Thoughts on Political Matters

[aeljn]

I wish that everyone who calls Judge Sonia Sotomayor a racist on the basis of this quotation:

"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."
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/s/soniasotom410703.html

would take a

Comments

[arrogantcur]

Re. Sotomayor:

Anything's possible, so I'm reluctant to say anything for certain. But I seriously doubt she's in any way racist against white people or sexist against males. If I were to harbor that belief I would require more than that single quote which keeps getting brought up by people opposed to her nomination.

Having said that, I never really analyzed it, or read it analyzed, like you did here. Hoping that somebody's life experiences would affect her ability to make the right decision is normal; you hope people are going to learn instead of remaining willfully ignorant. Plus, of course people aren't going to make the right calls all the time and she never claimed that all Latina women were wise. To be totally honest, when I first heard that quote I did briefly wonder whether she might feel superior even though I thought she'd probably be a good Justice. You've pretty well eliminated that tiny bit of suspicion, so thanks.

The difference between Obama and Sotomayor and McCain is that, as far as I know, McCain never passed any bar exam. Neither did I, but I believe that most decent-to-good members of the law profession are careful about how they phrase things. I don't mean that as a knock against those people, since I think there's nothing wrong with being careful. When McCain made the statement that arguably killed his campaign, if you take out the words "I think" (and from the printed quote, it seems like he may have stopped talking right after he said "I think" and started over with something like a whole new sentence) then it appears he is trying to project absolute certainty. He didn't just THINK the fundamentals of the economy were strong, they WERE strong. That wasn't careful. It was a gamble, and he paid for it.

Re. Limbaugh:

I'll be a lot less verbose here. If you asked him, he'd probably tell you that his listeners don't need his help, and that if they asked for help from him or from anybody else there was something wrong with them. (Despite the fact that he was on welfare himself once.)

Re. homosexuality and abortion:

I'm glad that nobody taught you homosexuality was evil when you grew up. For all I know it might've just been because nobody wanted to talk about it, but it may have made all the difference. If somebody taught me that it was evil when I was growing up, it may have made all the difference with me, so it ain't just a Catholic or religious thing. The Old Testament calling it an abomination doesn't exactly help things, but IIRC a lot of the more brutal laws of the Old Testament don't mesh very well with the much more tolerant and forgiving message of Jesus in the New one. Also, you do remember correctly about left-handed people. My grandmother started out left-handed but her teachers made her learn to write with her right hand. In the end she became ambidextrous, which is cool if you come by it naturally but not very cool if you are forced to spend countless hours working at it when you could instead be doing things that were either more productive or more fun.

With the guy who shot that doctor, it's really anybody's guess. The guy already demonstrated that he considers it okay to disobey what's written in the Bible sometimes. One of the Ten Commandments says either "thou shalt not kill" or "thou shalt not murder" depending on how it's translated or who you ask, but since the gunning down of another human being in cold blood qualifies as both killing and murder, he broke that one. Knew he was breaking it, and didn't care. I guess he figured God would understand and/or approve. So if this same person were to have fathered a child and if there was some way of determining that it would be gay, he might have made an exception there as well, figuring that God would understand and/or approve.

Finally, I hope that this new LJ entry (I found yours through Lia's, btw) means that your hands aren't bothering you as much as they had been.