One of Donald Trump’s potential Supreme Court nominees thinks gay sex should be illegal
By Will Stroude
Much of the United States’ progress on social equality in recent decades has come courtesy of the nine Supreme Court judges, with the balance between conservative and more liberal members of the bench finely held.
But with a number of spots likely to be freed up by retirements over the course of President-elect Donald Trump’s four-year term, the soon-to-be US leader will be able to shape the future of social issues for decades to come. And during the course of his campaign, the businessman and former reality TV star promised to only put forward nominees from a shortlist of 21 ultra-conservative individuals.
One of these prospective justices is the virulently anti-LGBT William H. Pryor Jr., who has been labelled the “most demonstrably anti-gay judicial nominee in recent memory” by LGBT advocacy group Lambda Legal.
According to Gay Star News, in 2003 Pryor defended a Texan law that criminalised consensual sex between two men in privacy, arguing that states should be allowed to prosecute LGBT+ people.
As well as casting the deciding vote against legalising same-sex marriage in Florida in 2004, the 54-year-old has also made comparisons LGBT rights and “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and paedophilia.”
“This Court has never recognized a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy,’ he wrote in a legal briefing.
“Such a right would be antithetical to the ‘traditional relation of the family’ that is ‘as old and as fundamental as our entire civilization.”
Pryor also wrote that Texans “need to be protected,” which he believes has “severe physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences, which do not necessarily attend heterosexual sodomy.”
The federal Court of Appeals judge added that Americans had “no fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy just because it is done behind closed doors.”
He argued: “Because 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.”
While Donald Trump stated over the weekend that the matter of nation-wide equal marriage had been “settled” by the Supreme Court, the LGBT+ community in America fear that his presidency will see a number of freedoms rolled-back.
Meanwhile, New York-based LGBT writer and activist Eliel Criz has argued that the country’s LGBT community will have to come together and “fight like its Stonewall” during Trump’s four years in office.
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