User: marycatelli Date: 27 May 2009 14:28 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

right

Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that Sotomayor has explicitly said that she's entitled to make judgments on the basis of her race and sex. Because being a Hispanic woman gives her the "richness of her experiences". As opposed to a white man "who hasn't lived that life".

User: tavella Date: 27 May 2009 14:52 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Behold the cant of the privileged: a judge who provides the experience of her life as a Latina is obviously Doing Something Wrong, while a white male judge doing the same is the Way The World Should Be.

Guess what? Your beloved white male judges "make judgements on the basis" of their race and sex all the time. It's the nature of humanity; what we come from shapes us, how we are privileged shapes us. And right now the Supreme Court gets nearly 90 percent of their input from one particular (and highly privileged) perspective. They'll now get a different one, and that's a damn good thing.

User: marycatelli Date: 27 May 2009 14:55 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Please be more precise.

What particular judgments are you complaining of, and how do you know that they are "on the basis" of their race and sex?

User: tavella Date: 27 May 2009 15:05 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Wow, Jonquil's post *really* flew past your head, didn't it?

User: beth_bernobich Date: 27 May 2009 18:08 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: Blue Surreal

Mary is a troll who couldn't be coherent if she tried. It's not worth engaging with her.

User: jonquil Date: 27 May 2009 15:53 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I'll give you one. The most recent abortion decision, Gonzalez vs. Carhart, Justice Kennedy's majority opinion.

"While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained." ... "It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form."

He has no data. He is nonetheless certain that some women regret their choice. That is a decision informed by being male. That's all he's got, that "it seems unexceptionable". In short, it's a gut decision, and the gut that made the choice is a male gut.

By contrast, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: " Revealing in this regard, the Court invokes an antiabortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from "[s]evere depression and loss of esteem." Ante, at 29.7"

User: elfwreck Date: 27 May 2009 18:08 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Phrasing quibble: He has data that some women regret their choice. (Anecdotal data, admittedly, but there's certainly plenty of it.) He has no way to *measure* that data to make it meaningful, or turn it into useful statistics--he is jumping from "we know that X emotion exists" to "X emotion is a problem that needs to be addressed by legal means" without any identified path between Point A and Conclusion B.

And the claim anyone who does regret, will obviously all regret it more keenly when they learn more medical details... that part is entirely in his head. It bothers him, so he believes it must bother them. ("It is self-evident that" he has no hard numbers so is relying on impact buzzwords to make his point.)

He has no stats about what percentage regret their choice, and what percentage regret *more* when the get more information.

User: minim_calibre Date: 27 May 2009 16:04 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

You know, you could read the whole quote in context if you were interested in looking at the nuances and reasoning behind the soundbite. It covers that, in the somewhat shorthanded fashion of speeches.

Context is everything. Which, curiously enough, is part of what she was getting at.

User: jonquil Date: 27 May 2009 16:12 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

<3 digby, as usual.

User: provacatrix Date: 28 May 2009 22:06 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I'm not in a place where I can look up the particulars right now, but you might want to look for Justice Ginsburg's comments on the difficulty she had, in conference, attempting to explain to her male colleagues that casual nudity in locker rooms does not really exist in the same frame of reference for adolescent girls as it does for adolescent boys and the fact that students in school do undress (to some respect) in the locker room context still didn't ameliorate the experience of a 13 year old who was strip searched in school (without a parent or guardian present) on the word of another student that she had a contraband ibuprofen.

User: prusik Date: 27 May 2009 14:36 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

What I find astounding is that every time a woman, person of color (or in this case, both) comes to prominence, people suddenly become experts on apophasis. Statements like Senator Imhofe's that emphasize the otherness in the guise of seeking to ignore it proliferate in the media. The senator can claim (and he may even think he's being sincere about this) that he simply attempting to make a decision free from racism or sexism. It's unfortunate then that he's doing this in a way that puts racism and sexism front and center. He didn't need that last compound prepositional clause (everything from "without" on). Certainly, I've never seen anyone speak this way about white male candidates (and we've had plenty of them to use as examples).

