Neil Gorsuch Has Revealed Conservative Justices' Partisanship

Justices Gorsuch and Roberts.

Judges and Supreme Court Justices are supposed to base their rulings on the law, the Constitution and the facts yet increasingly we are witnessing the conservatives on the U.S.S Supreme Court and right wing Republican appointed judges - especially Trump appointees, a number of which have been rated as unfit by the American Bar Association - motivated by political ideology and partisan affiliation and even personal religious belief rather than basing rulings on the language of the Constitution, statutes and scientific and medical facts. In the recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court concerning whether LGBT Americans are protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Justice Gorsuch tipped his hand that he may be more worried by the reaction of the ugliest elements of the GOP base - think Christofascists and evangelicals - if the Court rules that it is illegal to discriminate against gays and transgender employees. Indeed, Gorsuch commented on potential "massive social upheaval" which suggests that had he been on the Court at the time of Brown v. Board of Education, we'd still have segregated schools.  A piece in The Advocate looks at Gorsuch's candid and dangerous agenda.  Here are excerpts:

As a frequent critic of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and a long-standing activist for transgender rights, I am probably one of the few members of my community who feels grateful for Justice Neil Gorsuch’s acknowledgement that he fears extending employment non-discrimination protections to transgender Americans would unleash “massive social upheaval.” I found Justice Gorsuch’s remark — which many have interpreted as an indication that the Court may decline to protect transgender workers — to be refreshing for its honesty and transparency. If Gorsuch votes against extending protections, he acknowledged candidly, he would do so not on the basis of law, fairness, or judicial philosophy, but because of his assessment of public opinion, something Supreme Court justices rarely concede they take into consideration.

Integrity is obviously a crucial attribute of any judge, but has been sorely lacking in recent years among members of the Court’s conservative majority. To take an example I know well, earlier this year, a slim 5-4 majority accepted the Trump administration's false assertion that allowing transgender troops to serve posed a “risk to military effectiveness and lethality," thus allowing the president to reinstate the military’s transgender ban. But all service chiefs had testified that inclusive policy was a success, and the administration's claim about risk was based on medical arguments that the American Medical Association and former Military Surgeons General and U.S. Surgeons General had repudiated.

When a court’s rulings depend on the elision of fact, civil rights and even democracy itself can suffer, and the transgender military ruling, unfortunately, is far from exceptional. Critics have suggested that the Court’s most important decisions in recent years, including dismantling the Voting Rights Act and upholding the travel ban, have ignored key facts in service of partisan ends.

Given the conservative majority's arguably vexed relationship with evidence, Justice Gorsuch's integrity is admirable. But if his acknowledgment is refreshing for its candor, it is troubling at the same time, as the premise of his revelation — that a ruling extending protections would promote upheaval — has no basis in fact. Numerous polls confirm that the American public overwhelmingly supports extending non-discrimination protections to transgender employees. As a political science professor and LGBT advocate, I am unaware of any massive social upheaval in the 21 states whose laws explicitly protect transgender individuals . . . he is certainly entitled to his imagination. But his concerns have no basis in reality.

What likely worries Justice Gorsuch is that some conservatives believe that treating transgender employees equally violates their religious convictions. Setting aside that many evangelical Christians support employment non-discrimination for LGBT Americans, civil rights protected by laws and by the Constitution should not depend on the public’s comfort. Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 ruling prohibiting states from establishing racial discrimination in public schools, led to social unrest. But it was unquestionably correctly decided. By revealing his concerns about social upheaval, Justice Gorsuch has given up the ghost on the conservative majority’s true partisan priority, whether the Court thinks the GOP’s base will like a decision. That is dangerous partisanship that has no place on the bench.

[I]t is ethically unacceptable to prioritize the religious injury that some employers might believe themselves to suffer if forced to treat transgender workers equally with the tangible injury that transgender employees suffer when they are denied employment on the basis of their gender identity. Some employers surely believe that they compromise their religious convictions when they are forced to treat women, racial minorities, and Muslims equally, but catering to such beliefs would be immoral. Whether one interprets religious objections to treating transgender employees equally as unreasonable animus or reasonable religious belief, there is no comparison between such objections and the consequences of being fired. That Gorsuch and his conservative colleagues on the bench would entertain the comparison is, at best, problematic.

Justice Gorsuch’s concern is even at odds with his judicial philosophy. Gorsuch professes a commitment to “textualism,” . . . . that explicitly disavows any concern for public opinion.

Eve Sedgwick, had an insightful reading of Justice Byron White's opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick—the now-overturned 1986 case that allowed states to criminalize same-sex sex: She demonstrated that White’s ruling against gays and lesbians depended on a refusal to recognize hard facts, a maneuver she labeled as "willful ignorance." According to Sedgwick, White's sidestepping of evidence he did not like was a “contemptuous demonstration that powerful people don't have to be acute or right."

Gorsuch’s stated concern about “massive social upheaval” smacks of the same conceit. As conservative jurists twist facts to sustain partisan rulings that injure everyday Americans, progressives are becoming increasingly vocal about the possible need for judicial reform. Hopefully, Justice Gorsuch and his colleagues will heed such warnings before driving the Court and the democracy itself off a cliff.

Politicizing the U.S. Supreme Court

The Washington Post has an op-ed by Richard A. Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, that looks at the attempt by Senate Republicans to politicize the United States Supreme Court and in the process subvert the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution itself by demanding justices be appointed who put their religious bigotry and other factors above impartially applying and interpreting the law.  It is the height of hypocritical, partisan behavior which reveals the lie of Republicans who claim that they revere the Constitution, yet want justices who will put religious belief above the Constitution.  (The behavior is similar to that of Christofascist who claim to revere the Bible but then ignore almost all of the Gospel message while clinging to the most misogynist passages of the Old Testament.    Here are excerpts from the op-ed: 

The decision of the Republican Senate majority to consider no nominee of President Obama to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia is significant, but not for the usual reasons given . . .
 Rather, the significance of the Senate’s action lies in reminding us that the Supreme Court is not an ordinary court but a political court, or more precisely a politicized court, which is to say a court strongly influenced in making its decisions by the political beliefs of the judges.

Most of what the Supreme Court does — or says it does — is “interpret” the Constitution and federal statutes, but I put the word in scare quotes because interpretation implies understanding a writer’s or speaker’s meaning, and most of the issues that the court takes up cannot be resolved by interpretation because the drafters and ratifiers of the constitutional or statutory provision in question had not foreseen the issue that has arisen. This is notoriously the case with respect to the Constitution, composed in 1787, and the Bill of Rights, composed two years later. But it is also the case with respect to the 14th Amendment, composed in 1866 and ratified two years later; and in the statutory realm, it is the case with respect to numerous old but still influential statutes, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and countless modern statutes as well. 
When judges are not interpreting, they’re creating, and to understand judicial creation one must understand first of all the concept of “priors.” Priors are what we bring to a new question before we’ve had a chance to do research on it. They are attitudes, presuppositions derived from upbringing, from training, from personal and career experience, from religion and national origin and character and ideology and politics. The priors that seem to exert the strongest influence on present-day Supreme Court justices are political ideology and attitudes toward religion. It is well-understood that there are now, with Scalia’s death, three very conservative Catholic justices (Samuel A. Alito Jr., John G. Roberts Jr. and Clarence Thomas), four liberal justices (Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) and a swing justice (Anthony M. Kennedy) who is generally conservative but liberal in several important areas (such as gay rights and capital punishment of minors). 

