Republicans are very, very responsible with taxpayer money, and if you don't think so then they'll pay a lot of money to a Canadian expert witness
to tell you so.
Michigan has spent about $40,000 so far on experts whose testimony at a trial over gay marriage was panned as a “fringe viewpoint” by the judge. [...]
The state has paid $39,478.75 to experts, and some additional bills “have not yet been sent in,” Joy Yearout, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Bill Schuette, told The Associated Press.
That would be the Michigan trial defending the state's ban on same-sex marriages, and the "experts" the state summoned to make their very, very strange case would be, among others, the Canadian expert who said that
gay people were going to hell and Mark Regnerus, whose study of the supposed detrimental effects of same-sex marriage on children
was so flawed as to be useless. The judge considered each of those witnesses to be wastes of the court's time.
The judge said he couldn’t give the testimony of Marks, Price and Allen “any significant weight.”
“They, along with Regnerus, clearly represent a fringe viewpoint that is rejected by the vast majority of their colleagues across a variety of social science fields,” Friedman said in his 31-page decision.
So that's $40,000 spent—so far—by Michigan taxpayers
just for the brief testimony of supposed "expert witnesses" in state conservatives' efforts to block marriage equality. Granted it's no "shutting down the entire government" or "hey, let's sell our own statehouse and then rent it back at exorbitant sums, because free enterprise," but
still. Michigan could have taken that $40,000 and sent every state resident who truly gave a damn about blocking marriage equality a postcard saying
Get the hell over it, it would have been better spent.