Potential Trump Supreme Court Pick Argued Gay Sex Should Be Illegal

During his campaign, Donald Trump published a list of potential nominees to the US Supreme Court. Now that Trump is president-elect and there is an empty seat on the court, news outlets and campaigners are looking more closely at Trump’s list.

One of the men on that last is William H. Pryor Jr, an Alabaman judge who has argued in court that sex between consenting homosexual men should be illegal. LGBTQ news sites have been looking into Trump’s potential judicial appointments and there is reason for the LGBTQ community to be worried.

Pryor is a federal judge on the Eleventh Circuit who defended a Texas law criminalizing homosexual sex that takes place in private and argued that Texas needed to be protected from homosexual sex. Pryor wrote that homosexual sex would have “severe physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences, which do not necessarily attend heterosexual sodomy.”

“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,” Pryor argued. Pryor said that a right to homosexual sex “would be antithetical to the traditional relation of the family that is as old and as fundamental as our entire civilization.”

Pryor may not end up on the Supreme Court but his opinions on homosexuality are a worrying indication of the direction of the court under a Trump presidency. While Trump has said he thinks equal marriage is a settled issue, appointing judges like Pryor could clear the way for a challenge.