President Obama might nominate to the Scalia vacancy a centrist, or even a conservative-seeming judge of sterling qualifications, who yet might be a “stealth” liberal in the mode of John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Harry A. Blackmun and to a lesser extent Sandra Day O’Connor — justices who were or at least seemed conservative when appointed but became significantly less so as justices. Republican senators can avoid the embarrassment of confirming a stealth liberal by refusing to hold a confirmation hearing for any Obama nominee, hoping that the next president will be a Republican and will appoint someone in Scalia’s mold. The Republican senators’ behavior is proof (were any needed) of the Supreme Court’s politicization.

I may seem to be criticizing the court by calling it politicized. That is not my intention. When a statute or constitutional provision is clear, judges (including justices of the Supreme Court) will usually apply it to disputes within its scope, whether they like it or not. But when there is no clarity in the relevant provision — when the judges are on their own — their priors will tug them this way or that, and the tug may be decisive.  

Posner doesn't take the last step which is admitting that the Republican senators want justices with "priors" that will dispose them to be anti-gay, pro-Christofascists, pro-large corporations, anti- workers, anti-women and anti-modernity.

Quote of the Day: Ralph Northam on Aborted Cuccinelli Nomination to Virginia Supreme Court

Lt. Governor Ralph Northam

As noted in a post yesterday, Virginia Senate Republicans have cynically put Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli's name in play for appointment to the Virginia Supreme Court.  As I noted, I can thing of few people less appropriate on the Court than an extremist and zealot like Cuccinelli.  I am not the only one who feels that way.  Lieutenant Governor Northam released the following statement (here via Facebook) in advance of an expected Senate floor vote to nominate former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli II to the Supreme Court of Virginia:

RICHMOND– Today Lieutenant Governor Northam released the following statement in advance of an expected Senate floor vote to nominate former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli II to the Supreme Court of Virginia:

“This is an embarrassment and affront to the people of Virginia and to the judicial process. Ken Cuccinelli has spent his career as an activist trying to outlaw abortion and birth control, denying science and climate change, and aggressively denigrating and denying our LGBT community of basic rights.”

“We constantly hear about supposed efforts to politicize our courts, and I cannot think of a more cynical and obvious attempt to politicize the judicial process than to nominate Ken Cuccinelli to the Supreme Court of Virginia. And, with just a few days left in Session, making this nomination in the twelfth hour leaves little to no time for the public, the legal community, and other stakeholders to weigh in and discuss this with their legislators.”

“I am disappointed that the Senate Courts of Justice Committee would make this nomination and, as President of the Senate, I am hopeful that the Senate will reject this nomination.”

Thankfully, as the Virginian Pilot is reporting, Cuccinelli withdrew his name from consideration after the backlash that his nomination triggered.  Here are highlights:

Cuccinelli's name coming under consideration prompted a backlash from liberal groups at odds with his conservative positions on abortion, gay rights and other issues.

McDougle said Cuccinelli was "very interested" in the position but he and his family "ultimately came to a different conclusion," notifying lawmakers Wednesday that he did not want to be considered. There was then quick movement toward McCullough, he said.

Cuccinelli's withdrawl came as a relief to liberal activist groups, who coordinated a protest at the Capitol on Wednesday after news surfaced that he was under consideration.

VA Senate Republican Seek to Nominate Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli to Virginia Supreme Court

As an attorney for over 35 years I can think of few people less suited for the Virginia Supreme Court than gay hating religious zealot, anti-immigrant bigot and climate change denier, Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli.  Yet that is exactly who a Republican controlled committee nominated to the Virginia Supreme Court in an apparent effort to make Virginia a national and international laughing stock akin to Alabama. Moreover, Cuccinelli strikes me as totally incapable of meeting the standards of the Canons of Judicial Conduct which require a judge or justice to be unbiased towards issues and litigants before their court.  No gay Virginian, no environmentalist, and many others could not possible expect to be treated in an unbiased way by Kookinelli.  Multiple organizations are mobilizing to facilitate sane Virginians in sending a message to their state Senators that Cuccinelli is absolutely unacceptable.  Equality Virginia has a page here to send a message, to state senators but many others have similar links to stop this travesty.  The Virginian Pilot has details on this utterly insane and inappropriate nomination.  Here are highlights:

Some Republicans in the General Assembly are discussing the idea of electing former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to the Supreme Court of Virginia.

House and Senate Republican leaders have said they want to elect Appeals Court Judge Rossie Alston to the high court. There are plenty of votes to do that in the GOP-dominated House, but Republicans are one vote shy in the Senate, leading to an impasse.

Should they be unable to elect Alston, two lawmakers said, Republicans would discuss other candidates and Cuccinelli’s name is in the mix. Also among those that have been mentioned: Court of Appeals Judges Stephen R. McCullough and Mary Grace O’Brien. 

Most lawmakers are staying quiet about the situation because reaching 21 votes on the judicial election in the Senate has been a challenge and there’s uncertainty over what will happen.

The drama stems from a recess interim appointment last year by Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who appointed former Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Jane Marum Roush to the Supreme Court to replace Justice LeRoy F. Millette, Jr. after his retirement.

House and Senate Republican leaders later said McAuliffe did not properly consult them, and since it was the duty of the General Assembly to elect judges, they preferred Alston and would elect him.

Cuccinelli is an ardent foe of abortion and gay marriage, and as attorney general questioned the science behind global warming.

I find Cuccinelli nothing short of frightening.  In addition, in my opinion, he is also a closeted self-loathing gay man who clings to strident religious dogma and lashing out at other gays as a way to deal with his own raging internalized homophobia.   The man needs a mental health intervention, not an appointment to the Virginia Supreme Court.   PLEASE contact you state Senator and urge them to vote "No" to Cuccinelli.

Scalia's "Free" Trip to an Exclusive Resort

One of the things that judges, but federal judges in particular, are supposed to avoid is any appearance of impropriety or bias.  Having had two law partners become federal judges, I have seen the vetting process first hand and witnessed the efforts of these two individuals to refrain from any appearance of political partisanship or acceptance of gifts from those who might ever appear before them in court.  Not so with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, each of whom did little to hide their political or religious prejudices.  I have long argued that both needed to be removed from the Supreme Court if they could not abide by the canons of judicial conduct.  Likewise, as we now discover, nor did Scalia avoid accepting expensive gifts. As it turns out, Scalia was enjoying a free junket at the Cibolo Creek Ranch resortat the time he suffered his fatal heart attack.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this unseemly situation.  Here are excerpts:

Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death over the weekend at a West Texas ranch raised questions about the nature of his travel, who paid for the trip and whether justices are subject to the same disclosure guidelines as other judges or federal officials.

