Yet Another Extremist Trump Judicial Nominee

Eighty six years ago Adolph Hitler began his transformation of Germany into something horrible using three means: (i) a constant propaganda campaign of lies that played on Germans' prejudices, (ii) attacks on the free press that sought to expose him for what he was, and (iii) stacking the courts with loyal Nazi judges. Every day Germans and the world ultimately paid a terrible price for the failure of Germans to oppose Hitler when they still had the opportunity to do so.  Fast forward to 2019 America and we see the Trump/Pence regime using the Hitler playbook with too many Americans to complacent to get out and vote - studies show that it was non-voters who elected Trump - or foolishly believing that since they are not among the regime's targets, there is little risk from their doing nothing. History tells us that nothing could be further from the case.  The Trump/Pence regime is busy appointing extremist to the federal courts for lifetime appointments which will harm the rights of many Americans for generations. One of Trump's latest nominees is so extreme that even the spineless Susan Collins will oppose his nomination, even as the rest of Senate Republicans act like Germans who aided Hitler and ultimately destroyed German's democracy.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Christofascist extremist who Trump has nominated for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench.  Here are excerpts:

Sen. Susan Collins said Friday she will oppose one of President Trump’s federal judicial nominees over his record opposing LGBTQ rights.

In a statement, the Republican from Maine, who faces reelection next year, voiced concerns regarding Matthew Kacsmaryk’s “alarming bias against LGBTQ Americans and disregard for Supreme Court precedents.”

“Mr. Kacsmaryk has dismissed proponents of reproductive choice as ‘sexual revolutionaries,’ and disdainfully criticized the legal foundations of Roe v. Wade,” the landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion, Collins said. “Such extreme statements reflect poorly on Mr. Kacsmaryk’s temperament and suggest an inability to respect precedent and to apply the law fairly and impartially.”

Kacsmaryk, who serves as deputy general counsel to First Liberty Institute [a Christofascist organization] , which defends religious freedom issues, was first nominated for the lifetime appointment by Trump in 2017, and had to be renominated this year when the Senate failed to confirm him before the end of the last congressional session.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Kacsmaryk’s nomination in January on a party-line vote, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has scheduled a procedural vote on the nomination next week.

LGBT and women’s rights groups are vehemently opposed to his nomination, describing him as an “anti-LGBT activist” and pointing to instances in which he defended discrimination against LGBT people, wrote disparagingly about other gay rights such as marriage and called being transgender “a mental disorder.”

“His record reveals that he will be incapable of treating LGBT litigants fairly — no matter what body of law is at issue in the cases over which he may preside — because he does not acknowledge LGBT people as having a right to exist,” wrote a coalition of 75 organizations in a letter Wednesday to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Calif.).

In a statement, the Republican from Maine, who faces reelection next year, voiced concerns regarding Matthew Kacsmaryk’s “alarming bias against LGBTQ Americans and disregard for Supreme Court precedents.”

In a 2015 op-ed for the National Catholic Register, he wrote that sexual revolutionaries were demolishing the four pillars of marriage law: permanence, exclusivity, procreation, and finally “sexual difference and complementarity.”

The “Catechism holds that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,’ ‘contrary to the natural law,’ and ‘do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity,’ ” he wrote. “This view of human sexuality as male and female stands in stark contrast to the opposing definitions of marriage, sexuality and so-called gender identity promulgated by most LGBT scholars and activists.”

He also signed on to a letter that called being transgender a “delusion.”

To me, that is not someone that can be impartial to millions of people in this country who are LGBTQ. That type of demonstrated bias is not ‘he was representing someone’ or ‘he was taken out of context.’ This is his worldview. This is his bias. He has not shied away from it,” said Kristine Lucius, executive vice president for policy and governmental affairs at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which has organized a campaign against Kacsmaryk’s nomination.

Collins, who is a top target for Democrats in 2020, supports same-sex marriage and reproductive rights. But she was criticized by LGBT and women’s rights groups when she became one of the deciding votes that secured Kavanaugh’s place on the Supreme Court.

