In a 2014 radio interview, Gordon Giampietro, one of Donald Trump’s latest judicial nominees, publicly denigrated marriage equality as “an assault on nature” that would undermine the “very idea of marriage” by reducing marriage to “the sex act.”
Then, about a month after the Supreme Court recognized a nationwide right to marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, he returned to the radio. In that interview, he declared it “irrefutable” that children are best raised by a heterosexual couple, and described same-sex relationships as “troubled” — despite overwhelming social science evidence and legal precedent to the contrary.
In the same interview, he demonstrated his deep disrespect for judicial precedent and the Supreme Court when he urged people to “ignore Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion, because it’s not really legal reasoning,” and added that Justice Kennedy “went off the rails years ago” with his 2003 opinion in Lambda Legal’s landmark Lawrence v. Texas case, which struck down sodomy laws nationwide.
So today, Lambda Legal led 40 civil rights organizations and sent a letter to the U.S. Senate, urging them to demand that President Trump withdraw Gordon Giampietro’s nomination for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.
Gordon Giampietro is irrevocably unfit to serve a lifetime appointment on the federal bench. Not just for his homophobic and discriminatory remarks, but also for his demonstrated lack of candor. He failed to disclose these radio interviews on the application he submitted to Wisconsin’s Federal Nominating Commission. He also failed to disclose a comment he posted in response to an online news story, in which he asserted that “calls for [racial] diversity” are “code for relaxed standards (moral and intellectual).”
When pressed by journalists regarding why he omitted these materials, Mr. Giampietro said that he did not include them because he did not see them as relevant or necessary.
#Sure.
Like so many of Donald Trump’s other notoriously unfit nominees, Mr. Giampietro’s comments reveal a level of ideological fervor that is incompatible with judicial service. It is simply impossible to believe that he would be able to administer fair and impartial justice.
There’s little need to imagine how an LGBT person (or person of color, or woman – let alone someone who holds multiple of these identities) would fare in his courtroom. We already know the answer, and it’s not good.
