Eight days ago, in a series of three posts (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), I showed that nearly all the defenders of Vaughn Walker’s non-recusal set up straw-man misrepresentations of the argument made by Prop 8 proponents and that they could not meaningfully refute Prop 8 proponents’ actual argument. That pattern continued last week, as the New York Times editorial page, a front-page article in the Washington Post, and NYT blogger Linda Greenhouse persisted in the convenient distortions.

In the interest of comprehensiveness, I’ll note that I now see that Yale law students Taylor Asen and Grant Bermann added to the confusion with their Law.com essay last week falsely contending that Prop 8 proponents’ argument can fairly be reduced to the claim that Walker “might personally benefit from his ruling” (and piling epithets on top of their confusion).

Meanwhile, the hapless fellow at Media Matters who tries to birddog me has written a characteristically incompetent and/or mendacious* piece titled “Whelan Pretends That Judge’s Sexual Orientation Isn’t Behind Move To Disqualify Prop 8 Judge.” He quotes my acknowledgment that “a judge’s personal characteristics don’t generally provide a basis for recusal,” but somehow sees fit not to note, much less respond to, my accompanying explanation (in my Part 2 post):

But that general principle is not an absolute, and it clearly does not sensibly apply where the judge’s personal characteristics form part of the very basis of the assessment that he would be conferring on himself a valuable legal right that he has a strong and particular interest in exercising. To conclude otherwise—to maintain, in other words, that the polygamist-aspiring judge must recuse himself but that the gay judge who wants to enter a same-sex marriage need not—is not to treat gay judges equally with other judges but is rather to confer on them a unique exemption from the recusal obligations.

* I take no position on the respective contributions of incompetence and mendacity to the fellow’s pervasive misstatements about my posts.