At the time, Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin encouraged his members to vote out lawmakers who supported Kavanaugh, whose nomination was embroiled by sexual misconduct allegations.

Throughout Trump’s tenure, Republicans have made federal court appointments a top priority. As of Friday, the Senate had confirmed 119 federal judges nominated by Trump.

A number of these nominees have been deemed "unqualified" by the American Bar Association yet Republicans in the Senate have confirmed them as a means to pander to Christofascists and white supremacists who support Trump.  Be very afraid.

Can America Ever Be Great Again After Trump?

Donald Trump campaigned under the slogan "make America great again."  The slogan was a lie because what he really meant was that he would bring back right wing white privilege and put "those people" - i.e., blacks, gays, Hispanics, non-Christians - back in their place and as in the imaginary good old days. Sadly, many Republicans who should have know better, understood Trump's real meaning and voted for him anyway, shedding any claim to moral decency in the process. Now, two years into the Trump nightmare, America finds itself the most isolated perhaps since the 1920's or perhaps even prior to WWI.  Europeans still like American tourists,. but view our leadership with justified contempt.  Meanwhile, the nation's social fabric is being torn apart and the nation's institutions are under daily attack by the demagogue in the White House and his Republican enablers and sycophants.  A column by a Washington Post columnist provides a review of Trump's damage to the nation.  It's an indictment of Trump, but also of those who continue to support him. Although not specifically mentioned, perhaps the most morally bankrupt are the evangelicals whose support of Trump has stripped them of moral authority on any topic.  Here are column excerpts:

There will be no Mount Rushmore for Donald Trump. But, if there's a presidential library, it should contain a Hall of Tweets, a Hall of Lies, a Hall of Insults and, with the "Marines' Hymn" softly playing, a Hall of Montezuma, with a section of his border wall. Finally, there should be a Hall of Consequences, the grandest in the place. No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has mattered as much.

Trump has remade the Republican Party. It is no longer the party of Lincoln or Reagan, but increasingly a snarling, sneering collection of score-settlers, white nationalists, immigrant bashers, homophobes, science-deniers and religious reactionaries who praise a president who has lived a squalid personal life but who promised them a Supreme Court in their own image. Trump's GOP may not endure, but for the foreseeable future it reigns supreme.

Trump's dominance of his party is personified by Mitch McConnell. . . . . Trump has personally berated McConnell, but -- unburdened by either pride or principle -- McConnell does what the president wants. He faces re-election next year in a state, Kentucky, whose heart throbs for Trump. Understandably, McConnell fears vilification as a moderate.

In foreign affairs, the Trump presidency has had a huge impact. By fiat, by insult and by a dazzling display of historical ignorance, Trump has diminished the Atlantic alliance which every president since Roosevelt has supported and nourished. The lessons of World War II and of the implosion of the Soviet communist empire -- signal achievements of American involvement and leadership in the affairs of Europe -- are being discarded. . . . . . America may not yet be isolationist, but it is isolated.

Under Trump, the judiciary is being transformed. His judges not only are bitterly conservative but have been deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association at an unprecedented rate. He has vitiated Cabinet and other offices dealing with the environment and natural resources, turning over the grandeur of America to despoilers. Only his appointees' ineptness or sense of grandiosity -- EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's $25,000 phone booth, for instance -- has slowed the onslaught. Pruitt did manage to get Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement before he resigned.

But maybe the most damaging is how he has soiled the presidency itself. His incessant lying -- The Washington Post counted 8,459 false or misleading statements as of Feb 3 -- has turned the presidency into a gong show. He sits at the desk of presidents who took the truth seriously, who may have lied on occasion but never routinely. Trump, though, spouts lies like a drunken parrot, with, approximately, similar plumage. He has diminished the importance of truth, making it indistinguishable from lies -- just more noise.

Trump's attacks on the press are vividly demagogic. He has weakened its ability to be believed, to uncover scandal, to hold accountable the otherwise unaccountable. He applies the prefix "fake" to any news he does not like.

