Scott Walker, willing to do or say anything to win an election. She can’t possibly be credible when she tries to disavow what she’s written if she’s endorsing as her judicial role model someone who holds those very same beliefs.”