SUPREME COUT NOMINEE HEARINGS...LET THE SPIN BEGIN...

The Honorable Sonia Sotomayor is beginning at least a week of grilling, to say the least, on her ascension to the highest court in the nation. This is not out of the norm for any nominee to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the right wing asswipes are focusing on one thing and one thing alone...the "wise Latina" statement.

This, from the New York Times', is a reprint of Sotomayor's lecture entitled A Latina Judge's Voice, as published in the Spring of 2002 (speech in 2001) issue of Berkeley La Raza Journal - a symposium issue entitled "Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation."

I intend... to talk to you about my Latina identity, where it came from, and the influence I perceive it has on my presence on the bench....

Like many other immigrants to this great land, my parents came because of poverty and to attempt to find and secure a better life for themselves.... The Latina side of my identity was forged and closely nurtured by my family through our shared experiences and traditions....

America has a deeply confused image of itself that is in perpetual tension. We are a nation that takes pride in our ethnic diversity, recognizing its importance in shaping our society and in adding richness to its existence. Yet, we simultaneously insist that we can and must function and live in a race and color-blind way that ignore these very differences that in other contexts we laud....

When I finished law school in 1979, there were no women judges on the Supreme Court....There was then only one Afro-American Supreme Court Justice and then and now no Latino or Latina justices on our highest court....

[O]ne of my former colleagues on the Southern District bench, Judge Miriam Cederbaum....rightly points out that the perception of the differences between men and women is what led to many paternalistic laws and to the denial to women of the right to vote because we were described then "as not capable of reasoning or thinking logically" but instead of "acting intuitively."...

Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with...Judge Cedarbaum's aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases.... whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society.... I accept the thesis of... Professor Steven Carter of Yale Law School...that in any group of human beings there is a diversity of opinion because there is both a diversity of experiences and of thought....

[B]ecause I accept the proposition that, as [Yale Law School Professor Judith] Resnik describes it, "to judge is an exercise of power" and because as... Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School states "there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives - no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging," I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that--it's an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others....

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences...our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure....that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group.... As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown [v. Board of Education.]

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

The "wise Latina" statement makes total sense, yet the demagogues of the right wing have taken it out of context and represented it in a racial tone. Those now infamous words have been divorced from the totality of a 3,929 word speech.

Conservatives have been waving these 32 words as a sort of "red flag" to incite hatred and bigotry. Considering this party has become the master of spin and slime, I am not totally shocked.

Well excuse me Rethuglians and pundits....never having walked a day in the shoes of a black person or a Latino(a), I can only imagine the prejudice and bigotry they have had to endure during their lifetimes. I agree with her statement which has drawn so much fire.

The face of the SCOTUS has been predominately a bastion of white males (2 blacks and 2 women over time), but this does not reflect the face of our United States today.

In the first 2 1/2 hours of this initial hearing - comments are coming from, alternately Dems and Repubs, and the line has been clearly drawn. Sen. Lyndsay Graham has already made a scathing attack based on the "words" and thankfully Sen. Pat Leahy corrected the blatant lies he was trying to assert. (Leahy even had Sen. Sessions bolster the fact that Graham was "making it up as he went.")

I will be watching these hearings as much as possible - and I have faith that Sotomayor will be able to handle herself well against these sanctimonious fukktards (we know who they are.)

I may even be back here................later...................