The ranch is 30,000-acre getaway that is home to John B. Poindexter, according to the website of J.B. Poindexter & Co. It is a remote location that has reportedly attracted the likes of Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and Bruce Willis. 

All of which raises the question: Who pays for a Supreme Court justice to make this kind of trip?  Not Scalia, it turns out. Poindexter told The Washington Post that Scalia was not charged for his stay, something he described as a policy for all guests at the ranch.

“I did not pay for the Justice’s trip to Cibolo Creek Ranch,” Poindexter wrote in a brief email Tuesday. “He was an invited guest, along with a friend, just like 35 others.” . . . However, Poindexter said he did not pay for Scalia’s charter flight to Texas. . . . Poindexter, who would not identify Scalia’s friend . . . 

The nature of Poindexter’s relationship with Scalia remained unclear Tuesday, one of several lingering questions about his visit. It was not known whether Scalia had paid for his own ticket to fly to the ranch or if someone else picked up the tab, just as it was not immediately clear if Scalia had visited before.

It is also still not known who else was at the Texas ranch for the weekend, and unless that is revealed, there could be concerns about who could have tried to raise an issue around Scalia, said Stephen Gillers, who teaches legal and judicial ethics at the New York University School of Law.  

The 1978 Ethics in Government Act, passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, states that all federal judges — up to and including the chief justice and the associate justices — are required to report certain gifts. It also requires them to identify and describe when someone who is not a relative gives them “transportation, lodging, food, or entertainment” worth a certain amount.

Scalia was among the court’s most active travelers. However, these disclosure forms offer scant details about who else attends events with the justices.

Judges must report reimbursements related to travel totaling $335 or more, according to filing instructions posted by the group Judicial Watch. And judges are not allowed to accept anything of value from a person who has a case in their court, the document notes.

The biggest ethical questions involve when justices should recuse themselves from cases, says Gillers.

“Is [the justice] the final arbiter of whether or not he has to recuse himself? And the answer is yes,” he said. “Every other federal judge below the Supreme Court, every other federal judge’s decision about whether or not he should be recused is potentially subject to the review of a higher judge or other judges on his court. But no one reviews the decision of a justice.”

Roberts issued his [2011] report at the end of a year in which more than 100 law professors nationwide asked Congress to give the Supreme Court an ethical code of conduct after it emerged that Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas had attended private political meetings sponsored by billionaire conservative donors David and Charles Koch. That same year, Kagan was called on to recuse herself from hearing challenges to health-care reform, and a watchdog group said Thomas had failed to report his wife’s income from a conservative think tank before he amended his financial forms.

In my view, Scalia was a very arrogant and bigoted man and one who cared little about the rights of others.  In many ways, he was the Donald Trump equivalent of the Supreme Court.  The Court is better without him.  

Judge Who Refused To Marry Same-Sex Couples Found "Unfit" for Bench

Anti-gay judge Vance Day

An Oregon state court judge who has refused to marry same sex couples has been unfit for the bench by the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness.  Like lunatic County Clerk Kim Davis, Judge Vance Day believes he is above the law and can ignore the rules of Code of Judicial Conduct, much like the judge who heard my divorce did even though the Virginia Code of Judicial Conduct bars anti-gay bias on the part of judges and requires that they refuse themselves if they cannot be unbiased.  The difference is that in Oregon, the judicial review body seemingly takes its oversight duties seriously whereas in Virginia, the Judicial Review Commission is a joke based on my personal experience.  I hope Judge Day is removed from the bench and that a message is sent that judges and court clerks are not above the law.  The New Civil Rights Movement looks at this development.  Here are highlights:

A judicial oversight panel investigating complaints against Marion County, Oregon, Judge Vance Day, has recommended that the State Supreme Court remove Judge Day from the bench. Judge Day came to the panel's attention in May of 2014 when he refused to officiate at the weddings of same-sex couples after Oregon legalized marriage equality.

The Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability sent its formal recommendation to the Oregon Supreme Court this week, accusing Judge Day of discrimination based on sexual orientation, among other serious charges.

"His misconduct is not isolated. It is frequent and extensive,” the commission found. 

The commission charges Judge Day “willfully” violated ten different rules of the Code of Judicial Conduct, including his refusal to officiate at the marriages of same-sex couples. The commission said whenever a same-sex couple asked Judge Day to officiate, he told his staff to lie about his availability and direct them to another judge. Judge Day did not dispute that practice, but argued same-sex couples were not denied their rights because another judge was always found to marry them.

Day is only the sixth judge in the state since 2007 to have been referred for sanctions to the Supreme Court.

Virginia could stand to take some lessons from Oregon.

Accused in Case Scalia Used to Justify Death Penalty Proved Innocent

I did not intend to rightfully bash Antonin Scalia twice in one day, but a reader sent me a link to a column in the Miami Herald that takes Scalia to task for his bigotry and certainty over a death penalty case.  Indeed, Scalia used the supposed facts of the case to justify the death penalty.  The only problem is that in the meantime, DNA tests have proven that the alleged rapist and murderer was innocent.  It's yet another case of Scalia being dead wrong and more motivated by his own prejudices than facts and questionable prosecutions.  Here are column highlights:

To the Honorable Antonin G. Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States:

Dear Sir:

Twenty-one years ago, your then-colleague, the late Justice Harry Blackmun, wrote what became a famous dissent to a Supreme Court decision not to review a Texas death-penalty conviction.

You mocked him for this stance in an opinion concurring with the majority, invoking as justification for capital punishment the horrific 1983 case of an 11-year-old girl who was raped then killed by having her panties stuffed down her throat. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection,” you wrote, “compared with that!”

A few months later, the very case you had referenced came before the court. Henry Lee McCollum, a mentally disabled man who was on death row in North Carolina after having been convicted of that rape and murder, applied to the court for a review of his case. You were part of the majority that rejected the request without comment.

The demagoguery of your response to Justice Blackmun is pretty standard for proponents of state-sanctioned death. Rather than contend with the many logical and irrefutable arguments against capital punishment, they use a brute-force appeal to emotion.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article23877205.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article23877205.html#storylink=cpy

As you have doubtless heard, it now turns out McCollum was innocent of that crime. Last year, he and his also mentally disabled half-brother Leon Brown (who had been serving a life sentence) were exonerated by DNA evidence and set free.   A few days ago, McCollum was pardoned by North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory.

The case against him was never what you’d call ironclad. No physical evidence tied him to the crime. The centerpiece of the prosecution’s case was a confession McCollum, then a 19-year-old said to have the mentality of a child 10 years younger, gave with no lawyer present after five hours of questioning. 

“I had never been under this much pressure,” he told the News & Observer newspaper in a videotaped death row interview, “with a person hollering at me and threatening me...I just made up a false story so they could let me go home.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article23877205.html#storylink=cpy

You and your colleagues had a chance to intervene in that injustice and chose not to. Not incidentally, the real culprit avoided accountability all that time.

