Joe.My.God. LGBT News
AL.com reports:
A three-judge federal court panel has blocked Alabama from using in another election 12 legislative districts challenged as unconstitutional by black political groups. The districts are part of the district map drawn and approved by the Republican-led Alabama Legislature after the 2010 Census and were used in the 2014 election. The judges ruled for the plaintiffs in 12 of the 36 districts in dispute and enjoined the state from using those district lines again. The court ruled in favor of the state on the other 24 districts that were challenged.
All 140 seats in the Alabama Legislature will be up for election next year. One of the three judges, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson, issued a separate order dissenting, in part, from the other two judges, Circuit Judge Bill Pryor and Chief District Judge Keith Watkins. Thompson agreed on the 12 districts that were found unconstitutional but also found that 12 of the other 24 were unconstitutional.
Pryor is reportedly the favorite to be nominated by Trump to the Supreme Court. He and Trump had a meeting this week at Trump Tower. He was one of many who filed amicus briefs in the landmark Lawrence V Texas case that decriminalized gay sex nationwide. In his brief, Pryor compared same-sex relations to pedophilia and incest.
The former Alabama Attorney General defended a law in 2003 in Texas which criminalizes consensual gay sex, comparing it to “polygamy, incest, pedophilia, prostitution, and adultery”. Arguing that LGBT people were not protected by the US Constitution, Pryor said in a legal brief about the law that states should be able to criminally charge gay people for having sex.
“The Supreme Court has never recognised a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy,” wrote Pryor. “Such a right would be antithetical to the ‘traditional relation of the family’ that is ‘as old and as fundamental as our entire civilisation’.” He also defended straight people’s right to have anal sex, saying straight anal sex was better than same-sex anal sex.