The Widow Judge Who Ended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"
After President Obama, 535 members of Congress, and 1.4 million people in the military wrestled unsuccessfully with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" for what seems like eons, who is this judge who single-handedly has wounded, perhaps mortally, the 17-year old policy that bars openly gay men and women from serving in uniform?
Judge Virginia Phillips / CMR
Virginia Phillips, a federal district court judge sitting in California's central district in Riverside, ruled Tuesday that she will not reverse a decision she ordered last week barring the U.S. military from enforcing the 1993 law:
...to the extent Defendants now argue that stopping discharge under the Act will harm military readiness and unit cohesion, they had the chance to introduce evidence to that effect at trial. Defendants did not do so. The evidence they belatedly present now does not meet
their burden to obtain a stay.
Phillips has ruled that the ban violates due process rights, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government. The government now plans to appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has told recruiters they must accept gay applicants for military service, but add that the ban could be re-instated at any time by a higher court.
So just who is Judge Phillips? Elaine Donnelly of the conservative Center for Military Readiness has christened her the “supreme judicial commander of the U.S. military." Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council calls her "an activist judge playing politics with our national defense." But she is generally well-regarded in California legal circles, which was only as far as her reputation had spread until she ruled the military's gay ban unconstitutional Sept. 9. "Judge Phillips is someone who I've never known to have any sort of agenda," says Stephen Larson, who served alongside her as the only other district judge in Riverside for 10 years until he stepped down a year ago. "She's really dedicated to getting it right and going wherever it leads, whether it was the highest profile case -- like this -- or some small pro se civil rights case coming out of a prison some place," where a prisoner represents himself. "You hate to see so many people judge a jurist by whether or not they agree politically with a decision."
Phillips has handled several noteworthy cases in her 11 years on the bench. Last year, she overturned the conviction of a 45-year old man who had been jailed for 26 years for the death of his mother. She decided tainted evidence had been used against him and lacked adequate legal counsel; Los Angeles County didn't retry the man. In 2002, Phillips presided over a case brought by a nurse who complained she had been fired from a health clinic because she refused provide patients "morning after" pills designed to end pregnancies. She said the firing violated her religious beliefs. A jury awarded her $47,000.
Colleagues say Phillips is a cautious and hard-working jurist, frequently working late and sometimes typing her own orders to ensure they're done right. "The most important case I am working on is whatever case I am working on right now," Phillips told the Riverside Press Enterprise shortly after her first "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ruling. "Because it's about someone's life. It's not about money, it's not about issues, it's about someone's life. I am really aware every day what a privilege it is to have this job." Phillips also enjoys her two wire-haired fox terriers, Mick and Taffy, Jane Austen's books, and trips to Europe to walk its old cities with friends.
Born on Valentine's Day, 1957, Virginia Ettinger's father worked marketing -- first for Disneyland, then Universal Studios and Sea World. The jurist grew up in Orange, just south of Los Angeles, before earning her undergraduate degree at the University of California at Riverside in 1979. Three years later, she received a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall. While attending law school, she married John Phillips, on the history faculty at UC-Riverside. He died in a 1998 car accident. The couple had no children.
She worked at a Riverside law firm for several years before becoming a Riverside County Superior Court commissioner in 1991 and then a federal magistrate in 1995. In 1999, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the federal bench in Riverside.
And that's just one of the strange twists about the coming collapse of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." While the ban was a compromise Clinton didn't want to make, it was a judge he appointed who apparently finally has undone it. And she did it in response to a lawsuit filed by a group calling itself the Log Cabin Republicans. Not only did Republicans file the suit that's likely to end in the law's demise, the organization itself was created following a successful 1978 effort by gay California conservatives to defeat a ban on gay teachers in the state's public schools. Their most important ally in that fight? A former governor named Ronald Reagan.
http://swampland.blogs.time.com
Comments