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Bush nominates Harriet Miers to Supreme Court

By Lisa Keen

WASHINGTON – There was plenty of cause for gays to experience whiplash as the U.S. Supreme Court opened its 2005-06 session this week. First was the sight of the court's most liberal justice, 85-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, stumbling as he escorted the court's new Chief Justice, John G. Roberts Jr., down the steps of the court in a ceremonial welcome walk. Then came news that President Bush's nominee to fill the seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is a 60-year-old woman who has never married and who has been heavily involved in Exodus Ministries. Heads whipped.
Although at least one reporter asked Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter about Harriet Miers' involvement in an ex-gay group, the White House and gay organizations checked and corrected that record before noon Monday. Exodus Ministries is a Dallas-based group that helps ex-prisoners find housing. Exodus International is the organization serving people who think they were gay but are no longer.
Last year, when Miers became the White House counsel, the New York Times noted that she has "an extremely low profile" in Washington, D.C., and that she "is often the only woman who accompanies Mr. Bush and male staff members in long brush-cutting and cedar-clearing sessions at the president's ranch." Those two notes alone were enough to inspire some bloggers to start speculating about her sexual orientation. But bloggers and rumor mills speculate about just about everybody, with or without cause.
What will be important to gay legal activists are her legal and political orientations, and early signs are that she is not beholden to extreme conservatives and may be more in the mold of O'Connor.
"The president realizes that the views of the extreme right wing of his party aren't the views of the American people," said Schumer, a member of the Judiciary Committee who is supportive of equal rights for gays. But, added Schumer, "we know less about this nominee than we knew about Roberts."
But by the end of the day Monday, much more was known about her attitudes towards gays than was known about Roberts.
The Associated Press reported that, during her campaign for the Dallas City Council in 1989, she indicated on a gay group's questionnaire to candidates that she favored equal civil rights for gays but opposed to repealing the Texas sodomy statute, which prohibited only same-sex couples from engaging in sex.
"The biggest fear," said Slate magazine, explaining the reaction of conservatives, "is that she is a Souter in St. John knits: a justice insufficiently conservative who will only become more liberal once she gets on the bench." James Dobson of Focus on the Family supports her, however, because she is opposed to abortion and has belonged for many years to an evangelical church.
The New Republic magazine was reporting online that, in 1998 as chairman of an American Bar Association committee, she submitted a report that recommended the organization support "the enactment of laws and public policy which provide that sexual orientation shall not be a bar to adoption when the adoption is determined to be in the best interest of the child."
Roberts' assumption of the Chief Justice position is unlikely to change the teetering balance of the court on gay-related cases because he replaces the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist who voted against the interests of gays every chance he got. But Miers, if confirmed, will replace a moderate swing vote, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who voted in the interests of gays during her last years on the court.

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