This is my first blog entry.
First and foremost I would like to let our generation know that “blog” is an incredibly stupid word and, frankly, I’m upset that we couldn’t have coined something sounding less like a bodily function. Not only is its widespread use going to forever permeate our common vernacular, but it can also be a noun and a verb! Couldn’t we have thought of something cooler?
That being said. Twitter is a cool word. I don’t tweet, but I seem to be in the minority there.
Most of my friends tweet. They tweet about parties, concerts, dude – did someone leave a shoe in my bathtub last night?? Politicians tweet. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tweets.
If Newt and I were friends and I were the twittering type I would have recently gotten a text telling me:
Newt’s twitter was about Judge Sotomayor’s lecture in the New York Times where she says, essentially, that her experiences as a Latina woman would make her a better judge than a white man.
So there it is. The GOP argument. It’s simple, straightforward and easy to follow. I’ve had several friends agree with our former Speaker already. I myself want to agree with him. Why is it that the color of her skin and her gender makes her a better judge? That is, after all, the same argument made by racist and sexist institutions throughout our history. Shouldn’t we be deciding Justices based purely on qualifications?
The problem with this tweet is that it falls under the assumption that we live in a cultural vacuum. What Judge Sotomayor was saying is that her life experiences will bring a different perspective to the bench. She is better qualified because she is uniquely qualified.
The issue of “reverse racism” (which is bullshit term – by the way. racism is racism.) is that it doesn’t take into account the fact that white men still hold most of the power in this country.
Very recently, there was an example of a need for this unique qualification. SCOTUS recently heard oral arguments for Safford United School v. Redding. The case involved a 13 year old girl who was strip searched for allegedly having Advil. In hearing oral arguments, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said: “In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.” His point was that this was common place, not a big deal.
Experience has everything to do with being a Justice or Judge. Had Supreme Court Justice Breyer had the experience of a recently developing 13 year old GIRL he may realize that the two situations are not comparable. Different experiences flesh out our legal system. When we’ve never had a Latina justice before, it can be said unequivocally that there are things she will see in a case that the other 8 white people and 8 men would not see.
This is a nuanced issue. Judge Sotomayor’s lecture was a five page long account of what it is to be a Latina in the Justice System.
Newt and those making the argument that Sotomayor is a racist might not be racist themselves, as the left immediately scrambles to proclaim, but they are being criminally disingenuous. They are oversimplying an incredibly complex issue of personal experience and judicial bias.
In sum: Twitter might be a cool word but a 140 character limit is not enough space for this kind of argument. So let’s keep it to finding drunken partiers’ shoes and keep the heavy stuff where it belongs.
