President Joe Biden set a record for the most openly LGBTQ judges appointed to the bench by any president on Tuesday when the Senate voted to appoint a military veteran who worked as a prosecutor in Philadelphia for life.
The Democratic-led Senate voted 52-41 to confirm Mary Kay Costello to serve as a district court judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, becoming the 12th openly LGBTQ nominee to win confirmation under Biden.
This surpassed the record of former Democratic President Barack Obama, who secured the confirmation of 11 openly LGBTQ judges during his eight years in office.
Lena Zwarenstein, CEO of the fair trials program at the Progressive Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, applauded Biden for pushing to diversify the bench.
“As LGBTQ rights continue to litigate across the country, our need for judges who understand what’s at stake at all levels of the court system is increasingly clear,” Zwarenstein said in a statement.
Costello, who is married to a woman, served in the US Air Force from 1986 to 1994. He went on to receive his law degree from Temple University and was in private practice as a paralegal at Saul Ewing and Saul Ewing law firms from 2000 to 2008. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
He spent the majority of his career in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which he joined in 2008, where he prosecuted bribery, health care fraud and other criminal cases.
Costello recently left office while his nomination was pending and was sworn in as a federal magistrate judge last month.
Only in the last three decades have presidents nominated openly gay people for federal office.
Vaughn Walker, a former US District Judge in San Francisco who was nominated by former Republican President George HW Bush in 1989, came out to the press in April 2011, only after retiring. He overturned California’s gay marriage ban two months ago.
The first openly gay judicial nominee was Deborah Batts, who was nominated by Democratic former President Bill Clinton to be a federal judge in Manhattan. He was sworn in during Gay Pride Week in New York in June 1994 and died in 2020.
He remained the only openly gay judicial nominee until 2011, when he joined the bench as a Manhattan trial judge after being nominated by current U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan Obama.
Nathan was next has been put forward by Biden to the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Other appointees of Biden’s LGBTQ appeal are U.S. District Judges Beth Robinson 2nd round and Nicole Berner of the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
Most openly LGBTQ nominees have come from Democratic presidents, although Republican former President Donald Trump has appointed two openly gay judges.
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