Trump’s Supreme Court nominee: States should be able to jail people for ‘homosexual sodomy’
Donald Trump wants to nominate a judge for the Supreme Court who argued that states should be free to make “homosexual sodomy” an imprison-able offence.
The billionaire reality TV star-turned-Republican Presidential candidate this week suggested he would nominate Texas justice William H. Pryor Jr for the vacant spot on the US Supreme Court.
Pryor has previously attracted attention for being one of the most virulently anti-LGBT justices in America – having argued in a 2003 brief that Texas should be allowed to keep its sodomy law.
Liberal group People for the American Way notes that he argued in the 2003 brief: “[There is] no fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy just because it is done behind closed doors.
“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.”
He added: “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.”
In their report, PFAW notes: “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.
“Despite Supreme Court rulings to the contrary, Pryor has expressed the view that the Constitution should not apply to certain critical issues pertaining to the rights and freedoms of individual Americans, such as reproductive choice, the civil rights of gay men and lesbians, and religious liberty issues.
“Instead, Pryor has urged that these rights be determined by majority vote within each state, with the result that these rights could be diluted or eliminated in particular states.
“The effective and devastating result of this ideology would be that the fundamental guarantees of the Constitution would not apply equally across the country.
“Pryor’s ‘majoritarian’ views would create an America in which a person’s individual rights under the Constitution as the Supreme Court has articulated them would be fewer or greater depending on where that person lives.”
