This week, President Obama nominated five people to federal judgeships in Florida and New Jersey. Three of these nominees are already judges; two are accomplished attorneys. But what is more relevant to the right-wing Liberty Counsel is that, according to the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow, “among the nominees are four African Americans, one of them homosexual.” (That’s not actually true: one of the nominees is African American, one is Latino, and three are white).
Liberty Counsel head Mat Staver told OneNewsNow today that these judicial picks show “ideological bankruptcy” on the part of a president who is “destroying the judiciary.”
“So he gets a black man, who is a practicing homosexual, and now he wants to put this individual in an appointment for life on the federal bench,” Staver lamented, referring apparently to Darrin P. Gayes, a state circuit judge in Florida who Obama nominated to a federal district court.
At no point in the article does Staver or OneNewsNow touch on the nominee’s qualifications, other than to note vaguely that “all five nominees are considered liberals.”
Among the nominees are four African Americans, one of them homosexual, and the final one is white.
Mat Staver, who heads Liberty Counsel, tells OneNewsNow the president is reaching out to two communities.
“So he gets a black man, who is a practicing homosexual, and now he wants to put this individual in an appointment for life on the federal bench,” Staver advises.
He refers to the situation as “ideological bankruptcy.”
Why?
President Obama is “destroying the judiciary because, when he leaves office in 2016, these judges will be around for 20 to 40 years,” says the Liberty Counsel attorney. “That is going to be a bad legacy that Obama will leave behind that we’ll all have to deal with in the aftermath.”
Earlier this year, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio succeeded in torpedoing the nomination of William Thomas, a Florida state judge who was also openly gay and African-American. Rubio also blocked another African-American nominee, Brian Davis, for months before local activists pressured him to let the nomination go forward.
