Brad Schimel, Waukesha County, Wisconsin District Attorney and current GOP nominee for the state’s attorney general, said in an interview last month that he would have defended a ban on interracial marriage if he had been attorney general in the 1950s.
On Eye on Oshkosh, a local cable access program, the host asked Schimel about interracial marriage bans in the context of Wisconsin’s gay marriage ban.
The host asked:
“But if you had been an attorney general in, say, the 1950s, in a state that did not allow interracial marriage, do you think the proper role of an attorney general then was to not put himself or herself into the mix and say this is wrong?’
Schimel replied, “Yeah, it is.”
The host then asked if it was the attorney general’s job to uphold the law, even if it was something that “we might look back in the future and say that’s absurd?”
Schimel answered that while a law might be distasteful to him, he had “to stay consistent with that,” and that as the state’s lawyer, it’s not his “job to pick and choose.”
Watch the segment from Eye on Oshkosh.
