This decision — which reaches straight into the private lives of public officials, including interfering with how they raise their own children — demonstrates an astounding disregard for individual liberty and places the judicial thumb squarely on the cultural scales of further sexual permissiveness. Justified in part by concerns that judges who volunteer with the Boy Scouts can’t be impartial towards LGBT litigants (an insulting notion all by itself), one wonders if the same reasoning applies to judges who — in their own private lives — belong to LGBT organizations. After all, three of the four officers of the International Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Judges are from California. If private associations are now de facto proof of public bias, can socially conservative litigants have any confidence they’ll be treated fairly by judges who believe they’re virtually the equivalent of racists?

Under that reasoning, would you want to be the Boy Scouts and litigating before a California judge?

In fact, the very presumption that a judge can’t be trusted merely because of his private associations strikes at the heart of judicial impartiality. After all, every single judge in the United States has a world view. It would be hard to find a judge that doesn’t belong to a single private association indicating a level of interest in his community. Are we to believe that all judges’ decisions are pre-ordained by their ideologies and associations?