Obama and Holder are on the same page as the Dish, when it comes to respecting the rule of law, and the crude bullying tactics of HRC and Richard Socarides remain, to my mind, noxious. HRC ties itself in knots here:
Although [Executive Director Joe] Solmonese identified both King & Spalding and Clement in his statement, Fred Sainz, HRC’s vice president of communications, asserted that Holder’s comments defending Clement are inaccurate because the LGBT rights group went after the firm and not the private attorney.
“We have a great deal of respect for Attorney General Holder,” Sainz said. “His comments on the particulars of our involvement are inaccurate. We never criticized Paul Clement. Our issue has been with King & Spalding, the firm that employed him. K&S espouses LGBT inclusion on their website. This engagement is completely antithetical to those values and thus our central claim has been hypocrisy. You simply can’t square espousing LGBT inclusion and defending discrimination.”
This strikes me as the right thing to say:
“To condemn a lawyer for representing a client is a problematic attack on the general responsibility of lawyers. Third parties shouldn’t be in the business of excoriating lawyers for representing unpopular clients.”
The Dish 