Justice has been served to us on a silver platter, she is blind
as a bat, and her name is Sonia Sotomayor. All that is lovely in
humanitarian terms, since she seems a nice lady. It is also
tragic in legislative terms, as she arrives laden with more
biases than a recording studio. Just another lib ad for
diversity, here to offer diverse ad libs in support of the tired
old leftist agenda. A real yawner of a dog-bites-man story not
worth the new Sprint phone it was blogged on.
But no, the press presses, this is historic. Why, because the
President says another “barrier has been broken moving us to a
more perfect union.” Decoding this, we understand him to mean
that hitherto there had been some obstacle barring Hispanics, or
perhaps Hispanic women, from becoming Supreme Court Justices. We
further hear a boast echoing in his words: only a man of his
superior breadth is capable of breaking these barrister barriers,
while another President — take his predecessor for example —
would be overcome by his panic.
Incidentally, George W. Bush, the aforementioned forerunner,
nominated twelve Hispanic women to the Federal judiciary,
compared to five such appointments by Bill Clinton in his eight
years. Lest one think to credit Bush for this… er,
broadmindedness, a recent study by American and Oregon State
universities is quick to remind readers that Bush was courting
Hispanic voters. Otherwise, they say, he put ideology above
diversity, a priority at which they frown between the lines.
It should be extraneous to note how ridiculous this talk is, both
by Obama and by this team of colleges. Judging the law of the
land at the highest level should be the province of the worthiest
jurists. The standards should be more about Mensa than menses, or
as I wrote some years ago, it should go to the swift, not to the
race. If anything, Bush is impressive in that he rewarded
excellence and promoted a healthy view of the judiciary. Still,
this battle has long been lost to a series of absurd premises
that dominate discussion of these subjects.
What is most riling is the burial of a great Horatio Alger story
under the phony racial historicity. The fact of Sonia Sotomayor
being a Hispanic woman is utterly meaningless. The term Hispanic
is in any case an absurd construct, equating people from
Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, the Philippines, Honduras, Ecuador,
Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile, Bolivia, Puerto
Rico, Mexico and Spain itself. The idea that all of those
citizens from all of those cultures belong to one racial category
is ridiculous, insulting and utterly misguided. Thus, the
grouping of Hispanic women includes the late Evita Peron and
Corazon Aquino, in addition to the sitting presidents of
Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. Is it so all-fired amazing that
such an individual becomes a Supreme Court Justice in the United
States?
By contrast, the real story goes lost. The impressive history of
Justice Sotomayor is her rising from the semi-slum of Bronx, New
York, living in a housing project, with a mother working as a
domestic, determined to propel her children to prominence by the
toil of her gnarled fingers. That those children are a doctor and
a Supreme Court Justice, that is a touching and beautiful story,
a hopeful saga, an uplifting tale. It is the story of the real
America, not the corrupt leftist distortion; it is the story of a
perfect union without imaginary barriers; it is the story of the
individual triumphing without the intervention of government.
Hence the ultimate irony. Nothing could be better for all
Americans than the erasure of racial identities from the public
thoroughfare. I want to hear for once in my life a radio
announcer say that Barack Obama has chosen Sonia Sotomayor for
the Supreme Court without the stupid postscript about Obama’s
Kenyan father and Sotomayor’s Puerto Rican mother. She is an
inner-city New Yorker like me, who went to Princeton, who became
a good lawyer and a good judge. It is inspiring to behold her
career, and I say that as a severe critic of her decisions on the
bench.
This politicizing and racializing of America by the left since
the Civil Rights Movement is not civil, not right and impedes our
movement forward.
