James Fagan Gives the Haters Ammunition

The state of Massachusetts has a bit of a reputation. While we view ourselves as a group of intelligent, reasoned people, the rest of the country sees us as a bunch of feel-good, woosie liberals whose policies hath wrought pregnancy pacts and legal gay marriage.

Now that California has also legalized gay marriage and the Gloucester kerfluffle is slowly dying down, we figured the heat would be off for a while. But state Rep. James Fagan’s recent remarks on the floor of the House will doubtless give Bay State haters more ammunition.

The Herald reported Fagan’s completely bizarre comments, made while debating mandatory sentencing laws for child rapists, on Tuesday.

Fagan, a defense attorney, infuriated victims’ rights advocates during a recent House debate when he said he would “rip apart” 6-year-old victims on the witness stand and “make sure the rest of their life is ruined.”

Fagan said he’d grill victims so that, “when they’re 8 years old they throw up; when they’re 12 years old, they won’t sleep; when they’re 19 years old, they’ll have nightmares and they’ll never have a relationship with anybody.”

Yes, he really said that. Fagan claims he was just trying to prove a point, according to a Herald follow-up.

Fagan said his point was to show lawmakers that if the law was passed, defense attorneys would take every case to trial, rather than cut plea bargains, which would lead to more victims being traumatized in court.

Today, Wonkette ran a clip of Fagan’s remarks, which means so much for hoping nobody outside the state would notice. While we can kind of see where he was going with his tirade (tougher sentencing laws mean more kids will have to take the stand since defense lawyers won’t be able to cut deals), we can just imagine the rest of the country shaking their heads, looking at us Massachusetts liberals.