Sotomayer and the Tyranny of Race

In every important respect Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election was a victory for racism. First there was the racist claim that his skin color made his election somehow significant for black Americans with whom he otherwise shares no common moral or historical heritage. Second, his stubborn advocacy of the parent's right to murder her child made it a victory in principle for the racist notion that "inferior" physical development leaves people with no rights that must be respected by their supposed betters. Third, the US Constitution has been openly set aside on account of fears that racist violence would result from investigating the facts regarding his citizenship at birth (lest they support the conclusion that he is constitutionally ineligible to serve as President of the United States.) Truth, right and the Constitution all sacrificed for the sake of racist fears and premises.

The reaction in some quarters to the Sotomayer selection smacks of the same racist mentality. "Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, called Sotomayor's nomination 'a monumental day for Latinos. Finally we see ourselves represented on the highest court in the land.'" There was a time when we understood that those who served on the Supreme Court had first and foremost to prove that they represented the whole people of the United States, whose sovereign will constitutes the legitimacy of the Constitution it is their duty to uphold. The notion that someone would serve as the representative of this or that race or special interest tended to disqualify them from service.

Of course, a person proposed for a seat on the bench can't be held responsible for how others see her. But in a speech she reportedly gave in 2001 "Sotomayor has said that personal experiences "affect the facts that judges choose to see….I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging…but I accept that there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."

If her assessment of herself was correct, her own words disqualify her from serving on the Supreme Court. Unless we mean to overturn the whole idea of Constitutional government, the decisions of the justices of the Supreme Court should be based on the Constitution and the laws. No justices can be allowed to "accept" judgments based on gender or ethnicity. If they do, what becomes of the promise of liberty and justice for all, of equal rights and the equal protection of the law?

Does the notion that it's somehow acceptable to disregard the Constitution on account of race in Obama's case now make it acceptable to confirm as a Supreme Court Justice someone willing to allow their ethnic identity to distort their judgment of facts, and the basis for their decisions? Tragically, this is exactly the racist legal culture we would expect to result from the racist political mentality the Obama faction exploited to achieve his electoral victory.

Unity is always on their lips, but their hearts are far from it. Instead of a national government that represents our common heart for justice and liberty, the Obama faction means to create a fractured reflection of all our differences, until we forget how to see, think and act as Americans, regardless of those differences. With this dissolution of the American identity they prepare the way for the dissolution of the United States itself, so that a strong sense of our national identity no longer poses an obstacle to their plans for a new, global regime that sets aside our "provincial" concerns with right and ordered liberty.

Of course, those concerns are precisely what raise our national consciousness above the level of mere group selfishness, so that our concern for the good of our nation becomes a concern for the rights and decent freedom of all humanity. The sacrifices we commemorate every Memorial Day are marked by headstones and memorials in far flung corners of the globe where Americans gave ultimate proof that this concern is no pious abstraction. But it seems that what they died to preserve for others, we are now quietly surrendering ourselves under the mesmerizing influence of racist fears and lies.

Such is the change Obama represents. But where is the hope in it, except for those who succeed, as he did, by invoking the power of the very evil their success has supposedly overcome? "Racism is dead," they seem to say, "Long live the tyranny of race."