Trump Judicial Nominee Has Some Complicated Thoughts About Disabled People Getting Married

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee convened for its final meeting on President Donald Trump’s judicial nominations before lawmakers head home for the holidays. Among the nominees who appeared before the panel was Justin Olson, an Indianapolis lawyer whom Trump has nominated to a district court judgeship in Indiana.

In many ways, Olson is typical of the ambitious lawyers the Trump administration has been nominating of late: membership in the Federalist Society, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the National Republican Lawyers Association, and so on. In his answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s standard questionnaire, Olson described himself as a “specialist” in litigating a very particular type of Title IX case: those designed to bar transgender athletes from competing in college sports. One of his clients is Riley Gaines, the former University of Kentucky swimmer who is now testing whether it is possible to launch an entire career in right-wing media by virtue of having finished a 200-yard freestyle race in fifth place.

During the hearing, though, Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy focused on a different aspect of Olson’s résumé: his history as an ordained elder in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. (Olson said he is “no longer active.”) Kennedy asked Olson about a sermon he gave in August 2015 in which Olson asserted that marriage was not intended for all people, including—here, Kennedy emphasized that he was quoting Olson directly—“our handicapped friends or our persons with physical disabilities that might prevent the robust marriage that we’re called to.”

Kennedy turned back to Olson. “Did you say that?” he asked.

“I think I did, senator, yes,” Olson replied. Earlier in their exchange, Olson had clarified to Kennedy that based on the date, a “sermon” he gave in August 2015 would likely have been “a Sunday school lecture.” In retrospect, this is probably a detail he regrets volunteering.

Given an opportunity to add context, Olson said that he intended his reference to disabled people to be “illustrative of the condition in which some find themselves,” but that he did not mean to suggest that disabled people “couldn’t or shouldn’t” get married. His explanation leaned heavily on the biblical concept of “eunuchs by birth,” just to give you a sense of where Justin Olson’s head is at while Republican senators ponder confirming him to a life-tenured seat on the federal bench.

Kennedy, whose staffers have apparently spent a considerable amount of time on Olson’s page on SermonAudio.com, also asked Olson about a 2022 sermon in which he characterized “transgenderism, homosexuality, fornication, and all sorts of sexual perversions” as forms of hypocrisy that come from “shame on the inside.” In response, Olson said that he didn’t “recall the precise wording” of his remarks, but conceded that the language Kennedy read “sounds familiar.” (At least it wasn’t a Sunday school lecture this time, I guess.)

Olson said that he meant his words “for the edification of the people that I was preaching to,” and assured Kennedy and the rest of the committee that if confirmed, he would set aside his personal beliefs, apply the rule of law, and so on and so forth. I am sure that normal people in Indiana who do not want their federal judges to be alarmingly anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-disabled, anti-sex weirdos therefore have nothing to worry about.