John C. Eastman, seeking the Republican nomination for California attorney general, could become a new face in the fight to block same-sex marriage.
His candidacy threatens to further shrink the GOP’s dwindling market share among California voters, even as he seeks to use the campaign apparatus that won the epic battle to ban same-sex marriage in 2008.
Eastman has surrounded himself with prominent players from the Proposition 8 campaign. His campaign firm, Schubert Flint Public Affairs, ran the Yes-on-8 campaign. Several of his donors were major contributors to the effort.
And a conservative Christian group called National Organization for Marriage, based in New Jersey, already playing in the GOP primary for the U.S. Senate here, proclaimed Eastman’s candidacy to be of prime interest. “We view this race as one of the most important races in the country,” said Brian Brown. The group was a major Yes-on-8 fundraiser.
Eastman has never been a player in electoral politics, but he is significant in far-conservative legal circles. Until recently, he was dean of Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, and is a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
He founded the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, which stakes out conservative stands in appellate briefs and other writings, some of them related to homosexuality.
The center’s advisers includes Reagan administration Attorney General Ed Meese, who is Eastman’s campaign chairman, and John C. Yoo, another former Thomas clerk who authored “torture memos” in President George W. Bush’s administration contending that “enhanced” interrogation techniques like water-boarding were legal.
Eastman wields a sharp pen of his own. In June 2000, he wrote that just as slavery and polygamy were “twin relics of barbarism” in the 19th century, “two new indicia of barbarism arose during the 20th century: abortion and homosexuality.”
“Abortion is barbaric because it deprives some human beings of a right even more precious than liberty, the right to life itself. And homosexuality, like polygamy, has for centuries been thought to undermine the institution of marriage and the civil society that rests on it.”
Eastman sides with Boy Scouts of America, defending the organization’s exclusion of gay troop leaders, and saying that Boy Scouts teach “the long-established view that extramarital sexual relations and homosexual conduct are immoral.”
Some Republicans leaders fret that Eastman would be trounced in a general election if he were to win the primary. But it’d be folly to dismiss his primary campaign against Sen. Tom Harman of Orange and Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley. Eastman has endorsements from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and California Republican Assembly, significant in GOP primaries.
Conservative radio talk show hosts have embraced him, giving him unusual amounts of airtime, including three hours last week on a powerful Bakersfield-based station that beams throughout the San Joaquin Valley, prime turf for any Republican.
He has endorsements from rightwing talkers Hugh Hewitt, who regularly features Eastman on his show, Dennis Prager, Laura Ingraham, Bill Bennett and Mark Levin.
Whether spoken or not, one of the main issues in Eastman’s campaign is the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8. Current Attorney General Jerry Brown has refused to defend the initiative, leaving Yes-on-8 backers to argue the case before U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco.
Eastman’s supporters expect if he were elected, he would bring the power of the attorney general’s office to bear in defense of Proposition 8. In an interview, Eastman called Brown’s stand “flagrant disregard” of the law, and said attorneys general must defend virtually all state initiatives.
“It is the most important suit involving marriage in history,” Brown, of the National Organization for Marriage, said of the California case. A loss could upend same-sex marriage bans in 30 other states.
Eastman has raised relatively little money today. But he also stands to capitalize on the apparatus that raised $39 million for Proposition 8.
“We showed with Proposition 8 that we can get donors to support what we’re doing,” Brown said, adding that he is setting up a California campaign fund.
Eastman is quick to say support from Proposition 8 backers is only part of his base. Certainly, his writings go beyond homosexuality. Birth on U.S. soil doesn’t necessarily qualify a person to be a citizen, he has written, a concept that would overturn law dating to the 19th century.
Eastman sides with gun advocates in a U.S. Supreme Court case to be decided soon challenging the power of states to impose gun control. He filed a brief arguing against the ban on corporate donations to political campaigns. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down that ban in January.
Eastman could capture a GOP nomination from a pool of voters that is shrinking. But his positions could be red meat for whichever Democrat makes it to the general election. His candidacy could have longer-range implications. He is hard-right in a blue state, where decline-to-state voters soon may overtake Republicans. Eastman’s candidacy could hasten that day.