WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to open confirmation hearings on the nomination of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 9, and gay organizations and liberal allies have stepped up a coordinated campaign to portray Alito as a hard-nosed, conservative ideologue.

Led by Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund, the gay groups warn that Alito would likely put his personal political agenda ahead of constitutional principles. They predict he would likely vote to scale back or possibly overturn key decisions that have advanced gay rights.

“Judge Alito puts particular political ends above a fair reading of the Constitution,” said Kevin Cathcart, executive director of Lambda Legal. The group has argued in favor of gay rights cases before the Supreme Court.

“We do not believe that Judge Alito has the necessary commitment to liberty and equality for all Americans,” Cathcart said.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 54 percent of Americans support President Bush’s nomination of Alito to the Supreme Court, with only 28 percent of those polled opposing him. Eighteen percent said they did not know enough about the jurist to have an opinion.

The vocal campaign by the coalition opposing Alito has yet to persuade nearly enough senators to come out against Alito, even though the groups represent a broad range of progressive constituencies that ordinarily would hold great weight with the Senate.

Among them are moderate religious, civil rights, women’s rights, disability, labor, environmental, and privacy rights groups along with gay rights and AIDS advocacy organizations.

Each has warned that Alito’s conservative record as a federal appeals court judge for the past 15 years indicates he would likely roll back civil rights protections for minorities, weaken gun control laws and overturn the constitutional right to an abortion.  

Gay groups claim his stated position on privacy rights, both as an appeals court judge and a Justice Department attorney during the Reagan administration, indicates he would likely weaken the constitutional privacy rights doctrine. The Supreme Court cited that doctrine in its 2003 decision of Lawrence vs. Texas, which overturned state sodomy laws.

Lambda is among a number of advocacy groups that have issued detailed reports and analyses outlining why they believe Alito would vote on the high court to unravel existing civil rights and privacy rights protections. Yet none of these pronouncements appear to have had much impact on the Senate or the general public.

“Liberal groups have cried wolf so many times that when we get documents like these about Alito, crying wolf seems to have no resonance for people in the middle,” Supreme Court historian David J. Garrow told the Washington Post.

At the same time, conservative religious organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition have flooded their large memberships with e-mail and broadcast announcements portraying Alito as a defender of moral principles and values.

Conflicting opinions

Experts studying more than 800 written opinions that Alito took part in while on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals could find only two that directly involved gay-related issues. Alito ruled in favor of gay rights in one of the cases and against gay rights in the other.

He ruled in favor of the rights of a person with AIDS in a 2001 case before his appeals court, drawing praise from AIDS activists. But as a Justice Department attorney in 1986, he helped write an opinion asserting that employers had a legal right to fire people with HIV due to “fear of contagion, whether reasonable or not.”

Attorneys with Lambda Legal acknowledge that Alito’s few opinions on gay- and AIDS-related cases are mixed. Alito also co-authored a group position paper while a college student at Princeton that advocated broad privacy rights and the protection of all sexual conduct between consenting adults.

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