The argument against the death penalty will never have the visceral, immediate emotionalism of the argument in favor. It does not satisfy that instinctive human need to make somebody pay — now! — when something bad has been done. Rather, it turns on quieter concerns, issues of inherent racial, class, geographic and gender bias, issues of corner-cutting cops and ineffective counsel, and issues of irrevocability, the fact that, once imposed, death cannot be undone.

Those issues were easy for you to ignore in mocking Blackmun. They are always easy to ignore, right up until the moment they are not.

This is one of those moments, sir, and it raises a simple and obvious question to which one would hope you feel honor-bound to respond. In 1994, you used this case as a symbol of why we need the death penalty.  What do you think it symbolizes now?

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article23877205.html#storylink=cpy

Personally, I despise Scalia.  He is symptomatic of what is wrong with much of the judiciary.  Judges are supposed to be unbiased and, if unable to be unbiased and objective, they are to recuse themselves from the case.  Scalia is ALWAYS biased and has prejudged cases before hand based on his sole based on his own prejudices and preconceptions.  The prospects of a fair trial - or appeal in the case of the U.S. Supreme Court - is impossible with judges and justices like Scalia and his dimwitted cohort, Clarence Thomas. Both need to be removed from the Court.  Kudos to Leonard Pitts for this much needed column. 

Antonin Scalia is Unfit to Serve on SCOTUS

A piece in Salon makes the case that I have long argued: Justice Antonin Scalia has becomes so crazy that he no longer is fit to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.  I'd go further and say that the same arguments go to Justice Clarence Thomas as well.  Both put their religious beliefs above all else and openly reject modernity itself.  The United States of America per the U.S. Constitution has no established religion - indeed, any effort to  establish an official religion is unconstitutional - yet Scalia seeks to inflict his toxic form of Catholicism on all Americans regardless of their faith.  He needs to be removed from the Court.  (Note: I love the term "faith derangement syndrome" as described  because it so accurately describes the mental/psychological illness of the conservative Christians - and Muslims).  Here are highlights from the Salon piece:

Readers of this column already know that faith-derangement syndrome has stricken the highest levels of the executive branch of government, . . . .  Now we have evidence that it has spread to the top organ of the judiciary, the Supreme Court.

But first, a clarification. Sufferers of faith-derangement syndrome (FDS) exhibit the following symptoms: unshakable belief in the veracity of manifest absurdities detailed in ancient texts regarding the origins of the cosmos and life on earth; a determination to disseminate said absurdities in educational institutions and via the media; a propensity to enjoin and even enforce (at times using violence) obedience to regulations stipulated in said ancient texts, regardless of their suitability for contemporary circumstances; the conviction that an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient authority (commonly referred to as “God”) directs the course of human and natural events, is vulnerable to propitiation and blandishments, and monitors individual human behavior, including thought processes, with an especially prurient interest in sexual activity.

Secondary symptoms exhibited by sufferers of FSD comprise feelings of righteousness and sensations of displeasure, even outrage, when collocutors question, reject or refute the espousal of said absurdities. Tertiary symptoms, often present among individuals self-classifying as “evangelicals”: Duggar-esque hairdos and Tammy Bakker-ian makeup, preternaturally sunny dispositions and pedophiliac tendencies, sartorial ineptitude and obesity.

Last week, Justice Antonin Scalia delivered a commencement speech at an all-girls Catholic High School in Bethesda, Maryland. He warned the assembled, “You should not leave Stone Ridge High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented. Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so” – sic, italics mine – “and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were.”

Scalia confronts us with a sui generis challenge of great urgency: how to go about declaring a magistrate appointed for life of unsound mind and thus unfit to serve? Scalia rejects the fact of evolution – the foundation of modern biology – in favor of the opening chapter of a compendium of cockamamie fables concocted by obscure humans in a particularly dark age, evidence that his faculty of reason has suffered the debilitating impairment associated with acute FDS. He therefore cannot be relied upon to adjudicate without prejudice and should be removed from the bench henceforth.

We have even more damning evidence of Justice Scalia’s FDS-related impairment  . . . . A couple of years ago, Scalia nonplussed a contributing editor at New York magazine, Jennifer Senior, who made the understandable mistake of assuming that the Harvard-educated SCOTUS potentate lived in the real world, and not in a phantasmagorical realm of djinns and genies and junk cosmogony.

He leaned toward her and whispered, surely with eyes ablaze, “I even believe in the Devil  …  he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.”   By this time, Senior must have been scanning the room for the emergency exit. But she pulled herself together. “Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?” . . . . Scalia attributed the spread of atheism to Satan, who was “getting people not to believe in him or in God.  He’s much more successful that way.”  Satan had, in Scalia’s estimation, become “wilier,” which explained “why there’s not demonic possession all over the place.”

Scalia’s peevish demoniac harangue clearly had its roots in the past decade or so of New Atheist assertiveness. The faithful sense the mounting impatience among rationalists with beliefs that are not just wrong, they are, especially when influencing public policy, education and legislation, dangerous and regressive.

Faith-addled intrusions into public life extend beyond denying the fact of evolution. Another Republican contender for the presidency, Rick Santorum, has admonished the pope for his forthright stance on climate change, but urged Catholics to concentrate on “what they are really good at, which is theology and morality.”

Justice Scalia, until you’ve cured yourself of your FDS, please spare us your gaga musings about the history of humankind, desist from imposing your obscurantist dogma on impressionable young minds, and interpret the law in accordance with how the secularist Founding Fathers conceived it. You profess to be, after all, an originalist.  Better yet, Justice Scalia, resign.

The Idiocy of Those Supporting "Biblical Marriage"

Click image to enlarge

This morning I wrote about a state court magistrate judge in North Carolina who resigned from his judicial position rather than - the horrors - marry same sex couples now that marriage equality has come to North Carolina despite the efforts the North Carolina Republican Party.  The judge, Magistrate Judge Gilbert Breedlove, justified his action with this statement: "The whole Bible from front to end states that a marriage is between a man and a wife," . . . "Any other type of sexual activity other than that is what is defined as fornication."  I'm sorry, but Breedlove might just have well had "I'm an ignorant ass" on his forehead.  Why?  Because, as a post in Huffington Post by a biblical scholar points out, there is NO biblical marriage in the form of "one man and one woman."  Making matters worse, Breedlove purports to be an ordained minister.  He obviously never bothered to actually read the Bible. As I have stated many times, fundamentalist Christianity requires ignorance to survive.  Here are excerpts from Huffington Post that underscores Breedlove's ignorance:

In light of the recent resignations of two North Carolina magistrates, explained by their religious convictions that same-sex marriage is a sin or desecrates the "holy institution established by God Himself," I would like to offer a few points of clarification to the overall discourse. 

