Youngest Federal Judge Was Just Confirmed to a Lifetime Appointment & She’s an Anti-LGBTQ+ Extremist

Published in The Mary Sue

This week, the Senate confirmed Allison Jones Rushing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, a position with a lifetime appointment. Rushing is only 37 and the country’s youngest federal judge.

While I’d love to be excited over such an incredible accomplishment for such a young woman, (my) feminism means celebrating progress for women. It does not mean celebrating each individual woman, even when she’s terrible, which Rushing absolutely is.

It’s not that she’s conservative, having clerked for Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas. She’s well beyond regular standards of conservativism. She’s worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy and training organization that the SPLC has labeled an official hate group over its efforts to criminalize homosexuality here and abroad, its support of state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad, and more.

She’s also denounced the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage equality in United States vs Windsor and expressed indignation that the SCOTUS majority on that case saw the attempt to ban same-sex marriage on the basis of religion as bigotry.