He has weakened the FBI, denigrated the CIA, praised Russia's Vladimir Putin and shrugged at the murder of a Post columnist by the Saudis. He is a president out of Orwell, a creature out of Kafka, a nightmare out of the Electoral College.

Will America recover from the Trump era? Not soon, maybe never. The wounds to the environment may never heal. Inept judges serve for life. Our erstwhile European allies will move on, finding their own way, which, we must pray, will not be the old way. The planet will cook and despots will thrive. Bad days are coming.

But maybe the most terrible consequence of all is the growing realization that Trump mined a vein of meanness in the American electorate. We are not the country we once were. . . . . He has not made America greater. Instead, he may have put greatness out of reach.

The Fruits of Trump’s Racist Policies

The Trump/Pence regime has been a nightmare for all minorities as it has openly embraced religious extremist, white nationalists and some of the ugliest white supremacists.  But Blacks - followed by Hispanics - have suffered the most as FBI and other statistics have demonstrated.  Hate crimes have soared with the targets being most often targeted due to their race.  Meanwhile, anti-Semitic hate crimes has soared by 60%.  At the same time the Trump/Pence regime has waged a war against the LGBT community and argued that firing LGBT employees is perfectly legal.  In short, hate, division and violence are the fruits of Trump's - and Pence's - racist policies.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality as well as the threat Trump's judicial nominees pose to civil rights.  Thankfully, one racist nominee, Thomas Farr, was rejected by the U.S. Senate thanks to the vote of the lone black Republican senator.  Here are column highlights:

Back in September 2016, eight weeks before Election Day, I wrote these words about Donald Trump:

“Repulsive though he is, nominee Trump’s character defects aren’t what make him a threat. What does sicken and alarm, and what ought to concentrate African American minds, is the thought of Trump with the powers of the presidency in his hands. Therein lies the danger.”

I admit that, at the time, I did not fully appreciate just how damaging and degrading a Trump presidency could become. Trump’s two years of shameless and cynical exploitation of fears and anxieties within the ranks of his white base of support, and his unprincipled governance, have left this country more fractured along racial lines than at any time since the civil rights revolution.

Shootings, bombings and other acts of violence motivated by right-wing political ideologies are nothing new, according to a Post analysis of global terrorism data. But it found that “violence by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency — and has surged since President Trump took office.”

The FBI’s report released this month revealed that hate crimes had jumped an astonishing 17 percent from 2016 to 2017. And the targets? Sixty percent of the victims were selected because of their race, ethnicity or ancestry. More than 20 percent were targeted because of their religion.

The ADL reported an increase of nearly 60 percent in anti-Semitic incidents between 2016 and 2017. . . . . the Trump effect has taken on a life of its own, spreading a meanness and animosity once confined to the environs of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils that peppered the South.

The hard evidence of Trump’s hostility toward people of color abounds — his actions against south-of-the-border immigrants, his hostile treatment of black women and disparagement of black and brown men, references to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”

And it’s being demonstrated through his federal judicial appointments. Trump’s racial animosity can’t get anymore obvious than his choice of Thomas Farr to be a district court judge in North Carolina.

Farr is well known for his work as a lawyer defending a 2013 North Carolina voter ID law ruled discriminatory against African Americans. The federal appeals court that struck down the law called it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow,” saying it targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision” because the forms of voter identification North Carolina deemed acceptable were ones disproportionately used by white people.

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) and two other members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote in a letter last year to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing Farr’s nomination that “it is no exaggeration to say that had the White House deliberately sought to identify an attorney in North Carolina with a more hostile record on African-American voting rights and workers’ rights than Thomas Farr, it could hardly have done so.”

There it is. Trump knew what he was doing, and what the nation would be getting, when he chose to put Thomas Farr on the federal bench — a voter suppression advocate after Trump’s own heart.

Trump’s selection of Farr was so odious that South Carolina’s Tim Scott, a lone black Republican senator with unquestioned loyalty to conservative dogma, finally had to break ranks and declare his opposition to Farr’s nomination. Scott’s courageous decision will almost certainly doom Farr’s chance for a federal judgeship.

