Dark Thought for the Night

I was reading a Washington Post article pointing out that it's unlikely Bush will nominate a woman when Rehnquist retires, either. The Supreme Court has diversity in the wingnut eyes if it has one black man, one Hispanic man, one woman and six white men. So we are going to get the Hispanic man next time.

This is really sad, especially as all the debate with respect to John G. Roberts's nomination has been about women's reproductive rights. Not only will we lose those rights, we will most likely lose ground in the Supreme Court, too. Never mind that we are the majority. - If you think of the judges in the Supreme Court as representing their race and sex, white men are overrepresented by a gigantic amount.

One might argue that this doesn't matter; a good judge is a good judge. Yes, but the wingnuts believe that women and men are inherently different. Shouldn't we then have women representing the "women's views"? And if the "inherent difference" idea is rejected, shouldn't women be represented in the same proportions as their numbers in the legal profession?

I have already heard defenses of the Roberts choice as valiant stance against "political correctness". The real political correctness means munching on the dingleberries of the wealthy and powerful, of course, but as usual everything is turned upside down. So being "politically correct" in their sense really means "picking an incompetent woman/Hispanic/black judge". White conservative men are by definition not incompetent, you see.

I know loads of very competitive women and minorities, but they are invisible to George Bush's beady eyes, I guess.

If you see nothing wrong with what is happening, try this thought experiment: The SCOTUS consists of seven women and two men. One man retires and the president replaces him with another woman. We'd never hear the end of the yelling and shouting and breast-beating.