TPM has a kind of click-bait headline of GOP Nominee For Wisconsin AG Says He Would Defend Interracial Marriage Ban and of course i clicked on it.

The actual exchange is a little more nuanced and perhaps even understandable:

HOST: "But if you had been 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: "Yeah, it is."

HOST: "Your job is to uphold the law, even if it's something that we might look back in the future and say that's absurd?"

SCHIMEL: "It might be distasteful to me. I've got to stay consistent with that. As the state's lawyer, it's not my job to pick and choose."

I've watched some of the video of this interview, and Schimel makes a perfectly coherent slippery slope argument. I wondered if they followed up with, "Do you find the ban on same sex marriage 'distasteful'?", but they don't. They do ask a different good follow up question, and he acknowledges that an attorney general ought to be advising the governor on which laws to put resources into enforcing.

But Schimel's argument makes me wonder why the attorney general position is an elected position in the first place, if the role is just supposed to robotically enforce the laws. The general electorate isn't qualified to determine who would make the best lawyer. So it must be about the electorate picking the candidate that best represents their positions. In which case when you have one candidate saying i do not support the same sex marriage ban and another not taking a position on it, all while public opinion is increasingly comfortable with same sex marriage, it seems like a dodge.