Last week, I noted that many on the Religious Right are working to figure out how to deal with the possibility that President Obama’s nominee to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court could be gay.
For the most part, their response has been to claim that they would not oppose someone because he or she was gay, but that there would be serious concerns that their sexuality would make them incapable of being objective.
While many have been careful to avoid explicitly declaring that being gay makes it impossible for someone to be good Supreme Court justice, Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance is not among them, as evidenced by his column entitled “Virtually impossible for open lesbian to make a good Supreme Court justice”:
An open lesbian has obviously resolved the ethical questions about sexuality in favor of the legitimacy of aberrant sexual behavior, in favor of what historically has been known in U.S. law as an “infamous crime against nature.”
It’s one thing for a judge to keep his orientation a private matter. There is some evidence that perhaps two Supreme Court justices of the past were homosexuals themselves. But they concealed that from the public, accepted that the laws of the day considered homosexual sexual activity a felony offense, and did not use their platform on the bench to challenge society’s sexual standards.
But a judge who is quite open about his (generic use) alternative sexuality is another matter entirely. It’s hard to imagine any universe in which an open lesbian would uphold any pro-family law should it be challenged in her court.
It will be absolutely incumbent upon the GOP members of the Senate judiciary committee to ask probing questions of a lesbian nominee on a host of issues that are matters of legal and constitutional dispute.
Fisher lays out a series of questions any gay or lesbian nominee must answer because, as he says, “if the public ever had a right to know about anything, it most certainly has a right to know how a lesbian judge’s view of sexual morality will affect her jurisprudence” and declares that a gay nominee must be kept off the bench because the other justices “would certainly feel a strong pull to rule with a lesbian colleague on matters of sexuality just to avoid the awkwardness that otherwise would result.”
That’s right – Justices Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia will all suddenly start issuing gay-friendly rulings simply to avoid any “awkwardness” in the chambers.
Finally, Fisher tells his allies on the Right to start making this an issue because “the quickest way to shred what remains of America’s moral foundation may be to appoint an open lesbian to the Supreme Court [and] if the pro-family community does not want to get rolled on this issue, it had better speak up and speak up now.”