I'm holding my breath waiting for the equivalent of Rep. Westmoreland calling then presidential candidate Obama "uppity." Maybe it'll never come.

User: jonquil Date: 27 May 2009 15:54 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

You know how, when you're studying writing, bad writing can teach you more than good, because the seams are showing? I think it's the same way with political rhetoric. The people who are too dumb to glide over the cover story slip and tell you what they're really thinking.

User: ironed_orchid Date: 28 May 2009 05:21 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

That's a lovely analogy.

User: sollersuk Date: 27 May 2009 14:43 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

"Unmarked": I'm definitely more radical at 60 than I was at 20, but at that age I was very grateful to have language to express the frustration I had grown up with - over gender (I have taken with a great deal of relief to the singular "they"; I had for years been irritated by the lak of an equivalent to the French "on") and English being the unmarked nationality. As in:

"Everybody does X."
"I don't."
"Well, maybe you don't, but then you're Welsh. As I was saying, everybody does X."

User: delle Date: 27 May 2009 15:09 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

A white male rules (both senses) as Nature intended, free from personal bias. Everybody else is, by definition, tainted by their distance from the zero axis.


Yes, this. I have been thinking and stewing for 24 hours over the fact that some people are going to make an issue of her statement about a wise Latina woman. Because only white men are bias-free.

Somedays I could choke on the male privelege floating out there. And I was completely oblivious to it in my 20s. Now? It's everywhere.

User: jonquil Date: 27 May 2009 15:44 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: privilege

Yeah. What *was* I thinking? (My own privilege being part of this, natch.)

User: attackfish Date: 27 May 2009 15:11 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Of course no white able-bodied upper middle class straight cissexual male of Christian heritage has ever been unduly influenced by his race and gender (and other unmarked factors). Attempts to end the Voting Rights Act, keep gay marriage illegal, casually ignore the ADA guidelines, and restrict birth control access must be a figment of my imagination.

User: dichroic Date: 27 May 2009 15:17 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Dorothy L. Sayers: "Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force".

And I believe it was Gloria Steinem who said, "Women grow more radical with age."

I read the latter in my 20s and the former in my 30s, so it's come as no surprise.

User: tavella Date: 27 May 2009 15:40 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Gotta say, I do hope that Obama doesn't listen to the screaming and feel he has to appoint a white male next time (and he will get a next time; I'll be astounded if Stevens doesn't stand down before the end of Obama's first term.) The next three or four appointments could be non-white-male and the court would still be barely balanced.

User: jonquil Date: 27 May 2009 15:43 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Yes, THIS. This.

User: neadods Date: 28 May 2009 02:09 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: omg

I do hope that Obama doesn't listen to the screaming and feel he has to appoint a white male next time

I don't think he will listen to the screaming. He's got to know that he could appoint Bubba T. Lillywhite the evangelical minister and they'd STILL scream that the appointee was too liberal/biased/elistist/insult du jour, so why listen in the first place? As the tagline to War Games had it, "the only way to win is not to play."

User: zunger Date: 27 May 2009 16:46 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I'm amused that Sen. Inhofe seems to consider Republicanism to also be "unmarked." :) But then again, he is from Oklahoma.

Thanks for saying this so clearly, BTW. It's been bugging me since the smear campaign rumblings started, but I couldn't quite put a word to it.

User: aquaeri Date: 01 Jun 2009 03:41 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I agree with pretty much everything you say here, except that I expect now (at 41) I will be more radical at 50 than I was at 25, because the injustice is so much more obvious to me now and I don't expect that it will exactly go away in the meantime. And wordy McWord on needing all that academic jargon. I'm even finding I need to fully understand "hegemony" so it can become part of my productive vocab.