Sotomayor: A Civil Rights Set-Back For Latinas (Neocon or Otherwise)
I do not know Judge Sotomayor. I’ve never met her in person, and I don’t recall any legal opinions she’s authored. By all accounts, she is a competent, albeit not particularly distinguished, jurist. In saner days, being undistinguished would in itself disqualify a candidate from consideration for the Supreme Court. Those days are long gone.
Yet it is not Sotomayor’s unremarkable legal talent that makes her a poor choice, but rather her “race-conscious” and “gender-conscious” approach to the law. Sotomayor’s predilection to view legal disputes through the prisms of race and gender is illustrated by three quotes published in today’s New York Times.
Quote #1:
“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences,” she said, for jurists who are women and nonwhite, “our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”
This quote is objectionable, but not overwhelmingly so. One the one hand, it is true enough that all of us — to a certain degree — are i