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President Bush has nominated Leslie Southwick of Mississippi to join the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals -- just one level below the Supreme Court in our judicial system.  Unfortunately Southwick has exhibited such a long-term pattern of open hostility to workers, African Americans, and gays and lesbians that there is simply no way he should receive Senate confirmation.

Consider:

• In one infamous case, Southwick upheld the reinstatement -- with back pay -- of a white worker after she had been fired for using the single most offensive racial epithet, calling a black colleague a 'good ole n****r.' 
• In another case, he agreed that an eight-year-old girl could be taken away from her birth mother, in large part because the mother was living with another woman in a 'lesbian home.' He also joined in the opinion that sexual orientation is a 'choice,' and that one legally acceptable consequence of that 'choice' is losing one's child.
• In a third case, he argued that a worker made sick by on-the-job exposure to toxic chemicals could not sue her employer because the three-year statute of limitations had run out...even though the worker had not learned that her illness was job-related until ten years after the onset of her symptoms.
• When pressed by Senator Durbin during recent hearings to name just one example of an unpopular decision he made in favor of the powerless, the poor, minorities or the dispossessed, Judge Southwick responded, "no."

Last November, the American people voted for change. Change does not mean rubber-stamping George W. Bush's federal court nominees, and giving them lifetime seats on the federal bench. Tell your Senators to reject the nomination of Leslie Southwick.

(For more information about the Southwick nomination, please visit the websites of People for the American Way and/or the Alliance for Justice.)