Donald Trump’s illegitimate Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett not once, not twice, but on five separate occasions made paid speeches for an anti-LGBTQ organization that has been classified as a hate group for supporting recriminalizing being LGBTQ and defending the horrific state-sanctioned sterilization of transgender people abroad, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) said.
Even though a majority of Americans say the next president should fill the seat vacated by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Republicans are determined to ram through this nomination as soon as possible. “The troubling record of Judge Barrett makes the prospects of this confirmation even more objectionable,” LDF said. “From voting rights to affirmative action, to health care and abortion rights, the record and judicial philosophy of Judge Barrett constitutes a threat to the protection of core civil rights”—including speaking for a profoundly anti-LGBTQ hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom.
We need to turn out Democratic voters to defeat Trump in November, even during a pandemic-and to save Ruth Bader Ginsburg's legacy. You can help out from home, no matter where you live, by writing personalized letters to infrequent, but Democratic-leaning, voters in swing states. Click here to set up an account with Vote Forward, the most popular get-out-the-vote activity at Daily Kos.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “[s]ince the election of President Trump, ADF has become one of the most influential groups informing the administration’s attack on LGBTQ rights,” including being key in the development of so-called “religious liberty” bills designed to infringe on the rights of LGBTQ Americans. ADF has further “contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia,” and claims “that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society.” Truly quaint stuff that didn’t at all repel Barrett. In fact, she seemed quite drawn to it.
“On five separate occasions, Judge Barrett was a paid speaker of the Alliance Defending Freedom,” LDF said. “In addition, Judge Barrett, in a 2016 speech, contended that Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which also prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, does not protect transgender persons from discrimination because, in her view, ‘no one ... would have dreamed of that result’ at the time the law was enacted.”
Barrett made her own personal belief that LGBTQ people are not deserving of humanity as clear as day during her Senate nomination hearing on Tuesday, Daily Kos’ Kerry Eleveld noted, when she used the term “sexual preference” while dodging a question on the Supreme Court’s historic ruling striking down same-sex marriage bans nationwide.
“[T]he notion that anyone chooses to be gay or date people of the same sex is not only antiquated, it's the also the baseline that anti-LGBTQ activists have used for decades to advance and defend laws expressly discriminating against gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans,” Eleveld writes. “It's the verbiage of someone who lives in a highly conservative social bubble and traffics in anti-gay legal doctrine. The bigoted legal group Alliance Defending Freedom … was no doubt over the moon with the wink from Barrett.”
“Because ADF frequently litigates Supreme Court cases, taking positions against abortion, LGBTQ rights, and church-state separation, it is likely that if Barrett, who is only 48, is confirmed, she will be hearing arguments from ADF attorneys for many years to come,” Rolling Stone reported.
Barrett also got the thumbs-up from another hate group for her past rulings against immigrants and asylum-seekers, when she sided with the administration on its discriminatory “public charge” rule and denial of a green card to a Yemeni immigrant. That case appeared to strike a particular chord with the Center for Immigration Studies. “One of the eugenicist John Tanton’s favorite think tanks is praising Trump’s Supreme Court nominee thanks to her decisions denying certain brown people access to visas,” tweeted investigative journalist Jean Guerrero.
That should only add on to the case for reforming the courts, because even if we do give Trump the boot in November, and God willing we do, hate group ties may be removed from the White House but not the justice system, which clearly believes in justice only for some.
The Supreme Court is too important to be in Republican hands. Donate now to help end Republican rule.