But it’s not likely to quench Trump’s thirst for actions that fall within the purview of his discriminatory values. Watch out: He has yet to name a permanent replacement for fired attorney general Jeff Sessions.

That is the danger of Donald Trump with presidential power in his hands. A lesson now being learned the hard way.

Be very afraid. And do not fool yourself that Mike Pence would be any better should Trump be forced from office.  

Trump's Judicial Appointments Are Frightening

Lost to many in the daily media circus over Roy Moore, natural disasters and the lead up to the holidays is the frightening appointments that Donald Trump is making to the federal judiciary.  These are lifetime appointments and Trump is appointing many who are unfit, totally lacking in experience, and/or are alt-right ideologues.  Sadly, Republicans in the Senate seem only too happy to confirm those who only a few years ago would never have received a nomination to such important provisions.  The danger this phenomenon posed makes it all the more urgent that Democrats retake the U.S. Senate in 2018, to prevent a further perversion of the federal judiciary.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the danger Trump and a feckless Republican Party pose to the rule of law.  Here are excerpts:

Leo, after all, had a central role in advising first the Trump campaign and the Trump administration on judicial prospects, in conjunction with the Heritage Foundation. It’s a job he had spent many years preparing to perform as he helped build the Federalist Society from a group for conservative law students into a highly influential network of right-wing judges and law professors, bankrolled by the Koch Brothers and other wealthy interests concerned with reining in Big Government and inhibiting progressive cultural developments.

The guest speaker at this year’s Federalist Society bash was the American Beauty Rose of Leo’s careful judicial gardening effort: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Safely planted on the High Court, Gorsuch was able to dispense with the cautious non-partisan pieties of his confirmation hearings and acknowledge his deep kinship with Leo and the “originalist and textualist” thinkers who were busily working to reverse old liberal precedents and prevent others.

Even before Trump’s election enabled a new wave of carefully vetted conservative judges, the Republican Senate had ensured it would be enormous by systematically obstructing Barack Obama’s judicial appointments, particularly during the last year of his presidency (thwarted SCOTUS nominee Merrick Garland was just one casualty). When Gorsuch was appointed, that same GOP majority made his confirmation easy by abolishing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations. Subsequently Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sped up confirmation of Trump’s and Leo’s Court of Appeals and district court appointments by reversing his past position and junking the “blue slip” precedent letting individual senators hold up or veto judges from their states.

Yes, it’s a sweet moment for the Federalist Society and its beneficiaries, from social conservatives wanting to re-criminalize abortion to libertarians who view federal regulation of businesses as largely illegitimate. But there is a threat on the horizon that could grow much larger on December 12: the specter of a Democratic Senate.

With a Democratic wave election next year appearing more likely every day, and the GOP’s Roy Moore disaster in Alabama making Democrat Doug Jones the front-runner for Jeff Sessions’ Senate seat, there is now for the first time a plausible path to a Democratic majority next year. If Democrats win Alabama and the five 2018 Senate races that the Cook Political Report rates as toss-ups–not at all an unlikely scenario in a “wave” election–and don’t lose any of the races in which they are now favored, then they’ll enter the 116th Congress with 51 senators.

What would that mean for Trump’s judicial appointments and the Federalist Society’s agenda? There’s no way to know for sure, but with all 48 Democrats voting against the abolition of SCOTUS filibusters earlier this year, Democrats could bring back that great obstacle to a fifth Justice ready to overturn Roe v. Wade–the great prize conservative evangelical leaders hoped for in backing the heathenish Trump for president–right away.

Even if Republicans do hang on to the Senate in 2018, the road ahead would become very quickly rocky for conservatives. The Senate landscape in 2020 is unfavorable: Republicans will be defending 22 of the 33 seats up that year. And in a presidential election year, particularly if Donald Trump is running for reelection, Democratic turnout should be maximized.

