Gay Texas Judge Set To Defend Pride Display In Court Room

San Antonio’s first openly gay judge will be appearing in person in court this week to appeal sanctions from the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct for displaying a rainbow pride flag in her courtroom.

Bexar County Judge Rosie Speedlin-Gonzalez, who in 2018 became the first openly gay judge elected in Bexar County, will finally get her day in court before the Special Court of Review on Thursday to appeal sanctions that forced her to remove the pride flag and other pride symbols from her courtroom.

Judge Speedlin-Gonzalez was hit with private and public sanctions by the state’s judicial ethics committee in 2020. The public sanctions admonished the judge for sharing Facebook posts congratulating attorneys on their jury verdicts, but around the same time, Judge Speedlin-Gonzalez received a separate private warning over the rainbow flag in her courtroom.

In her testimony before the state’s ethics commission in February 2020, Judge Speedlin-Gonzalez said she had seen other judges display symbols reflecting their “identity and cultural heritage,” a release on Friday states. But the commission, according to Judge Speedlin-Gonzalez, ordered her to remove the flag from her courtroom, along with a rainbow pen, eyeglasses and a mouse pad, as well as a colorful traditional Mexican cloth.

Flavio Hernandez, the defense attorney who initially filed the complaint against Judge Speedlin-Gonzalez’s display, said in a statement to NBC News in April 2020 that he was “grieved” by the “unofficial flag symbolizing the judge’s personal bias,” adding that he felt the need to voice his support of “traditional American family values.”

He likened the flag to displaying swastikas or Confederate flags, which he said “are also divisive and inappropriate symbols in our courtrooms.”

Judge Speedlin-Gonzalez is also appealing the public sanctions she received in March 2020, which ordered that she spend four additional hours of judicial education with a mentor instructing her on how to avoid “actions which would lend the prestige of her judicial office to advance the private interests of the judge or others.”

The slap on the wrist resulted from at least eight posts that Judge Speedlin-Gonzalez made on her official Facebook page congratulating attorneys on their trial wins and applauding their professional backgrounds.

After the commission inquired about the judge’s social media activity, she stopped writing the posts, but the panel still found that her applause of the attorneys she presided over constituted a “willful and persistent violation” of ethics rules.

Judge Speedlin-Gonzalez told NBC News in April 2020 that she would not be “bullied off my bench” and that Hernandez’s complaint and the commission’s decision were “homophobia in its most transparent, clear definition.”

The hearing will be held at 9:30 a.m. Central Time in the Texas Supreme Court Building.

Judge Speedlin-Gonzalez and Hernandez were not immediately available for comment on Monday.

–Editing by Steven Edelstone.

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/articles/1495756/gay-texas-judge-set-to-defend-pride-display-in-court?copied=1