First, the kinds of relationships that qualify for marriage in the Bible, and thus could count as "biblical marriage," represent quite a striking range of options. They include polygamy (more than one wife or concubine, simultaneously), open marriage for the man (since he can have access to the female slaves or servants in the house), forcing a woman to marry her rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28-29) and levirate marriage (wherein a childless widow must marry the brother of her deceased husband). Those are just a few of the examples from the Hebrew Bible. 

What we see in the Newer Testament includes Jesus claiming that men can leave their wives and children in order to follow him (Luke 18:28-30), in addition to him somewhat throwing the gauntlet in Matthew 19:10-12, where he discusses men being made eunuchs or making themselves such for the sake of the kingdom . . . 

I think most people are simply unaware of the range of possibilities that qualify, regardless of which testament of the Bible we look to. 

The second point I would like to clarify is that, aside from that one moment in 1 Corinthians 7, marriage is discussed in terms of the woman as the property of the man. I say this with a fairly literal sense intended. It does explain why or how so many biblical stories show wives being treated as less than fully human, but I do hope that people who love the Bible can admit that this is an element of it that we ought not to continue to endorse.

Third, when people say that the "Bible says homosexuality/gay marriage is a sin," I know that they believe that the Bible says this, since I used to think so, too. But it does not.  . . . . the issue is about the people of Israel needing to grow in numbers. Any wasting of semen was not to be tolerated and thus was an abomination. None of those situations are talking about two same-sex people in loving relationships.Finally, there is no specific place where "God Himself" establishes marriage as a holy institution.

When I hear someone say she only believes in "biblical marriage," my knee-jerk reaction is to want to ask her which version she is referring to. I also find myself wanting to remind her that love is never discussed as foundational to marriage. Thus, while same-sex marriage is not endorsed in the Bible, neither is a loving, mutually agreed upon union of a man and woman.

As I said this morning, the North Carolina judiciary is far better off with a self-professed ignoramus like Breedlove off the bench.

Ranting Federal Judge Upholds Puerto Rico Marriage Ban

Other than one federal district court judge in Alabama, every federal court to rule on the constitutionality of state bans on same sex marriage has struck such bans down.  Now, in a somewhat unhinged opinion that attacks judges who have found that the 14th Amendment protects LGBT citizens, a federal judge in Puerto Rico has upheld that commonwealth's gay marriage ban.  Like Justices Thomas and Scalia, Judge Juan Perez-Gimenez seemingly believes that his personal views over ride the U.S. Constitution.  The next stop for the case will be the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit where it is thought the district court ruling faces a high probability of being reversed.  Think Progress looks at the ruling itself.  Here are highlights:

In an opinion that frequently crosses the line from visible rage to outright belligerence towards his judicial colleagues, a federal judge in Puerto Rico became one of just two federal judges to deny equal marriage rights to same-sex couples on Tuesday. Judge Juan Pérez-Giménez’s opinion accuses the overwhelming majority of federal judges who have sided with marriage equality of “inexplicable contortions of the mind or perhaps even willful ignorance.” At one point he appears to mock his colleagues, claiming that while the supposed fact that “this Court reaches its decision by embracing precedent may prove disappointing . . . there are some principles of logic and law that cannot be forgotten.” At another point, he claims that, if gay couples enjoy the same rights as straight couples, that will lead to a world where “laws barring polygamy, or, say the marriage of fathers and daughters” are “now of doubtful validity.”

The concluding section of Judge Pérez-Giménez’s opinion reads less like a judicial opinion than it does like a press release from the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage:

Recent affirmances of same-gender marriage seem to suffer from a peculiar inability to recall the principles embodied in existing marriage law. Traditional marriage is “exclusively [an] opposite-sex institution . . . inextricably linked to procreation and biological kinship,” Windsor, 133 S. Ct. at 2718 (Alito, J., dissenting). Traditional marriage is the fundamental unit of the political order. And ultimately the very survival of the political order depends upon the procreative potential embodied in traditional marriage.
Those are the well-tested, well-proven principles on which we have relied for centuries.

Notice the citation in this passage. Judge Pérez-Giménez relies on a quote from Justice Samuel Alito’s dissenting opinion in United States v. Windsor. Dissenting opinions are, by definition, not the law because they reflect the views of the judges or justices who were unable to persuade a majority of their colleagues.

Few judges believe, however, that Baker v. Nelson has any bearing on whether federal courts may consider marriage equality cases today. Indeed, Pérez-Giménez acknowledges this fact with a lengthy citation to other court decisions holding that Baker is no longer binding on lower courts. The list of cases that disagree with him is so long that it takes up nearly an entire page of his opinion.

So, while Pérez-Giménez clearly holds very passionate views on the question of whether same-sex couples are entitled to the same rights as everyone else, his views are unlikely to persuade many of his fellow judges. It’s even possible that his opinion could ultimately wind up bolstering the case for marriage equality. That’s because his decision will appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, a court dominated by Democratic appointees (although, it is worth noting that Pérez-Giménez was appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter). All four of the states that comprise the First Circuit — Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island — are already marriage equality states, so a decision out of a federal court in Puerto Rico is the only path to bring a marriage equality case before this circuit.

Given the makeup of the First Circuit, the overwhelming consensus among federal judges in favor of marriage equality, and the belligerent tone of Pérez-Giménez’s opinion, it is unlikely that his decision will be upheld on appeal.

 It bears repeating that NONE of the Courts of Appeal that have ruled to date have found Baker v. Nelson to have any remaining precedent al relevance, particularly in light of the 2013 ruling in United States v. Windsor.

Virginia Judge Reverses Himself, Grants Transwoman Name Change

Currently, the ONLY protections LGBT Virginians have under Virginia law appear in the Virginia Canons of Judicial Conduct which among other things in Canon 3 require judges who cannot remain unbiased and objective based on a litigants sexual orientation to recuse themselves.  In plain English, this means that they must not hear the case and defer the case to a different judge.  Sadly, far too many Virginia judges ignore the Canons and the enforcement of the Canons is to say the least almost nonexistent.  In my divorce, the judge was a far right Catholic who viewed being gay as a "choice" and sought to punish me accordingly.  Now, a Lynchburg, Virginia judge (who was formerly legal counsel at the late Jerry Falwell's lunatic Liberty University and a legislative aid to one of the authors of Virginia's anti-gay marriage ban) has reversed himself and decided to grant a name change to a transwoman (pictured above) after previously denying the petition.  Whether the judge's change of course was due to negative media coverage or a realization that he might face consequences we will never know.  Gay RVA has details.  Here are highlights:

In a reversal of his original decision, Lynchburg judge F. Patrick Yeatts has granted transwoman Julianna Fialkowski a name change.

Lawyer Kate Fletcher received the information late this afternoon via fax. She suggested it was the brief she filed, combined with the press around the issue, which led the judge to rule based on the statute which is what they had asked for all along.

“Julianna has complied with the statute and wasn’t requesting the name change for fraudulent purpose, nor to infringe on anyones rights,” said Fletcher. “There for he is granting the request.”

