The Senate Just Confirmed an Anti-Gay Blogger to the Federal Judiciary

[herding cats]

The Trump administration’s assault on LGBTQ rights scored a major victory on Thursday when the Senate confirmed John K. Bush to the powerful 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Bush, perhaps Trump’s most controversial nominee to the lower courts, has a long history of making homophobic and sexist comments during his years as an anonymous blogger. Yet every Republican senator (except the absent John McCain) voted to confirm him. Bush, who is 52, will serve a lifetime appointment.

Bush’s record overflows with offensive, archaic, and bizarre comments, many directed toward women and sexual minorities. In 2005, he used the word “faggot” in a speech to a private club, quoting Hunter S. Thompson. In 2008, he referred to then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as “Mama Pelosi” and urged Congress to “gag the House speaker.” When the State Department introduced gender-neutral passport applications to accommodate same-sex couples, Bush complained in a 2011 blog post that the move was worthy of “outrage”—though “not Obamacare-level outrage.” He added that the change means “both parents are subservient to the nanny state—more precisely, a nanny Secretary of State.” Bush also credulously reported a story from World Net Daily, the discredited promulgator of birther conspiracies, alleging that then-Sen. Barack Obama played a role in the detention of a WND reporter in Kenya who’d been investigating the future president’s half-brother.

Unsurprisingly, Bush’s stated attitude toward constitutional jurisprudence aligns neatly with his personal values. In 1993, he wrote an amicus brief on behalf of a conservative group opposing the admission of women into the Virginia Military Institute, asserting that VMI “does not appear to be compatible with the somewhat different developmental needs of most young women.” In 2008, he compared abortion to slavery, juxtaposing Dred Scott with Roe v. Wade and writing, “The two greatest tragedies in our country—slavery and abortion—relied on similar reasoning and activist justices at the U.S. Supreme Court.” In a 2016 paper, Bush bemoaned the Kentucky Supreme Court’s protection of same-sex intimacy, criticizing a 1992 ruling which “immunized consensual sodomy from criminal prosecution under the state constitution.”


http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/07/20/senate_confirms_john_k_bush_anti_gay_blogger_to_the_6th_circuit.html

This is a lifetime appointment. Which means we have 30 years of this sort of judicial rule ahead of us.

[msongs]

1. he must be recused from any relevant cases, using his own past as proof nt

[n2doc]

2. Further proof that there are no moderate Senate republicans

They are all nut jobs at heart.

[dalton99a]

5. Yep.

[Eliot Rosewater]

3. Unacceptable, trump and all appointments must be removed from office.

Push back is necessary

Removed legally, of course.

The election was stolen, we are under attack.

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R