They are shouting that Judge Sotomayor is racist and I find it interesting that the people who are yelling the loudest are white face males.. I find more and more the racist bigots in our country are falling back on the argument that anyone who is different than themselves are racist.
The truth be told, Judge Sotomayor is female and of a minority race so she is unfit, in their opinion, to join the good old boys club in the highest court in our land . I think they can yell till the cows come home but we are going to have a new female on the bench. I will say it is about time!
What did she say?? Judge Sonia Sotomayor's 2001 address to the 'Raising the Bar' symposium at the UC Berkeley School of Law
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.
In our private conversations, Judge Cedarbaum has pointed out to me that seminal decisions in race and sex discrimination cases have come from Supreme Courts composed exclusively of white males. I agree that this is significant but I also choose to emphasize that the people who argued those cases before the Supreme Court which changed the legal landscape ultimately were largely people of color and women. I recall that Justice Thurgood Marshall, Judge Connie Baker Motley, the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, and others of the NAACP argued Brown v. Board of Education. Similarly, Justice Ginsburg, with other women attorneys, was instrumental in advocating and convincing the Court that equality of work required equality in terms and conditions of employment.
Now Judge Cedarbaum expresses concern with any analysis of women and presumably again people of color on the bench, which begins and presumably ends with the conclusion that women or minorities are different from men generally. She sees danger in presuming that judging should be gender or anything else based. She 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." I am quoting adjectives that were bandied around famously during the suffragettes' movement.
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I have had children in school by the same last name. we pronounced it
soto meyer...they say it differently.
I think she will be confirmed. But they are still looking for a big albatross that they can hang her with.
Patsy, I'm not sure if you welcome my comments, but having been warned that I wouldn't like your blog, I couldn't resist looking while I was here. The quote that stirred up all the controversy had to do with a wise Latina reaching better conclusions than a white male (my words, but close). She didn't specific whether the white male would be himself wise (maybe she lumps us all together), but, my golly, just think if a white guy had said that being white and male made him better qualified than if he had been black or brown or yellow and female. Methinks there is an appalling double standard here. Other (sitting) justices have admitted that being white males influenced their decisions, but they never said the influence was for the better, just that it was there.
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