The Birch Bayh federal courthouse in Indianapolis, home to Indiana’s Southern District.Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty
On Wednesday, Justin Olson, a judicial nominee for the federal bench in the Southern District of Indiana, admitted that in a 2015 sermon, he had said marriage should not be for “our handicapped friends or our persons with physical disabilities that might prevent the robust marriage that we’re called to.”
Here’s Trump judicial nominee Justin Olson today, admitting than in 2015, he gave a sermon in which he said that “marriage was not intended for all people,” including “our handicapped friends or our persons with physical disabilities that might prevent the robust marriage that we’re called to.”
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— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) December 17, 2025 at 2:01 PM
His statement is ridiculous for several reasons. First of all, it makes the assumption that disabled people cannot have fulfilling marriages and also have intercourse. That reflects outdated views. It is true that not all disabled people have sex or can consent to having sex, but that’s not everyone. Disabled people are frequently desexualized by society. As writer Summer Tao notes on the sexual education platform Scarleteen, “the biggest harm of desexualisation is that it deprives us of our bodily, sexual, and reproductive agency. “
It is also important to recognize that policies do exist that prohibit some disabled people from getting married, so Olson’s views are not so out on the periphery. Disabled people don’t have true marriage equality.
If a disabled person does get married, they risk losing federal benefits such as Supplemental Security Income or Disabled Adult Child, which provide funds they need to live independently with their disability, and at rates that are arguably not very livable.
In 2024, for NPR, Joseph Shapiro reported a story featuring a couple that got married without knowing that one partner, Amber, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy, would lose her SSI and Medicaid benefits. Amber’s Medicaid likely provided more than $100,000 per year for round-the-clock home aids and nurses.
“That’s not how marriage should be treated,” Amber told Shapiro. “It should be honored and celebrated. Not: You’re going to risk your life if you do this.”
According to the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, several pieces of legislation have been introduced recently to address this issue, including the Marriage Equality for Disabled Adults Act and the Eliminating the Marriage Penalty in SSI Act, but these bills haven’t gotten any traction.
In a nutshell, Olson’s comments are gross—but so is the situation for disabled people who want to marry their life partner.