Neil Gorsuch will likely be on the Supreme Court for many years, and every week brings new arch-conservative lifetime appointees to the bench at lower levels. But the Right’s conquest of the judiciary could come to a halt as early as a year from now, with Leonard Leo returning to his old digs as a power broker in exile.

Having been an attorney for over 40 years, I understand how serious the situation is.  Many do not grasp how these right wing extremist appointments could effect their legal rights in ways ranging from the trashing of safety regulations, to restricting the rights of minorities, to literally aiding in the disenfranchisement of those who vote against Republicans.  It is crucial that Democrats retake the Senate and stop this destruction of a competent and impartial judiciary.

Trump Judicial Nominee Calls Transgender Individuals "Satan's Plan"

Trump's anti-gay extremist judicial nominee

The canons of judicial conduct which apply to federal court judges require that judges avoid the appearance of impropriety and that they recuse themselves from any case where their personal beliefs prevent them from being unbiased.  This is the case also under most state canons of judicial conduct. Even Virginia's canons of judicial conduct (not that they are always properly enforced) provide that a judge cannot allow his views on homosexuality and gender identity to influence his ability to render an unbiased ruling in a case or to allow opposing counsel the be disrespectful or biased against an LGBT party to a case before the court.  Despite these established rules and norms, two of Donald Trump's recent judicial nominees would seemingly willing flout these restrictions on judicial conduct. Perhaps the worst is Jeff Mateer, Donald Trump’s nominee for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, who has voiced extremely anti-LGBT animus.  Metro Weekly looks at this frightening nominee who is yet another cog in Trump's promises to Christofascists to roll back LGBT rights and to make our lives a living hell.  Here are excerpts:

Jeff Mateer, Donald Trump’s nominee for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, once described transgender children as part of “Satan’s plan.”

In a pair of 2015 speeches, Mateer, the first assistant attorney general of Texas, bemoaned the trend of states banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors, denounced transgender rights, and alleged that allowing same-sex marriage would lead to efforts to legitimize polygamy and bestiality, reports CNN.

In a May 2015 speech titled “The Church and Homosexuality,” Mateer discussed a lawsuit in Colorado where parents of a transgender first-grader sued her school to allow their daughter to use the girls’ bathroom.

“Now I submit to you, a parent of three children who are now young adults, a first grader really knows what their sexual identity?” Mateer said. “I mean it just really shows you how Satan’s plan is working and the destruction that’s going on.”

Mateer previously served as general counsel of the First Liberty Institute, a conservative advocacy group that has been involved in pushing anti-LGBTQ initiatives or opposing expansions of LGBTQ rights, such as passage of a nondiscrimination ordinance in Plano, Texas.

In November 2015, Mateer was speaking at a conference hosted by controversial anti-LGBTQ pastor Kevin Swanson [who has advocated for the execution of gays], during which he took issue with attempts to ban conversion therapy in New Jersey and California.

Unsurprisingly, Mateer, who must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, is facing criticism for his anti-gay statements.

“President Trump has once again demonstrated his complete disregard for the LGBT community by nominating a person to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas who opposes LGBT rights and dignity,” David Dinielli, deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in a statement. “The nominee’s past statements prove that he cannot and will not rule fairly on issues affecting the LGBT community.

“Jeff Mateer has demonized the most vulnerable members of our community and expressed support for conversion therapy — the dangerous, fraudulent, discredited and inhumane practice that purports to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.There is no place on our federal bench for people who harbor this sort of extreme and dangerous bias.”

“It’s concerning that the Trump Administration is trying to infuse its anti-transgender ideology into our judicial system,” Jennifer Levi, transgender rights project director at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, said in a statement. “Our courts must serve as a backstop to President Trump’s divisive and exclusionary policies, not promote discrimination. Courts must treat all Americans fairly and promote equal rights.”