She has a message for other who fear they might have to go through a similar experience when they seek a name change. “I don’t think holding back on account of being afraid for yourself is necessary;” Fialkowski said. “If enough support is sought after, it will be found.”

She told GayRVA earlier this week  Judge Yeatts said her the case was under “extra scrutiny” and it would be put under advisement after asking her medically specific questions pertaining to her transition, something not relevant to a name change request.

This line of questioning lead Fialkowski to believe she was being unfairly discriminated against.  Even in traditionally conservative Lynchburg, Fialkowski said she hadn’t ”faced any discrimination up until this point.”

Yeatts served as counsel to Jerry Falwell’s conservative Liberty University in the 90′s, and he was a legislative aide for state Sen. Stephen Newman when the Senator wrote VA’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, the Marshall-Newman amendment. He was elected to the Lynchburg Judgeship in 2011 by the state’s General Assembly.

Virginia’s name change laws are some of the easiest in the nation. The process consists of a few forms and a small fee. When GayRVA reached out for legal advice for those denied a name change, lawyers were surprised to hear it even happens.

“There is nothing in the statute that requires the applicant provide medical information. The application merely requires some demographic information (e.g. name, address, parent’s names, prior name changes etc.) and whether or not you are a felon or are incarcerated. The statute indicates that the name change will be granted unless the name change is being done for a fraudulent purpose or infringes upon someone else’s rights,” said Fletcher earlier this week.

But Fletcher wasn’t sure this would be the last time such a case of discrimination would pop up again in rural Virginia.  “I think it might happen again, but I think if it goes to a hearing we would be successful,” said Fletcher.

Unfortunately, under Virginia's judicial appointment system, partisanship and adherence to party platform mean more than one's likely competence  on the bench.  Given the GOP strangle hold on the House of Delegates, religious extremism definitely counts more than legal competence.  Yeatts is far from the only bigoted judge pushed through by Virginia Republicans.

Justice Antonin Scalia - It's Time to Retire

For regular readers it is no secret that I hold Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in low regard and believe that it is far past time that the old bigot retire from the Court.  Scalia makes no effort to hide or disguise his prejudices and religious based bigotry.  Moreover, he makes a mockery of the canons of judicial conduct which govern the behavior of other federal court judges. Now, in the recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld the EPA's regulatory powers, Scalia wrote a dissent that suggest that senility can also be added to the reasons he needs to retire form the Court - or be removed.  Te only oher justice to join with Scalia was that mental midget of all mental midgets, Clarence Thomas.  Talking Points Memo looks at Scalia's major fuck up.  Here are highlights:

It's not often that a Supreme Court justice makes a factual blunder in a formal opinion.

Legal experts say Justice Antonin Scalia erred in his dissent in the 6-2 decision Tuesday to uphold the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate coal pollution that moves across state lines. The Reagan-appointed jurist argued that the majority's decision was inconsistent with a unanimous 2001 ruling which he mistakenly said shot down EPA efforts to consider costs when setting regulations.

"This is not the first time EPA has sought to convert the Clean Air Act into a mandate for cost-effective regulation. Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc., 531 U. S. 457 (2001), confronted EPA's contention that it could consider costs in setting [National Ambient Air Quality Standards]," Scalia wrote in his dissent, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

The problem: the EPA's position in the 2001 case was exactly the opposite. The agency was defending its refusal to consider cost as a counter-weight to health benefits when setting certain air quality standards. It was the trucking industry that wanted the EPA to factor in cost. The 9-0 ruling sided with the EPA. The author of the ruling that Scalia mischaracterized? Scalia himself.

The conservative justice's error was noted by University of California-Berkeley law professor Dan Farber, who called it "embarrassing" and a "cringeworthy blunder." . . . . "This gaffe is doubly embarrassing because Scalia wrote the opinion in the case, so he should surely remember which side won! Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it's a cringeworthy blunder."

Doug Kendall, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal legal advocacy group, said the error was mystifying and very unusual for a Supreme Court justice.

"It is a mind-blowing misstatement of a basic fact of the American Trucking Association ruling which Justice Scalia himself wrote. And it's not just a stray passage -- it's the basis for an entire section of the dissent," Kendall said. "It is very unusual to see a passage that so clearly misstates the fundamental facts of a prior ruling, especially one written by the justice himself."

As I said, if Scalia had any honor and wanted to protect his image in history, he'd resign now.  Sadly, given his hubris and arrogance, that is not what is likely to happen.

Antonin Scalia Again Proves He's a Bigoted Ass

Once again flouting judicial propriety Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had a bur up his ass and was whining that the Supreme Court should not be deciding "moral issues" where there is no “scientifically demonstrable right answer.”   As one might expect, homosexuality and gay rights fall within this category in Scalia's bigoted mind.  Of course, he doesn't say who should make such decisions, although given his slavish obedience to the Catholic Church one must assume he'd leave it to the churches and religious charlatans at outfits like Family Research Council to rule on the rights of minorities.  He also ignores the reality that outside of organizations funded by far right religious groups, there is a scientifically right answer on gays.  Homosexuality is NORMAL, unchangeable, and many of the leading medical and mental health organizations support gay marriage rights.  With Scalia, his personal beliefs and Medieval religious views always trump all else.  He is one of the "mullahs" that he complains about but seemingly has failed to take a good look at himself in the mirror.  He really needs to be removed from the Supreme Court.  Here are highlights from the Charlotte Observer:

ASHEVILLE With a potentially ground-breaking decision on gay marriage expected next week, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Friday morning that he and other judges should stop setting moral standards concerning homosexuality and other issues.  Why?  We aren’t qualified, Scalia said.

In a speech titled “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters,” the outspoken and conservative jurist told the N.C. Bar Association that constitutional law is threatened by a growing belief in the “judge moralist.” In that role, judges are bestowed with special expertise to determine right and wrong in such matters as abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, the death penalty and same-sex marriage.

During his speech, Scalia acknowledged that his opinion is not universally shared. Many legal scholars and judges – including some of his colleagues on the Supreme Court – believe in a “living Constitution” that reflects “evolving standards of decency.” This also has given rise to what Scalia decried as a sprawling application of the provisions of human rights and equal protection under the law.

In response to a question, he said he does not ascribe to a Constitution locked away from change. The law must evolve to deal with new phenomena, he said, but it should do so while remaining firmly moored in its founding principles. And most moral issues, he added, don’t qualify as new.

One of those moral debates – gay marriage – is now before the high court. The justices are expected to rule next week on two same-sex cases. One involves the federal Defense of Marriage Act; the other, California’s Proposition 8. Both oppose gay marriage.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/06/21/4121621/nc-lawyers-listen-as-justice-scalia.html#storylink=cpy

[D]uring his half-hour speech at the Grove Park Inn on Friday, the 77-year-old frequently listed homosexuality among the issues that should be decided by the public and not unelected judges.

His comments during the March oral arguments for the same-sex marriage cases followed a similar bent. “When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage?” he asked.

