Judge William Pryor Jr.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (WordNews.org) Jan. 26, 2017 – Opposition against Judge William Pryor Jr. being nominated by President Donald Trump to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia is mounting among evangelicals.

Pryor, a justice on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, has had “several alarming rulings,” the Personhood Alliance said in a bulletin to supporters under the bold red headline reading: “Supreme Court Frontrunner Judge William Pryor Jr. is No Scalia.”

In February, then candidate Trump said the Alabama judge was on his short list, along with Wisconsin Judge Diane Sykes.

The Personhood Alliance, which has chapters in Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin, is voicing opposition to Pryor being considered for the Supreme Court.

“Not only did Judge Pryor personally prosecute Alabama Judge Roy Moore over his display of the Ten Commandments as Attorney Genera of Alabama,” said Daniel Becker, founder and president of Personhood Alliance, “but once he became a federal appeals judge, he issued rulings extending special rights to transgender people while refusing to recognize the religious liberty rights of Christians.”

Trump plans to announce his nominee shortly.

“Judge Pryor is no Scalia, and is manifestly unfit to succeed him,” said Gualberto Garcia Jones, National Policy Director of Personhood Alliance. “With his track record, we cannot risk having him on the court as we await the Supreme Court to deliberate on the cases considering the rights of children to be protected in their school bathrooms.”

The Personhood Alliance said the comparison between Judge Pryor and Justice Scalia couldn’t be starker. In Obergefell, Justice Scalia refused to go along with the majority’s opinion mandating same-sex marriage. But the alliance said several years before Obergefell, in two cases decided on the same day in 2011, Judge Pryor as an Eleventh Circuit judge voted that the Equal Protection Clause required reinstatement of a male employee who had been fired for wanting to appear at work dressed as a woman.

He also voted that a state university did not violate the speech or religious rights of a Christian student who was expelled from a graduate counseling program for refusing to submit to homosexual indoctrination. The cases are Keeton v. Anderson-Wiley and Glenn v. Crumby, respectively.

“More than a Scalia, Judge Pryor resembles the long list of Republican appointed liberal judges” said Jones.