AUSTIN, TX — Jeff Mateer — the top executive working in the attorney general's office in Austin who's a nominee for a federal judgeship — has called transgender children examples of "Satan's plan" and argued that gay marriage could usher in wholesale bestiality and polygamy.

Earlier this month on Sept. 7, President Trump announced nominees to fill five federal court vacancies in Texas, including Mateer — the first assistant attorney general of Texas working alongside Attorney General Ken Paxton in the state capital — to serve in the Eastern District with vacancies in the cities of Tyler and Plano. The nomination to the lofty post has heightened scrutiny of Mateer's beliefs. Among those expressed beliefs, as CNN reported Wednesday, is positing transgender children as evidence of satanic influence and his theory that gay marriage will inevitably lead to bestiality and multiple-partner weddings.

CNN quoted Mateer expressing those views from a pair of speeches he gave in 2015 while serving as general counsel for Liberty Institute, a legal advocacy group operating through the prism of conservative Christian principles now known as First Liberty Institute.

In May 2015, Mateer reportedly gave a talk titled "The Church and Homosexuality" before Christian pastors and church leaders in which he decried a homosexual agenda he said was being imposed on the public. In that speech, he condemned parents in Colorado who sued a school for banning their transgender daughter from using the girl's bathroom, CNN reported. "Now, I submit to you, a parent of three children who are now young adults — but still, a first-grader really knows what their sexual identity (is)? I mean, it just shows you how Satan's plan is working and the destruction that's going on," he said. He warned of an "anything goes" scenario that acceptance of gay marriage will usher in, expressing his imagined scenarios of multiple marriages and unions with animals as a result: "Why couldn't four people want to get married?" Mateer asked rhetorically.

He didn't stop there: "Why not one man and three women, or three women and one man? I mean, it's disgusting. There are people who are marrying themselves. Somebody wanted to marry a tree. People marrying their pets. I mean, it's just like — you know, you read the New Testament and you read about all the things and you think, 'That's not going on in our community.' Oh yes it is. We're back to that time where debauchery rules."

CNN also reported of a separate speech given in November 2015 during which Mateer endorsed "conversion therapy," a controversial method of changing sexual orientation through religious means. While a litany of medical, pediatric and psychiatric groups — including the American Psychiatric Association and the American Pediatric Association — have categorized such tactics as harmful, Mateer called it "Biblical counseling" at a conference hosted by pastor Kevin Swanson, who often preaches to his flock of the Biblical punishment of death for homosexuality.

"And if you're giving conversion therapy, that's been outlawed in at least two states and then in some local areas, so they're invading that area," Mateer said.

Mateer earned a law degree from Southern Methodist University and currently serves in Paxton's office supervising litigation matters before the state. His position as U.S. district judge in Plano would be a lifetime appointment.