MADISON, Wis. — The only conservative running for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat kept a personal blog more than a decade ago in which he opined on hot-button issues of the day, including that he thought a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a Texas anti-sodomy law could lead to the legalization of bestiality.
Brian Hagedorn, a state appeals court judge who previously served as then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s legal counsel, began the blog addressed to “fellow soldiers in the culture wars” in 2005, when he was a 27-year-old law school student and father of two, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Thursday.
On that year’s landmark gay rights ruling striking down the Texas law, Hagedorn wrote: “The idea that homosexual behavior is different than bestiality as a constitutional matter is unjustifiable.”
He called the Supreme Court’s decision overturning anti-sodomy laws a travesty that “should render laws prohibiting bestiality unconstitutional.”
Hagedorn also wrote about “why I hate Planned Parenthood” and called it a “wicked organization” that was more devoted “to killing babies than to helping women.” Hagedorn, an evangelical Christian, said he was praying and lobbying to stop abortion.
He also wrote that the NAACP, the national civil rights group, was a “partisan hack” and a “disgrace to America.” He wrote that after the NAACP president had, among other things, compared some Republican judicial nominees to the Taliban.
Hagedorn is running against liberal-backed appeals court Chief Judge Lisa Neubauer in the April election. The winner will replace liberal Justice Shirley Abrahamson. The court is currently controlled 4-3 by conservatives.
Hagedorn’s campaign adviser, Stephan Thompson, said the judge’s personal views would not affect his actions on the court, but he would not comment to the Journal Sentinel about where Hagedorn stands on issues he raised in the blog.
“When he put on the robe, Judge Hagedorn took an oath to be impartial and apply the law on every case, and he will always be faithful to that oath and to the people he serves,” Thompson said in the statement. “He believes personal political values have no place on the Supreme Court and his job is to say what the law is, not what he thinks the law should be.”
Neubauer’s campaign manager, Tyler Hendricks, criticized what he called Hagedorn’s “personal, extreme and radical agenda.”
