From the latest “queer parents making a mark” files: The U.S. Senate voted at the end of May to confirm Charlotte Sweeney, a Colorado employee rights attorney and a lesbian mom, to the federal judiciary. She will be the first out LGBTQ federal judge in Colorado and the first out LGBTQ woman to serve as a federal district court judge in any state west of the Mississippi, according to the White House.
U.S. District Court Judge Alison Nathan was confirmed this week by the Senate to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, making her the second LGBTQ woman and the first queer mom to become a federal appellate judge.
President Joe Biden has recently nominated Charlotte Sweeney, a Colorado employee rights attorney, to the federal judiciary, and reappointed Sharon Kleinbaum, a New York rabbi, to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Both are also lesbian moms.
Deborah Batts, the first out LGBTQ federal judge–and also a mom—died this past Monday at the age of 72, after complications from knee replacement surgery.
It took a while, but Mary Rowland, the first LGBTQ person nominated by President Trump to a federal judgeship, was finally confirmed last week by the U.S. Senate. How did Rowland, who once volunteered for the Obama campaign, manage to get appointed by Trump?
Mary Rowland, nominated in June by President Trump to be a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, seems to have sailed through her confirmation hearing. She’s the only openly LGBTQ person among Trump’s nearly 140 judicial nominees, and has two grown children with her spouse Julie Justicz.
My further thoughts on some of the latest marriage equality rulings, originally published in my Mombian newspaper column.
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that same-sex couples in Wisconsin and Indiana have the right to marry. My spouse and I met in Wisconsin (although we don’t live there anymore), so I’m especially pleased by this win. Making it even better was reading the ruling of Judge Richard Posner, who had grilled marriage equality opponents mercilessly during the hearing. Read on for highlights of his delightfully snarky decision.
As a general rule of life, I try not to gloat. But yesterday’s arguments in the federal marriage equality case in Indiana and Wisconsin were so overwhelmingly on the side of same-sex couples and our children that I can’t help but feel a little smug. One judge was particularly scathing in his questions to marriage equality opponents.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has just ruled that Proposition 8, California’s ban on marriage of same-sex couples, is unconstitutional. The law “serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”
