World
The Smearing of Judge Walker
The Smearing of Judge Walker
![Ed-walker12_020__0500354936_0](https://www.advocate.com/media-library/ed-walker12-020-0500354936-0.jpg?id=32722696&width=1200&height=876)
By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Private Policy and Terms of Use.
The Smearing of Judge Walker
COMMENTARY: It's an open secret that U.S. chief district Judge Vaughn Walker is gay. This has dismayed proponents of California's Proposition 8 all along, yet seems to have taken on desperate tones in light of his landmark ruling last week that denying lesbians and gay men the right to marry is patently unconstitutional. Advocates of Prop. 8 are certainly allowed to lick their wounds after such a precedent-setting decision, but the vitriol against Judge Walker is remarkable for both its personal animus and for the malice being shown toward all LGBT people.
Some on the right have gone so far as to characterize Walker as a pornographer and as a "teabagger" in its most literal and offensive sense. Some have suggested he is in cahoots with communists and polygamists. Conservative TV pundit Pat Buchanan said -- no doubt purposely utilizing the double entendre -- that "it is unnatural ... [that] an older white guy handed down the decision and that he happened to be gay." The American Family Association called Walker "a practicing homosexual" whose "sexual proclivity" compromised his judgment and was a basis for recusal. Not that Judge Walker's sexual orientation is actually a matter of public record. Perhaps the AFA has been following him around secretly, but all that has actually been reported about Walker's private life is a previous Los Angeles Times account that Walker "attends [legal] bar functions with a companion, a physician." That story doesn't even make note of his companion's gender.
There's apparently nothing left for conservatives to do at this important juncture -- besides filing the requisite appeal -- than to try to paint the silver-haired jurist as some kind of wacko-leftist-homo. Not only is Judge Walker being attacked; frankly, we're all being tarred as unfit to serve, unfit to be act professionally, and incapable of disassociating our brains from our genitalia. Of course, there's little new in these assertions and innuendos, but let us not forget for a minute that Judge Walker is simply the bull's-eye on the LGBT dartboard.
There's also a deeply disturbing double standard at play here. The now-65-year-old jurist came to the court decades ago under appointments by presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. At that time, no less solidly liberal a public figure than Nancy Pelosi opposed Walker's judicial nomination because of his "insensitivity" to LGBT people and the poor. Other Democrats objected to his role in preventing what are now known as the Gay Games from being called the Gay Olympics.