Another of Trump's disturbing judicial nominees is AmyConey Barrett, a right wing Catholic law professor who once suggested that one’s religious beliefs ought to take precedence over the U.S. Constitution. As Huffington Post noted, the Alliance for Justice (a progressive judicial advocacy group) called on the Trump regime to withdraw Barrett’s nomination because of her past writings on the role of faith in the courtroom. The organization also objected to her views on the matter of stare decisis, or the doctrine of legal precedent.  Stated another way, Barrett would seemingly ignore standing case law precidents that do no conform to her religious views. 

The Republican Party Announces It Is Now Officially The Party Of God

The insanity and batshit craziness of the Republican Party is now complete - as is the apparent Christofascist take over of a political party that once values, knowledge, logic and reason.  That's all out the window now as the GOP officially proclaims that it is the party of God and rips asunder the last pretenses that the party respects the concept of separation of church and state.  And that's not even considering the wrong headed ruling of the five conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court who more or less flipped their middle finger at non-Christians  who will now be forced to sit through proselytizing " Christofascist invocations" at the beginning of city and county council meetings and other governmental meetings.   The New Civil Rights Movement looks at the GOP's admission that it no longer supports the U,.S. Constitution.  Here are excerpts:

Over the weekend, the Republican Party (RNC) announced it is officially the party of God. In an embarrassing tweet that links to an even more embarrassing petition, the RNC announced “Religious freedom is our God-given right.”

“TELL OBAMA TO DEFEND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM,” it commands. “Make sure America is defending this God-given right.”

The “religious freedom” President Obama is supposedly not defending is not his to defend. The petition chastises the President for “not taking freedom of religion seriously” because “for the second time in his term,” President Obama has left vacant a ceremonial post, the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

[T]he Republican party is now attacking President Obama for not quickly filling a largely ceremonial post that has nothing to do with anything a President should be policing — religious freedom abroad — while not accepting the fact that their policies have made going to college so expensive and unwieldy that a U.S. Ambassador had to resign to put her sons through college.

But by comparison, let’s talk about all the judicial nominations and other federal positions nominated by the President that the Republican Party has blocked. Surely we can all agree that filling the federal bench at home, filling important positions in the Judicial and Executive Branch is far more important than filling one religious position (in an office that truly has no business even existing within the federal government) abroad?

The Republican Party has made it clear it has zero intention of actually governing, zero intention of performing the duties it is paid to by the American people, and zero desire to do anything but lie and harm President Obama’s agenda.

This, my fellow Americans, is the official party of God.

The GOP has become precisely what the Founding Fathers feared:  religious belief and practice being imposed as a criteria for one's ability to hold public office and the effort to impose support of one religious dogma on all citizens.  Increasingly, one can argue that the GOP favors treason and the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution.

Is Scalia in Denial About His Own Homophobia?

As even casual readers have likely figure out, I do not like Justice Antonin Scalia and believe it is time for him to either retire or be removed from the United States Supreme Court.  The man doesn't even attempt to appear impartial before hearing cases and he makes a mockery of the federal judiciary supposedly staying out of partisan activities.  And on issues of gay rights, one has lost the case before the first pleading is filed.  A piece in Slate looks at Scalia's inability to recognize his own anti-gay bigotry,  Here are highlights:

New York magazine’s expansive new interview with Supreme Court Justice (and lecture-circuit troll) Antonin Scalia contains a number of delightful revelations—he thinks the soup Nazi is hilarious! he doesn’t want ladies to use the F-word!—but the real fun lies in his tortured justification for his gay rights jurisprudence. When Jennifer Senior asks the justice about his attitudes toward homosexuality, Scalia spins out this specious yarn:

I’m not a hater of homosexuals at all. ... I still think it’s Catholic teaching that it’s wrong. Okay? But I don’t hate the people that engage in it. In my legal opinions, all I’ve said is that I don’t think the Constitution requires the people to adopt one view or the other. ... [I’m] not saying I personally think it’s destructive. Americans have a right to feel that way. They have a democratic right to do that, and if it is to change, it should change democratically, and not at the ukase of a Supreme Court.

This, to quote Scalia himself, is argle-bargle. The justice wants us to believe that his personal views on homosexuality have absolutely no bearing on his jurisprudence and that his legal opinions on gay rights are simply cerebral exercises in judicial reasoning. 

