It’s Pride Month, which means it’s time to talk about the lesbian takeover of America’s federal courts.
It’s been happening over the past several months. Nobody has noticed. Luckily, HuffPost did.
We crunched the numbers and discovered there’s been a staggering 30% increase in the number of openly lesbian women who have been put into lifetime federal judgeships since November.
Surely this huge spike in lesbian judges will change the way the nation’s courts function. It raises questions, too, about whether President Joe Biden is going to run out of lesbians to pick from to be judges. Or why this reporter is not yet a federal judge. (I am available, sir.)
Of course, this all requires some crucial context. Before Biden took office, there had only ever been seven openly lesbian women confirmed to lifetime federal judgeships. Now there are 10. That’s out of more than 3,700 people, the vast majority of whom have been men, who have ever been lifetime federal judges.
So lesbian representation on the courts isn’t that great after all, is it? Nonetheless, ladies, here in Pride Month, it’s worth noting that Biden has made a dent in our abysmal numbers.
He’s nominated and confirmed a total of four lesbian federal judges since last fall: Beth Robinson, the first-ever out lesbian to serve on a U.S. appeals court; Alison Nathan, the second out lesbian to serve on a U.S. appeals court; Charlotte Sweeney, the first openly LGBTQ judge on a U.S. district court in Colorado; and, just this week, Nina Morrison, now the second openly LGBTQ judge on a U.S. district court in New York.
It’s worth looking at how Biden compares to his predecessors here. President Barack Obama put a total of five openly LGBTQ women into federal court seats during his eight years in office, out of his 329 lifetime federal judges. One of them was Nathan, whom he put into a district court seat before Biden later elevated her to an appeals court seat.
President Donald Trump put one openly LGBTQ woman into a federal judgeship during his four years in office, now-U.S. district judge Mary Rowland. President Bill Clinton also put one openly lesbian woman, former U.S. district judge Deborah Batts, into a federal judgeship during his eight years in the White House.
And that’s all there’s been.
As of Thursday, there are 77 current judicial vacancies on the federal bench.
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Biden is considering filling all of these seats with lesbian judges as proof of his commitment to honoring Pride Month.
