Trump SCOTUS Nominee Was Named ‘Most Demonstrably Anti-Gay Judicial Nominee in Recent Memory’

Donald Trump’s List of Potential SCOTUS Nominees Includes Anti-Gay, Anti-Women Extremists

Among the list of eleven potential Supreme Court nominees Donald Trump has just released is a federal circuit court judge who was named “the most demonstrably anti-gay judicial nominee in recent memory” by Lambda Legal when opposing his nomination by then-President George W. Bush.

William Pryor, who now sits on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, has “made comparisons between the rights of gay people and ‘prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia,'” according to the well-respected LGBT civil rights legal organization. Raw Story was the first to note the group’s remarks today.

Upon his confirmation in 2005, Lambda Legal Executive Director Kevin Cathcart in a statement said Pryor “has a record of blatant hostility to fairness for gay people.”  

Cathcart has also called Pryor an “extremist,” saying he “has compared our love to bestiality, incest and pedophilia. He says prohibiting antigay discrimination is giving us ‘special privileges.’ And he thinks one of our recent Supreme Court victories against antigay bigotry amounts to ‘new rules of political correctness.’”

Pointing to a 2003 amicus brief Pryor signed on to, Raw Story’s Bethania Palma Markus reports Pryor argued “to uphold a Texas law criminalizing consensual LGBT sex,” “argued that states should be free to prosecute gay people as criminals. He said the rights of LGBT people as a group are not protected by the Constitution,” and “said homosexuality was harmful and that Texans needed protection from it.”  

In that brief Pryor compared sex between two people of the same gender to “polygamy, incest, pedophilia, prostitution, and adultery.” 

He also wrote that the Supreme Court “has never recognized a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy.”

“Such a right would be antithetical to the ‘traditional relation of the family’ that is ‘as old and as fundamental as our entire civilization,’” Pryor claimed.

“Texas is hardly alone in concluding that homosexual sodomy may have severe physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences, which do not necessarily attend heterosexual sodomy, and from which Texas’s citizens need to be protected,” Pryor’s brief states.

Raw Story adds Pryor “argued there was ‘no fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy just because it is done behind closed doors… Because homosexual sodomy has not historically been recognized in this country as a right — to the contrary, it has historically been recognized as a wrong — it is not a fundamental right.'”

Quoting both a Washington Post editorial that called Pryor a “right-wing zealot” who “is unfit to judge,” and an Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial that also marked Pryor as “unfit to judge,” People for the American Way in 2003 wrote:

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. Pryor is also a staunch opponent of a woman’s right to choose. He has called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and has supported efforts to erect unconstitutional barriers to the exercise of reproductive freedom.

Much has changed in the past decade or so, but entrenched homophobia rewarded with a lifetime judicial appointment never will.

 

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