Orlando Sentinel, Saturday, August 7, 2004, Gina Holland<\/p>\n
Atlanta — Judges are on the front line of battles about legal rights for same-sex couples and should never belong to an organization that discriminates against gays, supporters of a proposed change to American Bar Association ethics rules argued Friday.<\/p>\n
Judges are already prohibited from joining clubs that discriminate based on race or sex. An ABA panel is debating whether to make groups that discriminate against gays off limits as well.<\/p>\n
The ABA, the nation’s largest lawyers’ group, with more than 400,000 members, writes conduct rules for judges and lawyers. States and federal courts generally adopt them, with some changes.
\n
\nIt is not known how many judges participate in groups such as the Boy Scouts that have policies against hiring gays or having gay leaders, or some veterans groups that restrict membership to heterosexuals.<\/p>\n
The ABA held an all-day public hearing Friday on proposed judicial-ethics changes during the association’s summer meeting, which runs through Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Rules on gifts judges may accept and judges’ involvement in fund-raisers may also be changed.<\/p>\n
The ABA is not expected to vote on any changes until next year. It would be the first over-haul of the rules in more than a decade, and any changes eventually could affect thousands of judges.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a new report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ auditing arm, shows that some judges request–and receive permission–to withhold information about gifts from the public on the premise that their safety could be compromised.<\/p>\n
The ABA ethics panel is considering redefining a gift, possibly to include paid trips to seminars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Orlando Sentinel, Saturday, August 7, 2004, Gina Holland Atlanta — Judges are on the front line of battles about legal rights for same-sex couples and should never belong to an organization that discriminates against gays, supporters of a proposed change to American Bar Association ethics rules argued Friday. Judges are already prohibited from joining clubs … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moral-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1319"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}