Scalia’s writings on gay rights explode any notion of judicial remove, rocketing beyond casual homophobia into the repugnant realm of virulently anti-gay invective. Scalia has compared homosexuality to murder, polygamy, and animal abuse. He’s analogized gay people to drug addicts and prostitutes and likened gay sex to incest, adultery, and bestiality. He’s echoed his son in questioning whether gay people even exist, suggesting that homosexuality is actually aberrant, depraved conduct rather than a true identity. And he’s derided the “homosexual agenda” for “eliminating the moral opprobrium” against “a lifestyle [many Americans] believe to be immoral and destructive.”

 Scalia wants to spout this censure while also insisting—as he does in the opinion quoted above—that “I have nothing against homosexuals.”

[L]et’s be clear here: Whatever he says in this interview, Antonin Scalia really, really hates gay people. He thinks they’re wicked and twisted and deviant; he suspects they’re insidiously indoctrinating America with perverted values; he thinks homophobes are merely “protecting themselves and their families” from homosexuality’s corrupting immorality.

None of this, moreover, is conjecture: It is all taken straight from the justice’s own writings and copious public comments. These comments aren’t one-off gaffes; they’re an endless barrage, which, taken together, form a consistent philosophy of unrelenting homophobia. If Scalia feels constantly compelled to air his grievances about gay rights, so be it. But it’s intellectually dishonest for him to simultaneously maintain that these beliefs have no bearing on his jurisprudence.

There's more, but you get the idea!

Reports Mount About Judge Bill Pryor's '90s Ties To Gay Porn

Over the weekend I noted that a gay porn scandal seems to be building in Alabama focused on federal judge, Bill Pryor, a George W. Bush recess appointment to the federal bench.  Pryor is extremely homophobic now and ultra-far right in general, but to date has tried to blow off the growing controversy by stating "I have been smeared by a widely discredited blogger with a political agenda. His allegations have now been picked up by other bloggers. . . . "   The blog Legal Schnauzer looks at the growing scandal.  Here are excerpts:

The number of news accounts is steadily growing about photographs of U.S. Circuit Judge Bill Pryor that appeared at a gay porn Web site called badpuppy.com in the 1990s. Perhaps the story has not "gone viral" yet, but given Pryor's staunchly anti-gay views and the flagrant hypocrisy the photos represent, members of the gay press are starting to latch onto the tale with glee. (See here, here, and here.) The style site NewNowNext.com picked up on the story yesterday.

Based on inquiries I'm receiving from major news outlets, the story might go viral on the Web at any moment. Pryor once was considered a conservative boy wonder, whose boyish looks and right-wing credentials made him a possibility for future appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Pryor might be watching that dream, and maybe quite a few others, slowly swirl down the drain.

As noted by Legal Schnauser, even the legal website Findlaw has now picked up the story:

Judge Wade McCree left the bench after an inappropriate photo leaked (though he was also embroiled in a sex scandal). Does a similar fate await Judge William Holcombe Pryor of the 11th Circuit?

The Internet and especially legal blogosphere exploded earlier this week when nude photos of a man bearing a striking resemblance to Judge Pryor appeared on Legal Schnauzer (link NSFW), a blog dedicated to fighting legal "injustice," and filled with criticism of allegedly-corrupt judges. The blog is authored by Roger Shuler, who holds a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, worked for 11 years at a daily newspaper, and then spent 19 years as a university editor. 

Past Resurfaces
The photos came from badpuppy.com, reportedly one of the largest gay porn sites on the Internet, and were allegedly taken when Pryor was a student at Northeast Louisiana University (now University of Louisiana Monroe) in the early 1980s. The photos, which originally appeared in a print magazine, resurfaced briefly on BadPuppy in 1997 before being taken down. Printouts survived, however.
 
Judge Pryor was confirmed to the bench in 2005. His candidacy was extremely controversial due to his antigay stance, reports the Advocate.

