Throughout her brief legal career, Allison Rushing has supported and closely associated herself with one of the most extreme anti-LGBT organizations operating in this country today, the Alliance Defending Freedom. Rather than disqualifying her from consideration, this aspect of her record seems to have made up for all of the other deficiencies in her record, including her inexperience and he lack of any connection to the state in which she will sit.

Despite her denunciation of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision in United States v. Windsor, and her commitment to ADF’s mission to recriminalize homosexuality and sterilize the transgender community, all 53 Republican Senators voted to confirm her. Today is a very difficult and disappointing day for the roughly 1 million LGBT people who live in the states covered by the Fourth Circuit, and for all people who care about courts that can treat all people with dignity and fairness.

Bottom line: In a party-line vote Republicans confirmed Allison Rushing, President Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and a dangerous religious extremist who rejects the separation of church and state and has expressed a commitment to “recriminalize homosexuality and sterilize the transgender community.”