President Joe Biden’s nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, on Wednesday, distanced herself from the mission statement of a Christian school whose board she once advised.
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Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who currently serves on the D.C. District Court, during an exchange with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, said that she did “not necessarily agree” with all of the statements of the many boards on which she has served. Her response came after Hawley asked her about the Montrose Christian School, a now-defunct Maryland high school whose board Jackson advised from 2010 to 2011.
Hawley drew Jackson’s attention to the school’s statement of faith, which was drawn from a similar Southern Baptist Convention statement. It espoused traditional values with regard to sexuality and abortion, stating that Christians should speak “on behalf of the unborn” and that marriage is the “uniting of one man and one woman.”
“Those are positions I agree with, which is beside the point,” Hawley said. “I raise them because I recall that Justice Amy Barrett was attacked for serving on the board of Trinity School, which took similar positions. I defended her at the time. I would defend your right to religious liberty and to serve on this board, whatever your opinions may be.”
Hawley asked if, because of her past service to institutions that supported traditional views of the family and marriage, Jackson would respect religious liberty for people of faith who still believe in these values.
Jackson told Hawley that she also believed in protecting religious liberty broadly, but with regard to the Montrose Christian School, she could not sign on to everything in its statement of faith.
“The statement that you read, I’m not even sure that that was something that was in the school’s circumstances at the time that I was there because I was not aware of that,” she said.
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Archived links to the school’s website show that the mission statement was available on Montrose Christian’s website during and after Jackson’s tenure.
Jackson is widely considered a Supreme Court nomination favorite for Biden if Justice Stephen Breyer retires.