Credible source or not, the photos do resemble the 11th Circuit jurist. Above the Law has a censored version of the photo (SFW), and here is a photo of the judge (SFW). Legal Schnauzer has the printout from BadPuppy, which has "Bill Pryor and Tom Wander" displayed next to the photo (SFW). 

 If the photos are in fact of Pryor, I hope the jerk gets his due.

Does This Homophobic Federal Judge Have a Gay Porn Past?

Once again we are seeing the possible unmasking of a virulently homophobic Republican.  This time, however, it's not a GOP elected official but instead a federal judge in Alabama.  William Pryor does seem to fit the usual mold: married, "devout Catholic," ultra-far right, and anti-gay, anti-woman and anti-minority.  Indeed, he seems cut from the same cloth as Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli.  A piece on Pryor during the time period a decade ago when he was being considered for the federal bench described him this way:

He holds the ignominious honor of being the only attorney general to file a brief attacking the Violence Against Women Act. Ever the defender of prudish virtue, Pryor threw himself into a defense of Alabama’s Dildo Law, which forbade the sale of vibrators. Dredging deep into the recesses of Federalist Society legal theory, Pryor argued that there is no right to privacy in Alabama and that the state had the authority to outlaw any kind of pleasure devices it wanted, even when accompanied by a doctor’s prescription. Naturally, Pryor is unwilling to apply the same legal mumbo jumbo to assault weapons.

His homophobic sentiments rival those of Senator Rick Santorum, the famously anti-gay Republican from Pennsylvania. In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in the Texas same-sex sodomy case, Pryor urged the court to uphold the ban. "A constitutional right that protects ‘the choice of one’s partner’ and ‘whether and how to connect sexually’ must logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia." Santorum and Pryor must have attended the same Christian Coalition prayer breakfast.

Hence, that Pryor may have a gay porn past is just way too delicious (Ken Cuccinelli must be freaking out given the gay rumors I've heard about him).   Stories are exploding on the Internet, but here are highlights from Instinct Magazine that correctly notes that Mr. Pryor could be in big trouble if he lied to the FBI while being vetted for the federal bench.  (Two of my former law partners are federal judges and the FBI does extensive research on nominees' background under oath).  The Bilerico Project also has fun coverage.  Here are highlights:

The Alabama Bureau of Investigations (ABI) is looking into images that appeared on then-popular gay porn site Badpuppy.com in the '90s. Reportedly working on a few tips, the ABI is concerned that the full-frontal images feature federal circuit Judge Bill Pryor. If the ABI confirms that the images are in fact those of the conservative Bush-appointee, there is a chance Pryor could be indicted for falsifying his background during his Congressional confirmation hearings. 

According to LegalSchnauzer, Congress commonly asks federal judicial appointees about "potentially embarrassing or compromising information in their backgrounds." Sources indicate that Pryor was aware the pics were public on the gay site (which was dubbed the "Wal Mart of gay porn") in 1997, a few years ahead of his appointment. 

Pryor reportedly posed for the shots while he was a student at Northeast Louisiana University from 1980 - 1984, and sources indicate that the porn appeared in print during that time before finding new life on the Internet in the '90s. 

But that's not the juicy part. 

Judge Pryor is a notoriously staunch right wing conservative. Though he was cool with gay guys ogling his fully erect, full frontal naked self, he's not cool with gays and lesbians walking the streets as free people. According to People for the American Way, Judge Pryor "would deny gay men and lesbians the equal protection of the laws. He believes that it is constitutional to imprison gay men and lesbians for expressing their sexuality in the privacy of their own homes and has voluntarily filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court urging the Court to uphold a Texas law that criminalizes such private consensual activity."

Of course, Pryor insists the pictures are not him, though apparently, a republican colleague in Alabama was quick to confirm that they are. "Holy cow, that's Bill Pryor!" he said.

Pryor denies he did porn in college and the investigation is ongoing, so take it all with a grain of salt. But do you think these pics are of Judge Pryor?

 

For the NSFW version, click here.