Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis lawyer couple who went viral for pointing a pistol and an assault weapon at peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors from the front lawn of their home, are once again in the news as more details emerge about their past.
Specifically, a history of virulent homophobia: In 1992, they sued their neighborhood trustees for allowing gay couples to live in their neighborhood.
The lawsuit was ostensibly filed against the trustees for not enforcing one of the written rules of their gated community, which required that the neighborhood be home only to "single-family residences," which the rules defined as residences inhabited by married couples.
As same-sex marriage was not yet legal in Missouri in 1992, this rule would exclude gay couples. But the McCloskeys insisted it wasn't a homophobic rule, because straight unwed couples would be excluded too.
Mark McCloskey then accused the neighborhood of trying to politicize the issue. As he put it at the time:
“Certain people on Portland Place, for political reasons, wanted to make it a gay issue."
The McCloskeys went so far as to appeal their case all the way to the Missouri state Supreme Court, an effort that failed. Patricia McCloskey was subsequently impeached as a neighborhood trustee over what her fellow trustees saw as an overt attempt to codify homophobia into the neighborhood.
The incident is just one of a litany of lawsuits filed by the McCloskeys recently uncovered in a recent exposé in local newspaper The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. As the report details, the McCloskeys have a long history of using the court system to fight and intimidate--including suing Mark McCloskey's own father and sister.
As the Post-Dispatch put it:
"... public records and interviews reveal... the McCloskeys are almost always in conflict with others."
On Twitter, most people were disgusted by the McCloskeys' homophobia, but certainly not surprised.
Their litigious nature is just the latest chapter in the McCloskeys' infamy since their gun-toting Black Lives Matter encounter: in the wake of the incident, the compared BLM to "the storming of the Bastille" during the French Revolution, and they have been the subject of countless mocking memes.
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