Posted by casey at June 9th, 2005

Did you know?

  • Pryor has called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and has supported efforts to erect unconstitutional barriers to the exercise of reproductive freedom. He defended a “partial-birth abortion” ban in Alabama, although it lacked the constitutionally required exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman.
  • Pryor believes that it is constitutional to imprison gay men and lesbians for having sex in the privacy of their own homes, and has filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold Texas’ “Homosexual Conduct law,” which criminalizes such conduct. Pryor believes that singling out gay men and lesbians in this manner does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the same brief, Pryor equated for purposes of legal analysis sex between two adults of the same gender with “activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia…”
  • When the Supreme Court of the United States created a temporary moratorium on the death penalty in Alabama to determine if the electric chair was cruel and unusual, Pryor lashed out stating “the death penalty moratorium movement is headed by an activist minority with little concern for what is really going on in our criminal justice system.”
  • Pryor has supported the efforts of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore to display a nearly three-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the state Judicial Building, a display ruled unconstitutional by a federal district court. More than forty Alabama clergy and other religious leaders, including Christian clergy, have opposed Moore’s monument as a violation of the separation of church and state.
  • Pryor also argued that states’ execution of mentally retarded inmates did not violate the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Atkins v. Virginia, again rejected Pryor’s argument, and prohibited all states from executing the mentally retarded.

(Sources: People for the American Way, Independent Judiciary)