His earlier statements about the legal rights of gay couples are even more outspoken. During an October speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Scalia described the death penalty, abortion and “homosexual sodomy” as “easy” constitutional issues. “Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years it was criminal in every state.”

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/06/21/4121621/nc-lawyers-listen-as-justice-scalia.html#storylink=cpy

Apparently, no one reminded Scalia that slavery was legal for thousands of years.  A long running wrong doesn't somehow become right simply through a long period of abuse of others.  Scalia is nothing short of a flaming asshole in my view.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/06/21/4121621/nc-lawyers-listen-as-justice-scalia.html#storylink=cpy

Virginia Judge Allows Anti-Gay Bully and Negligent School Aministrators Off

Yesterday Circuit Court Judge R. Bruce Long dismissed a lawsuit against administrators at Grafton High School in Yorktown who failed to intervene and stop the incessant bullying of Christian Taylor (pictured at left) who eventually committed suicide on May 31, 2010.  Despite repeated complaints to school officials, the bully in this instance was never suspended and no meaningful steps were taken to protect Taylor.  The message to would be bullies and negligent school personnel- especially in reactionary areas like York County, Virginia -  is have at it, bully all you want and look the other way because there will be no consequences.  One can only hope that Taylor's family appeals this travesty.  The reality is that Virginia's anti-bullying policies remain a joke and seem more focused on protecting school personnel and bullies than their victims.  The second reality is that the lives of LGBT individuals and those perceived to be gay have little value to many in the state's judiciary.   Here are highlights from the Virginia Gazette on this sad result:

A judge on Friday dismissed a $10 million wrongful death lawsuit against three current and former Grafton High School administrators that alleged they did not stop the bullying of a student who committed suicide in 2010.

Circuit Judge R. Bruce Long dismissed the lawsuit after a jury determined the student, Christian Taylor, did not kill himself as the result of an irresistible impulse. Under Virginia law if someone who committed suicide is found to be of sound mind at the time when he or she died — or did not die as the result of an irresistible impulse — it is considered an illegal act, which means the lawsuit could not go forward.

Taylor, who was 16 at the time of his death, was found hanging in his bedroom closet on May 31, 2010. His mother, Alise Williams, filed the lawsuit in July 2010, which alleged the school administrators should be held liable for her son's death because they did not adequately stop the bullying of her son.

The ruling comes after four days of testimony from school officials, Taylor's mother and friends, a psychologist, psychiatrist and former school superintendents from New York and Hanover County who testified as experts in school administration.

Attorney O.J. Labell on Friday told the jury the case had come down to a "battle of the experts" between the testimony of psychologist Earl Flora, a witness for Taylor, and psychiatrist Dr. Eileen Ryan, a witness for the school administrators.

On Friday, Ryan testified that she did not think Taylor was suffering from the clinical diagnosis of major depression nor did she think he was of "unsound mind" at the time of his death or that his death was the result of an irresistible impulse.

In short, to Ryan - who I am certain was paid by the school system - and the judge, Taylor was the law breaker, not his bully or the school administrators who allowed his torment to continue.  As one who had two serious suicide attempts in the past myself (each sent me to the hospital), how any supposed mental health care professional can say that one is of a "sound mind" when they take their own life is ludicrous.  One is at best temporarily not of a sound mind and also likely suffering from depression.  Moreover, many suicides appear in good moods shortly before they act because they have finally decided to act and have a sense that their pain is about to be over.  Again, I've been there.  In my opinion, I pity anyone receiving mental health care treatment  from Ms. Ryan. They should find a new health care provider immediately, in my opinion.

I have said many times before that I would not recommend that any LGBT consider moving to Virginia.   That still holds true.  I give the same advice to any progressive, modern business seeking to relocate.  If Virginia is on your list, you need to seriously reconsider.  Virginia could be a wonderful state, but that will never happen until the power of the Christofascists and the Republican Party of Virginia is broken.  Until that happens ignorance and bigotry will remain hallmarks of the state.

Trans-Man Denied Name Change By Virginia Judge

Jacob Haley

One of the niche areas of my law practice is assisting transgender clients in securing amendments to their birth certificates once they have completed the sex reassignment process.  Virginia has no set form of petition for the process although statutory authority for such amendments and the Virginia  Code section is cited in the petitions and court orders I prepare.  I almost never get involved in securing court orders for name changes since typically the process is so easy that clients usually handle that process themselves, especially since a standard application form is available on the Virginia Judiciary web page in a fill in the blank PDF format.  Unless, apparently one is in Louisia County before judge, Timothy Sanner, who seemingly makes up his own rules that differ from the requirements of the Virginia Code.  Sadly, many judges in Virginia appear to feel that they can do whatever they want when it comes to LGBT clients and from my experience, the Judicial Review Commission never disciplines judges who abuse LGBT clients.  I was interviewed by GayRVA which has an article on the situation.  Here are highlights from that article:

A trans-man from Louisa County, Virginia, has been denied a name change by a Circuit Judge who, contrary to current Virginia law, said medical documentation was required for legal name changes.

Jacob Haley went to the Louisa County Courthouse in February of this year. When he handed the clerk the forms to change his legal name from his female birth name to his male name, the clerk, according to Haley, said ”more than likely (you’re) going to need a hearing, the judge is going to want to know the reasoning.”

Haley realized this might happen and asked if he would need to bring anything with him when he returned to court. He was told to bring “anything that would help explain the name change.”

Haley currently works two jobs and receives health care form one of his employers. But his health care does not cover transgender-related services, including hormone treatment or therapy. Unable to afford treatment, Haley has been working with local groups and has been raising funds independently. But it has not been easy. “It’s a struggle,” said Haley. “I’ve been trying to get money together since 2011 when I came out.”

The judge, Hon. Timothy Sanner, told Haley that in previous name-changing cases involving transgender individuals, a note from a doctor or some medical record was brought to help prove the need for a name change. According to Haley, Judge Sanner said “The prior case had been seen by a therapist for years, had been through hormone therapy, and had a letter and things to back their story up.”

Sanner then told Haley he would need to see paperwork from a medical professional before approving the name change.  ”[The judge said] the courts would like to see something of that nature,” Haley said. ”He didn’t say anything about the law.”

Medical documentation is required for changing genders on a birth certificate, and similarly for Virginia state ID’s like driver’s licenses. Hamar said the judge could have confused the two, but denying a simple name change because there is no doctor’s note is not in line with the law. “The forms are standardized, you print them out and pay your money, and you may or may not have to appear. You usually don’t even have to show,” according to Hamar.

Other transgender people in Virginia told GayRVA that they received their legal name changes in similarly simple circumstances. In an email, Ryan O’Donnell changed his name in 2010. “I did it through the mail, so I didn’t have to go before a judge, I just had to get the form notarized and send it to the county clerk’s office. I got the form back in a couple of weeks with no hassle… I have plenty of trans friends in Virginia who changed their names with little to no hassle.”

