The fictional exchange is surprising, mostly because of who wrote it. It appears in a novel released in February by J. Harvie Wilkinson III, one of the most conservative judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Wilkinson, 77, said in an interview that in writing the book, published by Milford House Press, he wanted an escape from “the acrimony and the intolerance and the venom” of political life. His protagonist, Leah, wrestles with deeply personal problems: whether to leave her small Pennsylvania town for better professional options, how to process a tragic death, whether to forgive an intimate betrayal. While “romantic,” it’s not exactly a romance novel, the judge said.
“Sometimes things are more titillating when they’re hinted at than when they are just stripped bare,” Wilkinson said. “I don’t think [these characters] would have wanted their private sexual acts just spread across pages for everybody to visit.”
He said he wanted to write from a female perspective in part to build his own empathy.
“I wanted to reach out into worlds beyond my own little insular conclave,” he said.
In his day job, his positions remain staunchly conservative. In a recent case over whether a North Carolina charter school could require girls to wear skirts, Wilkinson wrote a controversial dissenting opinion siding with the school. He argued that applying the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment to a charter school — the core issue of the case — could “extinguish the place of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the educational system” and opined that “to a great many people, dress codes represent an ideal of chivalry that is not patronizing to women, but appreciative and respectful of them.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/20/wilkinson-novel-romance/
