“A third of Trump’s court nominees have anti-LGBTQ history, report finds.”

That was the headline at NBC News on Monday evening, though the “report” in question was produced by a liberal LGBTQ advocacy group, Lambda Legal.

NBC accepted Lambda’s characterization of the nominees as “anti-LGBTQ,” though the main evidence provided in its article is that they had expressed opposition to same-sex marriage in the past. (President Barack Obama also opposed same-sex marriage until he ran for re-election in 2012; no one characterized him as “anti-LGBTQ.”)

In the case of Judge Stephen Menashi, recently confirmed to the Second Circuit, NBC News cites a letter from Lambda to the Senate Judiciary Committee that claimed he expressed “animosity” to the LGBTQ community.

In fact, the letter provided no such evidence, merely the subjective judgment of Lambda that opposition to separate LGBTQ dorms on campus, or to the “normalization” of gender-reassignment surgery, somehow constituted “animosity.”

The article also cites Lambda’s condemnation of Judge Allison Jones Rushing of the Fourth Circuit. Lambda tarnished Rushing through guilt by association, citing the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which labeled a group with which Rushing worked, the Alliance Defending Freedom, as a “hate group.”

Jessica Prol Smith. an editor at Alliance Defending Freedom, struck back against the SPLC in an op-ed in USA Today in August: “The [hate group] label easily peels and fades away when one actually does the research and listens to truth before deciding to troll.”

The NBC News article failed to express any skepticism of Lambda’s highly ideological analysis. It also failed to note that the Senate recently confirmed Trump appointee Patrick Bumatay, who is gay, to the Ninth Circuit. Bumatay is Trump’s second gay judicial appointee; Mary Rowland was recently confirmed to the U.S. District Court of Northern Illinois.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.