Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Trump’s pick for Attorney General, has been on the side of homophobes his entire political career.
Sessions has been a vocal opponent of marriage equality. He also grilled then Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan on her opposition to ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tel’l during her senate confirmation hearings and said he would do crack cocaine at Sonia Sotomayor’s hearings. He also opposed the Matthew Shepard hate crimes act and supports the First Amendment Defense Act, the bill that would allow businesses to cite religious beliefs as justification to discriminate against LGBT people.
Now a CNN Kfile report has dug up some new info:
As Alabama’s attorney general in 1996, Sessions attempted to stop the Southeastern Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual College Conference from meeting at the University of Alabama under a state law passed in 1992 that made it illegal for public universities to fund in any way a group that promotes “actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws.”
The stated mission of the Southeastern Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual College Conference was to educate and start a dialogue about the LGBT community. Scheduled events at the conference included a workshop on coming out, an interfaith panel of LGBT issues, a discussion on preventing STDs, and discussions on the Internet and substance abuse.
Sessions fought tooth and nail to have the conference stopped but it backfired:
Several days later, a federal judge struck down Alabama’s 1992 law as unconstitutional.
US District Judge Myron Thompson, in his opinion striking down the law, wrote that it was “an open effort by the State Legislature to limit the sexuality discussion in institutions of higher learning to only one viewpoint: that of heterosexual people. This viewpoint limitation violates the first amendment.”
Sessions vowed to appeal, and told reporters he would even seek an injunction to stop the conference.
Sessions lost at every turn and in the end provided the conference some useful publicity. He soon ran for Senate and won.
