Last week, Judge Charles W. Pickering of Mississippi accepted President Bush's offer of a recess appointment to a long-vacant Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals slot -- an end-run that bypassed Senate Democrats who had filibustered Pickering's confirmation. Much consternation was expressed by the left.
But despite his opponents' charges of "racial insensitivity," Pickering has a long and distinguished civil rights record that includes bravely testifying for the prosecution in a criminal hate-murder case against the Ku Klux Klan. Also not widely reported were his rulings regarding gays and lesbians. In 1991, Pickering sharply rebuked an attorney who tried to use a plaintiff's homosexuality in a fraud trial, saying "Homosexuals are as much entitled to be protected from fraud as any other human beings." And in 1994 he stopped an anti-gay citizens group in the town of Ovett, Mississippi, from using the courts to harass Camp Sister Spirit, a lesbian community. "The judge who threw out the anti-Camp Sister Spirit case and rebuked homophobia from the bench in the Deep South over ten years ago deserves a promotion," according to a statement last year from the Log Cabin Republicans.
The Human Rights Campaign, which was part of the Democratic coalition that opposed Pickering, condemned his appointment, making much of remarks by Pickering 20 years ago before a Baptist group in which he briefly mentioned divorce and homosexuality as social ills. Not exactly fire and brimstone, and it's the worst that liberal gays could find.
Once again, the broad--based liberal-left agenda of the gay "mainstream" takes precedence over support for fair-minded conservatives.
The Right and the Left, Again.
Sunday's New York
Times reported that:
[Sandy] Rios of Concerned Women for America said Mr. Bush had implicitly endorsed gay unions. "It is the same as saying the federal government doesn't want to weigh in on slavery, but if the states want to call it chattel that is O.K," Ms. Rios said.
By the way, right-winger Rios was condemning the same Bush
statements that the left-wing National Gay
& Lesbian Task Force called "a declaration of war on gay
America."
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