He argued that gay marriage was unconstitutional. Now Trump wants him on the federal bench.
In March 2013, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) broke with his Republican colleagues and penned an op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch supporting same-sex couples’ right to marry, a conclusion he reached shortly after his son came out as gay. In the article , he expressed his desire for each of his three children to have “the same opportunities to pursue happiness and fulfillment” in all aspects of their lives. So I was surprised to find out that Portman was supporting the nomination of Eric Murphy to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit even after Murphy argued against same-sex marriage at the Supreme Court.
Barely four years ago, Mr. Murphy made a forceful argument that my marriage was unconstitutional. As the attorney tasked with defending Ohio’s discriminatory ban on same-sex marriage, he used dog-whistles such as “traditional marriage” in his brief to the Supreme Court and argued that “bigotry” had nothing to do with why the state refused to recognize my lawful marriage to my late husband.
The court rejected Murphy’s arguments and overturned that law. In a landmark opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — for whom Murphy himself once clerked — the Supreme Court declared that “it demeans gays and lesbians for the State to lock them out of a central institution of the Nation’s society.” Gay couples “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law,” Kennedy wrote. “The Constitution grants them that right.”
Still, if Murphy had been successful, John and I, and tens of thousands of couples like us, would have been denied the right to marry and forced to live as second-class citizens.
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