Sarah Palin’s pick for AG ‘supports rape’

Just a fortnight after announcing her pick for Alaska's new Attorney General, Governor Sarah Palin may have to withdraw her nomination following accusations that the man she chose - Wayne Anthony Ross - supports marital rape. Leah Burton, a lobbyist on children's issues and domestic violence, told the Alaska State Judiciary Committee that Ross said in a 1991 speech: "If a guy can't rape his wife, who's he gonna rape?"

Burton also claims Ross once said: "If a woman would keep her mouth shut, there wouldn't be an issue with domestic violence."

Ross denies making these statements, "I don't talk like that!" he says,  but the word from Juneau, the state capital, is that Palin will have to withdraw her nomination in order to save face.

According to a report by Max Blumenthal for the Daily Beast website, Ross is a colourful lawyer who sports his initials - W A R - on his Hummer's licence plate and has long been an ally of the Alaskan state governor and former Republican vice-presidential candidate.

But his far-right sympathies are well-known: he has in the past called homosexuals "degenerates" and once hailed the "courage" of a student who lionised the Ku Klux Klan. When in the early 1980s residents of Anchorage were deciding whether to rename one of the ciuty streets after Martin Luther King Jr, Ross publicly attacked King as a communist subversive.

According to Blumenthal, Leah Burton also maintains she has been in touch with "a number" of domestic-violence victims who witnessed Ross making "horrible" statements but were too intimidated to speak out. Ross's comeback? Burton, he says, is an anti-Christian "fringe nutcase". ·