By LOU CHIBBARO JR.
Oct 3 2005, 4:33 PM |
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White House Counsel Harriet Miers, President Bush’s latest nominee for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, met with members of a gay rights group during her successful campaign for a seat on the Dallas City Council in 1989 and later appointed a prominent gay attorney to a city board that oversees federal grants.
-IMG-News of Miers’ relations with the Dallas gay community surfaced Monday as political groups of all stripes scrambled to learn about her views on issues expected to come before the Supreme Court.
Her nomination came four days after the Senate confirmed Bush’s nomination of federal appeals court Judge John G. Roberts, a conservative, as Chief Justice on the Supreme Court. Gay activists have expressed concern that the president’s two appointees could tip the balance of the court in the direction of opposing gay rights.
Louise Young, former co-chair of the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas, said Miers provided mixed responses to a questionnaire on gay issues that the group sent her during her council campaign, with some of Miers’ responses "non-supportive" on gay rights.
Former Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition member Marc Lerro, a D.C. resident, said he recalls that Miers stated in the questionnaire that she would not support a bill to repeal the Texas sodomy law, saying the matter would not come before the Dallas City Council.
Lerro and Young said that although the group did not endorse Miers, members believed she made a positive gesture by completing the questionnaire and agreeing to meet with them.
"She was not hostile nor did she come across as some kind of right-wing ideologue," said Young, a Dallas software engineer and a member of the Business Council of the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay political group.
In Miers' meeting with members of the gay group, Lerro said Miers stated that she opposed abortion, a response that prompted the group to eliminate her from contention for obtaining the group’s endorsement.
Lerro said he endorsed Miers for the Council post, saying he recalls that she expressed general support for equal rights for gays and indicated she opposed discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Gay appointees
According to Lerro, Miers later appointed Dallas gay attorney Don McCleary to Dallas’ Community Development Block Grant Board, which helped the city decide how to spend federal housing and urban development funds. Under Dallas’ city manager form of government, members of the Council have authority to make city appointments.
"I can’t say policy wise that she will be good on our issues," Lerro said. "But on a personal level, she was very open to having gay people serve on boards and commissions."
Lerro said Miers "welcomed" his endorsement in the 1989 Council race and added his name to one of her campaign brochures.
Miers chose not to seek re-election after serving just one, two-year term on the Council.
Mark Johnson, a past president of the Oregon State Bar Association and former co-chair of the National Lesbian & Gay Law Association, said he worked with Miers when the two served in leadership positions with the American Bar Association.
"She is a very nice person and seems quite fair-minded," Johnson said. "Really, the fact that she is a personal friend of the president’s is the only thing about her that makes me question her judgment. I like her a lot and I’m very happy for her personally."
Miers, 60, who never married, has been credited with breaking barriers against women in the legal profession by excelling as a corporate trial lawyer and becoming the first female to be chosen as the leader of a prominent Texas law firm.
She achieved additional milestones by becoming the first woman chosen as president of the Dallas Bar Association in 1982 and the first woman elected president of the State Bar of Texas in 1992. She has also held prominent positions with the American Bar Association.
Her association with President Bush began in 1994 when then Governor-elect Bush named her to his transition team. She served from 1995 to 2000 as chair of the Texas Lottery Commission as a Bush appointee.
In 2001, President Bush named her to the post of assistant to the president and staff secretary. In 2003, Bush appointed her as deputy White House chief of staff, and in February 2005 named her Counsel to the President.
Miers is the first Supreme Court nominee since the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was appointed to the high court in 1971, who has never served as a judge prior to their nomination.
Gay rights organizations, similar to both liberal and conservative leaning groups, said they had little or no information about Miers’ views on the important constitutional issues expected to come before the high court over the next few years. All of the groups said they would closely watch her Senate confirmation hearing to determine where she stands on issues such as privacy rights and key past decisions by the high court.
Wait and see
One of the key decisions is Roe vs. Wade, which declared that women have a constitutional right to an abortion and which the court cited as a foundation for expanding rights for gays in the landmark 2003 decision of Lawrence vs. Texas. The Lawrence decision overturned state sodomy laws.
"Does Harriet Miers possess a clear commitment to equality and fairness for all Americans, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and those affected with HIV, and a judicial philosophy that will make that commitment real?" asked Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay litigation group. "That’s the $64 million question for us."
National Stonewall Democrats, a gay partisan group, said it was troubled that Miers, as a White House legal advisor, helped Bush select several anti-gay appointments to the federal appeals court bench.
Log Cabin Republicans, a national gay GOP group, said it would withhold judgment on Miers’ nomination until after her Senate confirmation hearing, when she will be questioned on her legal views.
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay political group, called on the Senate to sift through her past record to help the public learn whether Miers is a "worthy successor to Justice [Sandra] O’Connor, a consensus builder in a closely divided court."
Bush nominated Miers to replace O’Connor, who is retiring from the court.
HRC also noted that some earlier news media reports incorrectly linked Miers to the anti-gay group Exodus International, an anti-gay group that seeks to help gays to become heterosexual. Some confusion over the Exodus group surfaced when Bush mentioned Miers was affiliated with Exodus Ministries. The latter group is not linked to the "ex-gay" organization. Instead, it is a "non-denominational Christian organization established to assist ex-offenders and their families become productive members of society…," according to the group’s Web site.
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