Haley has 60 days to go back before the judge with a medical letter. He’s not sure why the judge singled him out for this case, especially after hearing about the ease so many other trans individuals had with the name change process. ”It blows my mind that people can have their name changed to whatever they want,” said Haley, “but when it comes to someone needing their name changed for their mental health, they get roadblocked.”

When one reads the instructions to the application form for seeking a name change, when it comes to supporting documentation, the instructions state "None."  The only issues covered in the application are assurance that the name change is not being done for fraudulent purposes or to hide from creditors or probation officers.  Apparently none of this means anything to Judge Sanner who makes up his own rules - especially for LGBT petitioners.   Welcome to Virginia which has a well deserved anti-gay reputation.

The Case for Impeaching Justice Antonin Scalia

This blog has noted the open animus of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia towards LGBT Americans.  Indeed, he has equated our relationships to murder and bestiality.  Yet his duties as a justice require that he be objective and base his rulings on the facts of the case before him and the legal arguments.  It's beyond obvious that there is no chance of that happening if Scalia is sitting on the Court when the Proposition 8 appeal and DOMA appeal cases come before the Court.  Scalia's conduct and statements go a long way to delegitimizing the Court and make it plain for all to see that impartial justice and equal rights under the law are impossible at least when Scalia is involved. Scalia has become a train wreck and needs to be removed from the Court.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at why Scalia needs to be impeached.  Here are highlights:

By now it is well-known that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia thinks homosexuality is immoral. In responding to a student during a talk at Princeton earlier this week, he said homosexuality is immoral in the same way that murder is immoral.

Scalia may agree that killing someone of the same (or opposite) sex is worse than loving someone of the same sex; but of course, murder is also worse than robbery and rape. What they all have in common, in the worldview of Antonin Scalia, is they are immoral.

[I]t is high time for Congress to do the right thing, protect the legacy and the future of the Supreme Court, and immediately impeach Justice Scalia.   

First, let’s stipulate that people are entitled to be crackpots. They are entitled to hold absurd viewpoints; and in the United States, thanks to the First Amendment, they are even entitled to express them.

But an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court has to play by different rules. We elect presidents and members of Congress precisely because of their political views; but we appoint judges only if we believe they will make every effort to transcend them. If they cannot or will not, it’s Congress’s job to take them out of the game. In Justice Scalia’s case, the time for that drastic action has long since arrived.

Removing a judge from the bench for expressing deeply held views will make some people on the left nervous and, as we saw when I floated a similar suggestion back in April, it will surely make many on the right apoplectic. Admittedly, it’s not something Congress has done before—but that’s only because the high court has never before harbored a member quite so imperious and intolerant as Antonin Scalia.

First, judges are supposed to be impartial. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean they are not supposed to have personal opinions; it means they are supposed to work very hard to avoid letting those opinions influence their legal judgments. For example, in the many years I have worked as a death-penalty lawyer, several Supreme Court justices, including most notably Justice Harry Blackmun, have said they personally oppose the death penalty, but that did not stop them from ruling against my clients and paving the way for their executions, because that is what they understood the law to dictate in those cases.  .  .  . In other words, most justices work their hardest to put their personal viewpoints aside. Justice Scalia doesn’t even pretend to try.

Remember, if any lower federal court judge said what Justice Scalia said this week, that judge would be barred by judicial ethics rules from participating in any case involving gay marriage.

There are nine judges in the United States who are not bound by those rules, but that does not mean it is ethical or acceptable when they violate them. It only means that when they do violate them, and then refuse to remove themselves from proceedings in which ordinary judges would be subject to mandatory removal, we must remove them some other way.

This brings us to the second thing I suspect most people agree on: there are lines, and if judges cross them, they should be removed from office. Reasonable people will disagree about precisely where those lines are located, but there is no doubt but that they exist. 

As Paul Campos wrote here earlier this week, Scalia’s problem is not that he has views: the problem is that his views are so reactionary and so far outside the mainstream of modern moral sentiment.  .  .  .  . But it is not simply that Justice Scalia clings like the Taliban to anachronistic ideals; it’s that he seems unwilling or unable to understand that he should decline to participate in cases where those very views undermine his neutrality.

Being confirmed by the Senate to sit on the Supreme Court may be a lifetime appointment, but that does not mean it isn’t subject to oversight. The Constitution permits judges to be removed when they no longer exhibit “good behavior.” The simple truth is that there is no definition of “good” that encompasses Justice Scalia’s behavior, particularly with regard to gay rights. His conduct is boorish and intemperate; his views are anachronistic and absurd; his moral authority is zilch. In short, he lacks every quality a good judge requires. 

From slavery to the mistreatment of women to the criminalization of consensual homosexual conduct to the stealth appointment of a President, our constitutional history is already sordid enough. It’s time to get rid of Antonin Scalia before it becomes dirtier still.

Oklahoma Judge Bars Transgendered From Changing Names

It's a story that sounds like something that could have happen in Virginia given the state's general contempt for LGBT citizens, but instead comes from Oklahoma, another rabid anti-LGBT state.  When a transgendered petitioner came before the Oklahoma County District Court seeking a name change, Judge Bill Graves (pictured at right) not only denied the petition - bizarrely claiming it was fraudulently motivated - but went off on a tirade citing the Bible and condemning the petitioner.  It's a shining example of what life in a red state - or a slightly purple state like Virginia - can entail when judges feel free to allow their personal religious beliefs trump the U. S. Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom for all.  Gay Star News looks at this unfortunate circumstance.  Here are highlights:

An Oklahoma judge has sparked fury after not allowing transgender people to change their names legally.

Local newspaper The Oklahoman reports Oklahoma County district judge Bill Graves, a former state legislator, cited the Bible in disallowing the name changes, claiming trans people are ‘making the changes for fraudulent purposes’.

Last year, in an order denying a name change, Graves said: ‘A so called sex- change surgery can make one appear to be the opposite sex, but in fact they are nothing more than an imitation of the opposite sex.’   ‘To grant a name change in this case would be to assist that which is fraudulent,’ Graves added.

‘It is notable Genesis 1:27-28 states: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.”  ‘The DNA code shows God meant for them to stay male and female.’

Two transgender women, who wish to be called Christie Harvey and Angela Ingram, are trying to appeal Graves’ decision.

Other judges told the newspaper they routinely allow anyone to change their name, transgender or otherwise, and Graves was acting on a discriminatory basis.

Before becoming a judge, Graves was a Republican state representative who pushed for a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.  Sitting on the bench, he objected to a proposal that would bar judges from membership in organizations which discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

Furious civil rights campaigners created a petition, saying if Graves is unwilling to follow the law, he should be resign from office.  It states: ‘Judge Graves has no right to make his ruling on constitutionally prohibited religious grounds. His actions are a violation of due process, equal protection and the First Amendment.’
If you would like to sign the petition, click here

Obviously, Graves needs to be removed from the bench if he cannot put his own bigotry and hatred behind him when hearing cases.  This is yet another example of how screwed up our judicial system is when the outcome of a case often hinges on the judge one draws.  There is ZERO assurance of equal treatment under the law.