Senate confirms a bigot as U.S. Circuit Judge

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate confirmed Leslie Southwick, a known bigot, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Here is what the organization People for the American Way had to say about Southwick:

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Two cases in particular serve to highlight Southwick's lack of commitment to the social justice progress of the last fifty years.

In 1998, Southwick joined a ruling in an employment case that upheld the reinstatement, without any punishment whatsoever, of a white state employee who was fired for calling an African American co-worker a "good ole nigger." The court's decision effectively ratified a hearing officer's opinion that the slur was only "somewhat derogatory" and "was in effect calling the individual a 'teacher's pet.'" The Mississippi Supreme Court unanimously reversed the decision.

In 2001, Southwick joined a ruling that upheld a chancellor's decision to take an eight-year-old girl away from her mother and award custody to the father, who had never married the mother, largely because the mother was living with another woman in a "lesbian home." Southwick went even further by joining a gratuitously anti-gay concurrence which extolled Mississippi's right under "the principles of Federalism" to treat "homosexual persons" as second-class citizens. The concurrence suggested that sexual orientation is a choice and stated that an adult is not "relieved of the consequences of his or her choice" - e.g. losing custody of one's child.

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And now this judge has gotten a big promotion.

>> Read more about Southwick.

>> See how your senators voted.