By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – A judicial reform advocacy group on Tuesday filed a complaint accusing a Texas federal judge of engaging in misconduct by taking the “strange” step of requiring three attorneys for Southwest Airlines to attend “religious liberty training” by a prominent conservative Christian legal group.
The head of the group Fix the Court in a judicial misconduct complaint filed with the 5th Circuit Judicial Council accused U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr in Dallas of violating the judicial code of conduct by assigning a sectarian organization to carry out the attorney sanctions he ordered in a religious bias case brought by a flight attendant against the airline.
That organization, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), is a well-known conservative legal group previously not involved in the case that advocates for religious liberty and has brought cases challenging LGBTQ rights and the ability of women to secure abortions.
Jim Campbell, ADF’s chief legal counsel, in a statement called it “baseless and intolerant to suggest that people of faith cannot provide legal instruction simply because their religious beliefs might differ from their audience’s.”
Starr, a former assistant Texas attorney general, was appointed to the bench in 2019 by former Republican President Donald Trump.
He is the nephew of Kenneth Starr, who spearheaded the investigation that led to the impeachment of former Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1998 and was a member of ADF’s Supreme Court Advisory Council before his death in September 2022.
Starr did not respond to requests for comment.
Southwest, which declined comment, is appealing Starr’s order, which tasked ADF with training its lawyers after he determined they undermined an earlier decision he made in the case.
Starr said that instead of notifying employees of their rights against religious discrimination, as he had ordered Southwest to do, the lawyers penned a memo warning workers not to violate company civility policies that led it to terminate flight attendant Charlene Carter.
She had alleged she was fired for criticizing her union’s decision to participate in the 2017 Women’s March, a nationwide protest following Trump’s inauguration, because Planned Parenthood was a sponsor. Carter says she is a Christian who opposes abortion. Southwest denied the allegations.
ADF has led efforts to restrict the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone and helped draft a Mississippi law at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year overturning the national right to abortion.
In Tuesday’s complaint, Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, said that while training can at times be a fair sanction to impose on a lawyer, Starr’s order “sets a dangerous precedent.”
He said such a religious-based sanction was “unprecedented” and inconsistent with Canon 3 of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges, which holds that “a judge should perform the duties of the office fairly, impartially and diligently.”
Starr in imposing the sanction had cited past cases where lawyers were ordered to attend ethics training.
But Roth argued that unlike legal ethics, which have generally agreed upon precepts for training curriculums, religious liberty means different things under different faiths. No sectarian organization of any faith should be allowed to carry out such a court-ordered sanction as a result, he said.
Judicial misconduct complaints are subject to dismissal if they directly relate to the merits of a decision.
Roth said should the circuit’s chief judge determine his complaint should be dismissed under that rule, he requested a “limited inquiry” at least be undertaken to determine if ADF and Starr communicated privately beforehand.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Marguerita Choy)
