(Dave Martin/AP)
Jeff Sessions — President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. Attorney General — went several extra miles to try and prevent a gay rights group from holding a conference on a public college campus in 1996, newly unearthed news articles from the time show.
The 69-year-old Alabama senator is an outspoken critic of LGBT rights on a federal level and called the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize gay marriage an “effort to secularize, by force and intimidation.” He has also voted against measures taken to expand hate crime laws to include attacks targeting sexuality, in addition to being a staunch supporter of the First Amendment Defense Act, which critics have labeled as a bill that enables the “right to discriminate.”
And Session’s intolerance for homosexuality apparently trails far back.
A CNN review of media reports published Friday showed that the senator fought long and hard to prevent the Southeastern Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual College Conference from meeting on the University of Alabama campus in 1996.
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The conference featured workshops and an interfaith panel meant to facilitate an open dialogue about the LGBT community and STD prevention.
Sessions served as Alabama’s attorney general at the time.
Sessions — who was the Yellowhammer State’s attorney general at the time — allegedly threatened to get a court order against the university in order to derail the conference. In doing so, Sessions cited a 1992 state law that made it illegal for public institutions to in any way promote “actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws.”
The university’s president, Roger Sayers, refused to cancel the conference, noting that the gay rights group was protected under Constitutional rights.
“As the attorney general knows and is clear and well established in law, the university has a duty to err on the side of the First Amendment,” Sayers is quoted as saying in a Mobile Register story from the time.
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A few days after Sayers defended the conference, a federal judge struck down the law Sessions was citing. In his opinion, the judge deemed the law unconstitutional and called it “an open effort by the State Legislature to limit the sexuality discussion in institutions of higher learning to only one viewpoint: that of heterosexual people.”
Newly married couple David Roby, center, and Erik Obermiller, right, as they leave an Alabama court house after getting married last year following the federal legalization of gay marriage.
(Hal Yeager/AP)
But Sessions didn’t give up.
The senator vowed to appeal the ruling and told reporters he was even prepared to seek an injunction to disrupt the event.
“I intend to do everything I can to stop that conference,” he was quoted as saying in the Huntsville Times. “I believe that my responsibility is to defend the laws of the Legislature.”
But Sessions was forced to bite the bullet after the federal judge only a few days before the conference was set to begin reiterated his opinion.
The 1996 conference continued as planned. As for Sessions, he went on to become President-elect Trump’s attorney general.
(Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images)
In a press release issued after the judge’s reiteration, Sessions didn’t signal defeat.
“We’ve got to make a decision about what we’ll do about the actual conference,” he stated. “(The) ruling said that on its face the Alabama statute is unconstitutional and indicated that any attempt to enforce it he would stop and so we’ve got to evaluate whether or not there’s anything we can do with the university at this point.”
The conference began a few days later to no objection. As for Sessions, he went on to successfully run for the U.S. Senate later that year.
Neither a spokeswoman for Sessions nor the Trump transition team immediately returned requests for comment from the Daily News.
