WASHINGTON, D.C.—Just one month after a judge on the federal Ninth Circuit appellate court was forced to resign over sexual harassment allegations including accusations that he forced co-workers to view porn on his office computer, a right-wing activist used the case to argue that gay judges should not be allowed to serve on the bench because they would be biased against “Christians,” according to the site Right Wing Watch.
Last month, longtime federal appeals judge Alex Kozinski stepped down from his seat on the Ninth Circuit after a number of sexual misconduct allegations, including that he kept porn on his work computer and made female law clerks view it with him.
In an interview last week, Mat Staver, an attorney who chairs the far-right Liberty Counsel, said that Kozinski would have been unable to render objective rulings in cases involving pornography or sexual assault.
“Imagine a case coming before [Kozinski], and he’s so wrapped up into this pornography, and [the case is] about pornography or it’s about sexual molestation of someone. Do you think you’re going to get a fair shake out of that guy? I don’t think so,” Staver said.
(In real life, in 2008, Kozinski recused himself from the obscenity trial of Ira Isaacs after it was revealed that the judge kept a secret soft porn website.)
The Liberty Counsel chief went on to reason that gay people who serve as judges would not be able to rule fairly on cases involving “religious freedom.”
Staver and other religious conservatives define “religious freedom” in part as the right to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals, as in a recent pair of “bakery” cases in which bake shop owners refused to prepare wedding cakes for gay couples citing their religious objections to same sex marriage.
“The question is: are you going to get a fair shake out of this individual who identifies as someone based upon his sexual practices, who is identified and identifies himself based upon certain behavior?” Staver stated. “Are you gonna get a fair shake? I don’t think so. So that is a real problem in this nomination of this appointment of this individual.”
Staver made his comments in an interview on the conservative evangelical Voice of Christian Youth America radio network. His full comments can be heard in the sound file available at this link.
His remarks came in response to a question about Connecticut state judicial nominee Andrew McDonald, who if confirmed would become the first openly gay Chief Justice of that state's (or any state’s) Supreme Court. The United States Supreme Court has never had an openly gay justice in any capacity.
In fact, Staver’s position is similar to the discredited view held by Donald Trump that a judge of Mexican descent could not rule fairly on a lawsuit involving Trump’s “Trump University” operation, because Trump had announced that he wanted to build a wall on the Mexican border.
Support for Trump by right-wing evangelical Christians, despite the many allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump, has remained confounding for political experts. In the 2016 election, despite multiple sexual assault accusations against him and his seeming confession to a delight in assaulting women on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, 85 percent of self-identified Christian evangelicals voted for Trump—and most continue to back him.
Their support has continued even in the wake of the Stormy Daniels scandal, in which Trump through his lawyer reportedly paid $130,000 in hush money to the AVN Hall of Famer to buy her silence about a prolonged affair they had in 2006.
As AVN.com reported, Daniels, in a earlier interview several years before the 2016 hush money payoff, Daniels described what it was like to have sex with Trump in an extensive interview with the tabloid InTouch Weekly.
But many of the same conservative Christian leaders who once condemned President Bill Clinton over his sexual dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s have remained silent about the multiple sexual allegations against Trump.
In fact, Focus on the Family leader James Dobson, who called the Clinton-Lewinsky affair “a profound moral crisis,” has instructed Christians not only to pray but to engage in acts of self-abnegation such as fasting in support of Trump.
Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, whose mother Lucianne Goldberg played a key role in exposing Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky, proposed a theory to explain the double standard in her column for National Review Online Thursday. Simply put, Trump and his base are too hypersensitive to criticism to handle any objections to his behavior. In other words, they won’t criticize Trump because they fear he’ll dump them.
“The president is incredibly thin-skinned and demands not only loyalty but flattery,” Goldberg wrote. “Any criticism is seen as a betrayal. Second, the Trump base largely sees it the same way. It’s a right-wing version of virtue signaling, or really, MAGA-signaling. If you’re on board with Trump, you need to be all in.”
