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Okay. Prior comments notwithstanding....

And the fact that the opinion itself was based on specious (at best) reasoning:

I visited the Judicial Watch website and followed the links. It appears that our esteemed judge is a secretary and trustee of the Community Foundation of Southern Michigan. In my practice I have had a great deal of experience with community foundations.

If CSFM is like any other community foundation I have come in contact with, it works like this:

1. The point of these organizations is to permit donors to make charitable gifts without the administrative expenses of creating their own private foundation.

2. Donors can set up a fund at the foundation for the benefit of a pet charity or a donor-advised fund (donor gets to pick and choose upon which of the downtrodden masses to bestow his or her largesse).

3. Donors can also give money to a specific fund under the foundation's umbrella (i.e., a fund created by another donor) or a general "discretionary" fund (a-la United Way) that makes discretionary gifts to other charities.

The "HOPE Fund" referred to by Judicial Watch appears to be a GLBT focused charity (not civil liberties).

[donning teflon suit, raising "devil's advocate" flag]

In any event, it is not clear from the article whether this judge had any discretionary authority to allocate funds. The ACLU may have been designated by the creator of the HOPE Fund as a recipient - meaning the judge had no discretion.

If this was a discretionary gift, the documents cited by Judicial Watch do not indicate whether or not our esteemed jurist had any discretionary authority over whether distributions were made to the ACLU. Generally (a-la United Way), discretionary gifts are selected by committee, although they are ultimately approved by the board as a whole.

Some unanswered questions:

-Was this a discretionary gift?
-Did Mme. judge have discretionary authority?
-Did she as a trustee abstain from a vote approving such a gift?

[removing charred tatters of teflon suit]

Notwithstanding the above, the standard is an APPEARANCE of impropriety - and she should have known better and recused herself.