Bats In The Belfry

There is a Republican candidate running for governor in Massachusetts against an incumbent Republican.

I have been writing (here) about this case for years now, he won on a technicality but he appealed his case anyhow.

Scott Lively claims victory in apparent appeals court defeat
Boston Herald
By Brian Dowling
August 15, 2018

Buried in the appeals court defeat was just what Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Lively wanted.

“This is absolutely the best thing that could have happened with that appeal,” Lively told the Herald, claiming victory from the apparent defeat in the First Circuit Court of Appeals decision last week.

The appeal stemmed from a 2012 lawsuit filed by Ugandan LGBT activists that claimed Lively’s work in their country fomented animus toward gays and argued he should be held liable in a U.S. federal court.

That is the case that was thrown on the technicality that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing in the judge’s ruling he said that Scott’s views on gays ranged from “ludicrous to abhorrent” and “This crackpot bigotry could be brushed aside as pathetic, except for the terrible harm it can cause,”

So the Appeals Court said…

Lively appealed and asked the First Circuit Court of Appeals to edit out the editorial findings, lest they spark fodder for additional cases. The appeals court declined to take that move on account of the comments having no legal weight.

Masslive reported,

The ruling, issued Friday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit justices Jeffrey R. Howard, Bruce M. Selya, and David S. Barron, essentially says taking offense at a judge's language, descriptions and personal opinions is not a sound basis for an appeal -- especially if the ruling is ultimately in the plaintiff's favor.

"In his most loudly bruited claim of error, Lively beseeches us to purge certain unflattering statements from the court's dispositive opinion," the ruling notes.

But none of the offending statements "have any bearing on the analytical foundations" of Posner's ruling or impact the final outcome, the ruling notes.

"Generally speaking, only a party aggrieved by a final order or judgement may avail himself of the statutory right to appeal," the ruling notes. "As a practical matter, this means that we typically review appeals by parties who lost in the lower court."

And now Lively is happy with this ruling.

And here is the scary part, the Boston Herald wrote…

Lively — a Springfield pastor who captured 27 percent of the Republican party vote to land on the primary ballot and challenge Gov. Charlie Baker — is credited with asserting that Nazism was a result of the German homosexual movement.

That says a lot about the Republican Party in Massachusetts that almost a third of them vote for this guy.

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Today I am at the Carnival parade in Provincetown so this post was pre-written on Wednesday.