Liberals are already slamming Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch as being anti-LGBTQ, but in college the judge was an outspoken advocate of gay rights.
NBC News reported on Wednesday that Gorsuch was opposed to military recruitment when he was an undergrad at Columbia because they discriminated against gays and lesbians from joining. He went so far as to write an op-ed in the Columbia Daily Spectator in 1987 making the case against the ban on LGBTQ individuals in the armed services.
It was a very different time in the U.S. in 1987. AIDS was claiming the lives of tens-of-thousands of Americans. Fear of the disease and the growing epidemic sent shock waves through the public. According to Gallup, about 57 percent of Americans wanted to ban consensual relations between gays and lesbians, which was the most ever recorded.
Despite all the backlash facing the LGBTQ community during the period, Gorsuch still wrote the op-ed. His article defending gay rights was published even before President Ronald Reagan was willing to make his first public speech about the AIDS epidemic.
“It is an accepted fact that all four branches of the U.S. military discriminate against men and women based on their sexual preferences,” Gorsuch wrote. “This kind of discrimination just doesn’t fit in with Freedom of Opportunity and Democracy. Plain and simple. Unless it’s prepared to hire applicants regardless of race, sex, class, religion, or sexual preference, the military should be denied the use of Columbia facilities to recruit.”
Even in college, Gorsuch was a well-known conservative on a liberal campus. However, he was true to his beliefs against discrimination that he went on the record defending gay Americans at a time when they were most ostracized.
EDITORS NOTE:
The school newspaper mixed up Gorsuch’s article and fellow student Jason Myers’ op-ed when the paper was originally printed. A correction in the school newspaper was issued the next day.
