Abortion

A former campaign manager says Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers opposed abortion rights while running for Dallas City Council in 1989.

"She is on the extreme end of the anti-choice movement," said Lorlee Bartos, who managed Miers' first and only political campaign and said they discussed abortion once during the race. "I suspect she is of the same cloth as the president."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said she couldn't comment on Bartos' recollection but added that President Bush "does not have a litmus test for his judicial nominees."

Miers served on the City Council from 1989 to 1991,

Bartos said Miers told her she was "pro-choice in her youth" but underwent "a born-again, profound experience" that caused her to oppose abortion.

In 1989, Miers donated $150 to the Texans for Life Coalition.

Ron Key, Miers' pastor since the early 1980s, said his church is anti-abortion. Key recently left Valley View Christian Church to found a new church with Miers and others. Miers was a leader in an effort to persuade the nation's largest lawyers' group to reconsider its pro-abortion-rights stance.

As president of the Texas State Bar in 1993, Miers urged the national American Bar Association (ABA) to put the abortion issue to a referendum of its full membership. She favored a neutral stance for the ABA, and questioned whether the group should "be trying to speak for the entire legal community" on an issue that she said "has brought on tremendous divisiveness" within the organization.

The ABA's policymaking body rejected the proposal that would have surveyed the ABA's 360,000 members.

Miers had worked earlier to oppose the pro-abortion-rights stance adopted by the ABA in 1992. However, a friend and fellow lawyer who worked with her on that fight said he did not know where her personal views on abortion lay.

"This was not about abortion. This was about the appropriateness of the American Bar's taking a position," said Dallas lawyer Darrell Jordan.

Although it is unclear whether Miers ever voiced a personal opinion on the issue during the ABA fight, Leonard Leo of the conservative-libertarian Federalist Society cited the episode as one reason "conservatives should be very happy with this selection."

The ABA changed its position on abortion three times in two years between 1990 and 1992 — voting first to support abortion rights, then to take no position, and then again in support.

The position adopted in 1992 remains in effect. It endorses the basic outlines of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling that allowed legal abortions nationwide. The ABA opposes legislation that would restrict abortion before the point at which a fetus could live outside the womb, and after that point if the woman's life or health was in danger.

Gay Rights

Miers went on record favoring equal civil rights for gays when she ran for Dallas City Council, and said the city had a responsibility to pay for AIDS education and patient services.

But Miers opposed repeal of the Texas sodomy statute — a law later overturned by the court on which she will sit if confirmed — in a survey she filled out for a gay-rights group during her successful 1989 campaign.

The Supreme Court struck down the prohibition on consensual homosexual sex in 2003 on a 6-3 vote. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whom Miers is nominated to replace, voted with the majority.

Although she came to a meeting of the Lesbian/Gay Coalition of Dallas to answer questions during the campaign, she said at the time that she was not seeking its endorsement.

Miers answered "Yes" to the survey question, "Do you believe that gay men and lesbians should have the same civil rights as non-gay men and women?"

She was noncommittal on several other questions, saying, for example, that she would be willing to discuss the need for a law prohibiting discrimination in housing or public accommodations against people who had AIDS or were HIV-positive.

Asked whether qualified candidates should be denied city employment because they are gay or lesbian, she said, "I believe that employers should be able to pick the best qualified person for any position to be filled considering all relevant factors."

She answered "No" without elaboration when asked whether she believed, both as a citizen and a legislator, that criminalization of the private sexual behavior of consenting adult lesbians and gays should be taken out of the Texas criminal code.

She said Dallas had a responsibility in AIDS education and treatment and that she favored more money being spent in that area "assuming need and resources. I do consider the AIDS illness as a serious total community problem." She underlined "total."Compiled from The Dallas Morning News and The Associated Press