Should female Supreme Court Justices think with their uteri?
Some liberals seem to think they do and should.
Ruth Marcus thinks that the female SCOTUS justices do. And she thinks it’s a good thing:
How did the Supreme Court manage to agree unanimously that police must obtain a warrant before searching cellphones, yet split on whether employers must offer contraception as part of their health care plans?
My explanation, slightly crude but perhaps compelling: All the justices, presumably, have cellphones. Only three have uteruses, and you know which way they voted.
This is hardly an isolated idea. It was inherent in Sotomayor’s statements about the superior judgment of a “wise Latina“:
And [Sotomayor] often said that she hoped those experiences would help her reach better judicial conclusions than someone without such a varied background might reach.
The line was almost identical every time:
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.”
That sentence, or a similar one, has appeared in speeches Sotomayor delivered in 1994, 1999, 2002, 2004 and 2001. In that speech, she included the phrase “than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” at the end, which sparked cries of racism from some Republicans.
A similar notion about the superiority and importance of membership in a minority or other group officially designated as oppressed was strongly suggested in an execrable comment by Harry Reid (is there any other kind?) in connection with Hobby Lobby, about which I wrote:
More reaction from the left…My favorite (and I mean that in a sarcastic sense) is from none other than Harry Reid, our illustrious Majority Leader: “It’s time that five men on the Supreme Court stop deciding what happens to women.”
I’ve got a idea! Let’s pack the Court, and have an equal number of men and women on it, and then have the men decide cases that affect men and the women decide cases that affect women. What could go wrong?
I am almost sure that the left would applaud—except they’d probably add that although an all-woman judiciary for cases involving women made sense, cases involving men need the participation of women to make them fair.
And although this case doesn’t seem to be so closely related, nevertheless there is a connection, Black Prep School President Steps Down After Mocking White Classmates. The young woman involved is, after all, only following the example of her elders, and if she goes them one better in how overt she makes it—well, that’s what young people do. They build on the work of those who have gone before them. If Peterson saw her task as student-body president as representing her own special interest groups to the detriment of others—well, why wouldn’t she see it that way at this point?:
The most expensive prep school in the country, the Lawrenceville School, spent much of its spring semester mired in racial tensions as its first black student-body president was forced to step down for “mocking” white male students on Instagram…
“I understand why I hurt people’s feelings, but I didn’t become president to make sure rich white guys had more representation on campus,” [Maya] Peterson told BuzzFeed, which reported the story on Monday. “Let’s be honest. They’re not the ones that feel uncomfortable here.” Peterson graduated from Lawrenceville, a private school near Princeton, N.J., in June…
…[T]he Lawrenceville School — where annual tuition is around $53,000 and the student body is 55 percent white, 21 percent Asian, and 16 percent black/Hispanic — would not comment directly…
Peterson…told BuzzFeed that the controversy over her leadership started long before the Instagram photo, with cries from some students suggesting that the election she’d won had been fixed. She also notes that some of her initiatives as president — to institute a “diversity representative” on the student council board, and to create gender-neutral bathrooms, for example — were not well-received. She caught flak later in the year, she explains, for raising her fist in a “black power” salute along with several other students for a yearbook photo. But Peterson, a lesbian, says it was always her aim to reach out to minorities who often felt overlooked on campus. “The younger kids told me they felt comfortable opening up to me in a way they didn’t with other people,” she tells Buzzfeed…
“I’m not saying what I did was right,” Peterson told BuzzFeed. “But it wasn’t racist. I was just calling those guys exactly what they are. And Lawrenceville is the type of place where those kids are idolized.”
Kudos to Lawrenceville for recognizing this as racism, whether Maya Peterson knows it is or not. And she may not know it, even now, because so many of her elders have modeled this sort of behavior and told her it’s not only acceptable, it’s desirable.
[Featured image: separate images from Wikimedia Commons – Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor]
[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]
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Comments
Yeah. What the Marcus piece…and the “wise Latina” trope…do for me is called “whip-lash”.
XY types like me have been told for decades, “There is NO DIFFERENCE between the sexes”. In law school, a PhD psychologist taught a class on the “Psychology Of Communication”, and had the temerity to suggest that men and women communicate differently. A little coven of incensed 22 year old chickies complained to the dean about this heresy against the dogma they’d acquired as undergrads.
Why are there not more females in science, math, and technology? Well, it SIMPLY CANNOT BE THAT ONE SEX HAS A TENDENCY TO DO WELL IN THOSE FIELDS. You best duck and cover if you so much as suggest that…!!!
But, according to Marcus, Grandpa Simpson Reid, and the whole “wise Latina” meme, not only ARE there differences in the way men and women think, Latins and the peach-colored think, etc., they are PROFOUND and IRRECONCILABLE differences that no amount of sympathy or empathy can overcome.
So…whip-lash.
Plus, wasn’t the Roe court without a single XX type…???
Don’t you understand? There are absolute differences when emphasizing difference favors women; there are no real differences when emphasizing sameness helps women.
Same with race: Skin color is absolutely determinative of a person’s thinking and perspective on the world; but any correlation between race and test results or criminal arrest rates can only be the result of white prejudice.
Along similar lines: Any criticism of any black politician must be motivated by pure racism — there cannot possibly be any other explanation — and it’s absolutely forbidden. Unless the black politician is conservative, in which case attacking him or her is absolutely not racist and it’s mandatory.
Excellent and on-point critique about Leftist hypocrisy.
I really think this is rooted in the logical inconsistency of Post-Modernism in that it pragmatically adopts any position or belief which supports itself, but when those positions can be used to criticize that worldview, it gets disregarded as unenlightened.
