Sunday, July 29, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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Editor’s note: Today, the Sun continues its occasional series of guest columns focusing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court.
We hear it every election cycle from both parties and countless pundits — this is the most important election of our lifetime.
This time, it’s true.
The Trump administration has spent the past 18 months attacking the LGBT community, including targeting our brave transgender service members and supporting a license to discriminate against LGBT people.
But President Donald Trump has now taken another dangerous step: nominating the anti-equality extremist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Hand-picked by some of the country’s most anti-LGBT and anti-choice organizations, Kavanaugh poses a real and direct threat to the well-being and safety of Nevada’s LGBT community. His track record leaves no room for doubt that he would radically undermine LGBT equality, reproductive rights and access to affordable health care.
As a federal judge on the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court, Kavanaugh ruled that an employer’s religious beliefs should be allowed to override workers’ access to birth control — the same argument used time and again to license discrimination against LGBT people. He has also suggested Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided and could further erode a women’s right to make basic decisions about her own health care. Not only that, he has troublingly asserted that a president can refuse to enforce a statute, even if a court has ruled that the statute is constitutional. And if Kavanaugh helps gut the Affordable Care Act, as Trump has promised he would, millions of transgender Americans and people living with HIV and AIDS could once again be denied health insurance for “pre-existing conditions.”
Our next Supreme Court justice will shape civil rights jurisprudence in the country for decades to come and cast tie-breaking votes on issues critical to the LGBT community. In coming terms, the Supreme Court could decide whether to uphold or strike down the Trump administration’s ban on transgender troops, with the lives and livelihoods of thousands of transgender service members and their families hanging in the balance. The court will rule on whether businesses and others have a right to discriminate against LGBT people in the public square. And the justices will determine the outcome of cases designed to chip away the rights, benefits and protections of marriage for same-sex couples and their families — from hospital visitations to adoption to accessing emergency services.
For the LGBT community, our rights and our lives are literally at stake in this fight. Yet so far, the fact that 100,000 LGBT Nevadans are at risk has been lost on Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., who has already signaled he is likely to vote to confirm a nominee intent on rolling back our rights. We deserve elected leaders who won’t think twice about putting LGBT Nevadans ahead of their fealty to Trump, which is why we’re doing everything we can to elect pro-equality champions to the Senate in November.
We don’t need a senator who will rubber stamp any extreme nominee the president puts forward. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Rep. Jackie Rosen, both Democrats, have already started asking tough questions about Kavanaugh’s record and fitness for this lifetime appointment. The next time we face a Supreme Court vacancy could be as soon as next year, so we are going to need a pro-equality majority in Congress that will pull the emergency brake on this administration’s reckless policies and dangerous nominees.
The American people deserve a Supreme Court justice who has demonstrated a commitment to full equality under the law — not only for LGBT Americans, but for individuals living with HIV and AIDS; women; people with disabilities; and racial, ethnic and religious minorities. We deserve a justice who is committed to constitutional safeguards for individual liberty — including marriage equality and the rights of LGBT people to be free from discrimination and harassment. And we deserve a justice who will respect action by Congress and state legislatures to address discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, race, color, national origin, religion and other factors through legislation that meets the requirements of the Constitution.
That Supreme Court justice is not Brett Kavanaugh.
Briana Escamilla is the Nevada state director of the Human Rights Campaign, a national civil rights organization advocating for the LGBT community.
