Trump’s potential Supreme Court nominee wants gays jailed for having sex
After Trump said this week that he wouldn’t appoint a Supreme Court justice to attempt to roll back same-sex marriage, but one of his prospective picks has actually made some pretty disturbing comments.
Despite President-elect Trump saying that same-sex marriage is “settled”, he also said he wanted to appoint justices who would challenge the 1973 abortion rights ruling Roe v Wade.
One of those conservative judges is William H Pryor Jr, who has in the past suggested that same-sex couples should be punished with jail for having sex in their own homes. Mr Pryor has also been forced to deny that he posed nude for gay porn while a student.
The former Alabama Attorney General defended a law in 2003 in Texas which criminalises consensual gay sex, comparing it to “polygamy, incest, pedophilia, prostitution, and adultery”.
Arguing that LGBT people were not protected by the US Constitution, Pryor said in a legal brief about the law that states should be able to criminally charge gay people for having sex.
“The Supreme Court has never recognised a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy,” wrote Pryor.
“Such a right would be antithetical to the ‘traditional relation of the family’ that is ‘as old and as fundamental as our entire civilisation’.”
He also defended straight people’s right to have anal sex, saying straight anal sex was better than same-sex anal sex.
“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,” he wrote.
Going on, he said 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 recognised in this country as a right; to the contrary, it has historically been recognised as a wrong. It is not a fundamental right.”
So Trump could appoint a justice who has bee described by Lambda Legal as “the most demonstrably anti-gay judicial nominee in recent memory.”
Kevin Cathcart, Lambda Legal’s executive director adds that Pryor blocked a law which would have allowed same-sex couples in Florida to adopt.
“Several judges on the appeals court wanted to hear the case and said the law raised ‘serious and substantial questions,’ but William Pryor kept that from happening,” wrote Cathcart.
“As a result, lesbians and gay men in Florida cannot adopt children who need permanent, loving homes.”
