Judge James Ho was the talk of appellate Twitter Friday afternoon. And observers seemed stunned after the conservative jurist from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit appeared to lash out at homophobic legal arguments.

Ho is an appointee of President Donald Trump with a reputation as a conservative, pro-prosecutor jurist. But his strong stance against the legal argument in question garnered applause on social media, as a footnote in the case appeared to cast the judge in a new light.

"Wait," tweeted Twitter user Sam Rubinstein, whose bio describes him as Jewish and gay. "Did Judge Ho just do something good?"

Raffi Melkonian, a Wright, Close & Barger Houston partner, started the conversation on social media.

"Really remarkable footnote from judge Ho, not joined by the other judges on the panel," Melkonian tweeted.

The thread referred to a footnote in a decision released Friday that pitted the parent of an unnamed student against Mississippi's Hinds County School District and three members of its staff.

The parent in the litigation claimed a school employee violated her son's Fourth Amendment rights by searching his pockets after a teacher caught him selling contraband candy, according to the opinion. She alleged the employee also grabbed her son's genitals.

But the footnote in the appellate ruling showed that Ho found the appeal to be frivolous, and stood alone on the panel in wanting to have the plaintiff's lawyer sanctioned for  "conduct unbecoming a member of the bar."

"The appeal is demonstrably frivolous on the face of counsel's briefs. Moreover, those briefs not only contain countless misspellings and grammatical errors—they also appear to appeal to prejudice," the footnote reads.

But what it says next set tongues wagging.

"Counsel's opening brief repeatedly contends that 'Brumfield was touching around in minors [sic] pocket, making minor believe the defendant was gay. Her reply brief then concludes that B.O. 'believed that … Broomfield [sic] was gay, making the touch of the minor's privacy area that more offensive,'" the footnote reads. "That is circular logic: Brumfield searched B.O.'s pockets, so he must be gay—and because he is gay, he shouldn't have searched B.O.'s pockets. And the demonstrable failure of counsel's logic makes one wonder why counsel bothers to bring up sexual orientation at all. It should go without saying that members of the bar are expected to engage in legal argument—not prejudice."

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