Prop 8 Defenders Attack Ruling Judge For Being Gay

Vaughn Walker, the judge who overturned California’s Proposition 8, is being attacked by conservative groups for being gay.

“Here we have an openly gay federal judge, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, substituting his views for those of the American people and of our Founding Fathers who, I promise you, would be shocked by courts that imagine they have the right to put gay marriage in our Constitution,” said Maggie Gallagher, chairwoman of The National Organization for Marriage, a group that helped fund Proposition 8.

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And Byran Fischer, issues director for the American Family Association, urged the group’s members to contact their congressional representatives about launching impeachment proceedings because Walker had not recused himself from a case in which “his own personal sexual proclivities utterly compromised his ability to make an impartial ruling.”

But law professor William G. Ross of Stanford has a good point:

“Under the logic of the people challenging the judge’s fitness to rule on a case involving gay rights because he or she was gay, one would have to find a eunuch to serve on the case, because one could just as easily argue that a heterosexual judge couldn’t rule on it either,” Ross said.

But Walkers hasn’t always been on the “gay side” of every issue:

Until this week, though, Walker had come under more criticism for representing the U.S. Olympic Committee in a lawsuit against a gay ex-Olympian who had created the so-called Gay Olympics. Walker won, forcing the Gay Olympics to become the Gay Games. He also aggressively pursued legal fees by attaching a $97,000 lien to the home of the organization’s founder while he was dying of AIDS.

Meanwhile, a New York Times profile of Judge Walker portrays him as an “independent conservative.”

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.