Great post – this is EXACTLY the point – and why this is such nonsense!!! The faux #waronwomen is being ginned up for the masses. Doesn’t anyone THINK anymore?! The dumbing down of this nation is reaching disturbing levels.
ON this topic, I just posted this in reply to a troll on another blog – why I feed trolls ever I don’t know…..I usually refrain).
The post was in response to this question:
and his “nimble” follow-up question:
when I said no, because they rule based on THE LAW.
Here was my (final) reply:
Apart from the question of whether a family-owned company has religious rights:
How did we get to the place where a bureaucratic agency has the right to coerce every business (and every insurance company) to cover contraception expenses? Shouldn’t EVERY citizen — religious or not, male or female — be free from the compulsion to participate in a communally funded “free” contraceptive-and-abortifacient program?
The fact that this bureaucratic dictate has to be fought on narrowly religious grounds is an indicator of how far we have gone into bizarro-land.
Aahhhh, the smell of leftist hypocrisy in the morning!
what if the women in question have had a hysterectomy ? are they less able to consider a womans case ? seems like this thinking with your lady parts thing is hetronormative … or something …
I wonder how would they count a trans-gender judge(male to female)?
They’d reject the transgender judge. They call their coalition LGBT, but they discriminate hard against the transgendered. Go to a feminist conference sometime and watch how “women born women” is the operative rule. They want to keep transgendered people out.
Hey, you always have penumbras of your ovaries…
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.”
+++++++++++++++++++
The off-the-charts narcissism in Sotomayor’s statement has always astonished me. Why would this woman simply assume that a Bronx-born hispanic woman has “richer” life experiences than a white man? She’s like a cartoon character, or one of those Saturday Night Live actors doing a skit in which white men go through life with a super-secret, whites-only password that gets them every advantage in life, and ensures that they never have to deal with any type of adversity or challenges (e.g., they’re never afflicted with serious illnesses, never have any financial needs, always get whatever jobs they want, never become victims of violent crimes, never have serious accidents, never get insulted or mocked or humiliated or harassed, etc.).
Well guess what, Sonia? The vast majority of white people in this country never received their secret password. They’ve had to struggle and deal with all manner of hardships and challenges, and most of them have never had the advantages or the privileges or the comfortable lifestyle that you, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, have enjoyed. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that a white coal miner’s kid from West Virginia, who worked his way through a state law school, has had far “richer” experiences of life than a pampered princess from Princeton like you.
Back when Sotomayor’s nomination was being considered I got into it online with some libs who were indignant that people were calling her out for her comment. Initially I took the position that what she meant was that a Latina woman would bring a different set of experiences to the court, but that she had been a little too ‘rah-rah Latinos!’ when she said it. They continued to argue that there was nothing wrong with what she said, which prompted me to read her entire remarks, and my conclusion was, yes, she’s straight-up racist. Kind of funny that the libs thought that reading her remarks in context would convince me she’s not racist, when it had the opposite effect.
I’ve heard black people say that every white person gets a “free ride through life,” and that any white man can walk into any company in America and walk out with a job.
Many black people tell white people “You don’t know what it’s like to be black!” Meanwhile, they imagine that they know exactly what it’s like to be white, but they’re wildly off the mark.
Get your ovaries off my freedom.
Using the same argument, only Justice Thomas should be allowed to decide racial discrimination cases, right? I may be okay with that!
What part of the Constitution allows for gender to influence interpretation? We have individual rights and equal protection under the law. The libs have to cheat to get what they want since their view is to have on group protected and they other not. Libs are for group rights and special preferences for some at the expense of others.
Three females who do not have to worry about being raped.
‘Only three have uteruses, and you know which way they voted.’
Yes, they voted to kill what comes out of them.
It’s not the “Latina” part that is the problem, it is the “wise” part that is questionable.
Should female Supreme Court Justices think with their uteri?
Well, what are they thinking with now?
Whatever it is, it isn’t working very well.
Let me reiterate a couple things here. Calling the Hobby Lobby case a contraceptive debate is intentional misdirection. It wasn’t about contraception, but rather, abortion. HL apparently supplied, free of charge, the 16 forms of non-abortifacient types of contraception approved by the FDA to its employees. And, will continue to, after the decision. What they brought suit over, was being forced to also supply the other 4 FDA approved methods of contraception, on the grounds that they believed them to be abortifacients, i.e. to operate after fertilization, and, thus, to kill a human life. I suspect that the reason that the dispute in this case is so commonly misrepresented is that the leftists, including probably the three uteri bearers here, wish this to be seen as part of the War Against Women, and not a War Against the Unborn. (And, note that some of the HL stockholders involved here are women).
The other thing though is that there is really nothing in the decision that would keep it from applying to non-closely held companies. Rather, the distinction here is practical, versus legal. The HL stockholders were able to operate with unanimity because it was closely held. It would be far, far, harder to do so, on religious grounds, if the company were not closely held (and, apparently, the HL stockholders also had an agreement among themselves that the company would be run as a Christian company). How do you show a heartfelt religious justification for an exception to the laws/regulations when the stockholders are not unanimous in their beliefs? I think that it would be quite hard. Which is why my reading of the case is that it is not de jure limited to closely held companies, just de facto limited to such. At least that was my reading of the majority opinion when the subject of closely held companies was discussed.
If you think with what’s below the belt, you know you are goin’ to be in trouble – all the time. Men know this and still…
Maybe women (Sandra Fluke O’Connor) will figure this out.
Justice begins and ends with God-given absolute thinking, not with “make me a priori and forget everyone else “