Last month, J. Paul Oetken won Senate confirmation by a vote of 80-13, making him the first openly gay man to be confirmed as a federal judge.

Peter LaBarbera has long demanded a sexual orientation test for judges, asserting that all nominees must declare if they have a history of “practicing immoral homosexual behavior” or “consider yourself homosexual.”

So needless to say, the milestone of Oetken’s confirmation is not sitting well with him:

“Homosexual activists are quite clear that their so-called ‘rights’ trump our religious liberty, our freedom to act on our beliefs to oppose sexual immorality,” he explains. “So we certainly can’t trust open homosexual activists to give us fairness and to defend religious liberty and our First Amendment freedom to live by our faith.” LaBarbera adds that it is because homosexual activists strive to convince people, and force them by judicial fiat, to accept the homosexual lifestyle as somehow equal to heterosexuality. “This is dangerous territory where we are seeing homosexual activists trying to get on the bench,” says the spokesman. “The Democratic Party is advancing their cause and it’s not going to help justice. In fact, I predict this will undermine religious liberty in this country.” Says LaBarbera: “We have a big fight ahead of us.”

I wonder what LaBarbera’s response would be if people were to demand that an openly Christian judicial nominee be kept off the bench because everyone knows that the Religious Right cannot be trusted to “give us fairness” on equality issues?