Sotomayor

spike said:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/14/gomez.supreme.court/index.html?iref=24hours
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100% bullshit. All that article does is split hairs and say "Well, if you look at it this way, then it isn't blatantly offensive". That's like me taking a piece of rope, then saying "Well, if you squint, and tilt your head, and it's dark out, then the rope looks like a snake!". That doesn't mean the rope is gonna bite you anytime soon.

Given enough time, you can probably re-analyzes someone's words enough to construct your own meaning out of them. That doesn't mean that your fabricated reason is the speaker's original meaning. Just because one OPINION columnist is able to bend the words to make it slightly palatable doesn't make it any less ignorant.
 
Altron said:
Given enough time, you can probably re-analyzes someone's words enough to construct your own meaning out of them. That doesn't mean that your fabricated reason is the speaker's original meaning.
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With enough time you can probably find something anyone said to take out of context and fabricate your own meaning out it.
 
spike said:
With enough time you can probably find something anyone said to take out of context and fabricate your own meaning out it.
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It sounds pretty fucking insulting to me on the first read, without having to go through it several times trying reconstruct it to be inoffensive, like your columnist did. It's pretty clear that she's claiming intellectual superiority based on gender and ethnicity. I thought we used to have a law or something like that saying that all races and genders are created equal, and I don't think anyone who isn't an idiot wants that law to be interpreted by someone who thinks that her race and gender make her a better decision maker than someone else.

You should listen to me spike. I'm a white anglo-saxon protestant man. That means I'm wiser than some hispanic bitch.
 
spike said:
It happens sometimes when your first read is out of context spin.
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Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice 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 Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also 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.
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If I said that same speech, but swapped "latina" and "white", I'd be branded a bigot and a racist.
 
A day to be joyous (Souter is going away) or a day to be sad (an admitted bigot is on the highest court)
 
Altron said:
If I said that same speech, but swapped "latina" and "white", I'd be branded a bigot and a racist.
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Yeah, if you take it out of context and try and make it look like she wasn't referring to people with more experience on a particular subject and try and spin it a bit.
 
spike said:
Yeah, if you take it out of context and try and make it look like she wasn't referring to people with more experience on a particular subject and try and spin it a bit.
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Spike, I just quoted it in context. I can send you a link to the 5 page NYTimes article containing the full speech. You're going to need to think of a new retort besides "Well, yeah it's offensive, but it's out of context!"

Let me put it in context AGAIN, since you obviously did not bother to read post #32.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice 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 Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also 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.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/us/politics/15judge.text.html

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.

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice 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 Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also 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. Many are so capable. 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.

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.

I also hope that by raising the question today of what difference having more Latinos and Latinas on the bench will make will start your own evaluation. For people of color and women lawyers, what does and should being an ethnic minority mean in your lawyering? For men lawyers, what areas in your experiences and attitudes do you need to work on to make you capable of reaching those great moments of enlightenment which other men in different circumstances have been able to reach. For all of us, how do change the facts that in every task force study of gender and race bias in the courts, women and people of color, lawyers and judges alike, report in significantly higher percentages than white men that their gender and race has shaped their careers, from hiring, retention to promotion and that a statistically significant number of women and minority lawyers and judges, both alike, have experienced bias in the courtroom?

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering. We, I mean all of us in this room, must continue individually and in voices united in organizations that have supported this conference, to think about these questions and to figure out how we go about creating the opportunity for there to be more women and people of color on the bench so we can finally have statistically significant numbers to measure the differences we will and are making.

I am delighted to have been here tonight and extend once again my deepest gratitude to all of you for listening and letting me share my reflections on being a Latina voice on the bench. Thank you.
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I think anyone who isn't a completely partisan whackjob is disturbed by her racism and bigotry. She's insulted the 222 years of judicial tradition that precedes her, because OBVIOUSLY us EVIL WHITE GUYS can't make fair decisions. Kick all them damn crackers off of the supreme court! and let's change the constitution to be written in spanish. oh, wait, we don't even need a constitution any more. Equality be damned - wise latina women can make way better judges then those damn redneck cracker whiteys.
 
Altron said:
Spike, I just quoted it in context. I can send you a link to the 5 page NYTimes article containing the full speech. You're going to need to think of a new retort besides "Well, yeah it's offensive, but it's out of context!"
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I read your quote and noticed that what you pulled out did not reflect what she was referring to when she said that. Therefore it was out of context.

Now that you've put the entire context it doesn't sound so bad huh? That's because in context you can see that she was saying people with certain experience in a subject may sometimes be able to reach a better decision on that subject than people without that experience. However "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".

So gee, that doesn't really leave you anything to complain about when you have the full context.

See how that works? I think only a complete nutjob would still try to call it racism with the full context.
 
spike said:
I read your quote and noticed that what you pulled out did not reflect what she was referring to when she said that. Therefore it was out of context.

Now that you've put the entire context it doesn't sound so bad huh? That's because in context you can see that she was saying people with certain experience in a subject may sometimes be able to reach a better decision on that subject than people without that experience. However "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".

So gee, that doesn't really leave you anything to complain about when you have the full context.

See how that works? I think only a complete nutjob would still try to call it racism with the full context.
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Congrats, you found the one line that disagrees with the rest of the speech.

Here's the other ones
our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.
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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.
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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.
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But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
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For all of us, how do change the facts that in every task force study of gender and race bias in the courts, women and people of color, lawyers and judges alike, report in significantly higher percentages than white men that their gender and race has shaped their careers, from hiring, retention to promotion and that a statistically significant number of women and minority lawyers and judges, both alike, have experienced bias in the courtroom?
Click to expand...

We, I mean all of us in this room, must continue individually and in voices united in organizations that have supported this conference, to think about these questions and to figure out how we go about creating the opportunity for there to be more women and people of color on the bench so we can finally have statistically significant numbers to measure the differences we will and are making.
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Any judge that says they're going to make different decisions based on their ethnicity does not belong on the bench. The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land. There are two things that should affect a judge's decision - the Constitution, and the evidence. Personal bias and opinions have no place in the Supreme Court.
 
Yeah you can't really not have your experiences and education not affect how you see things. The line I bolded does not disagree with the rest of the speech. I don't really see anything to get worked up about here.
 
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