Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Judge Not Lest Ye Judged.

Attention all Nutbags of the Retail Right.

Before you carry on with any more whining that 'Maria' Sotomayor is somehow unfit for the bench due to her gender, nationality, cultural identity, empathy, sympathy or anything else, read these quotes:

…when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant – and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases – I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position…when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, "You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country.

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender.
– Samuel Alito coming on all Italian immigrant at his confirmation hearing to sound of Republican silence.


The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible. Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe, and has least support in the churchgoing United States.

I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? – Anton Scalia
crashing through the wall between church and state to the sound of the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves.


I have followed this man's career for some time…he is a delightful and warm, intelligent person who has great empathy and a wonderful sense of humor
. – Poppy Bush 41 dropped the 'E" word about Clarence Thomas to the sound of distant crickets.


The thing is that conservatives like biased Supremes and 'activist' judges' just fine, so long as their activism is directed in the right, ie their, direction. 'Not only do state-court judges possess the power to "make" common law’ opined Scalia, ‘but they have the immense power to shape the States' constitutions as well’ and without conservative judges 'legislating from the bench', corporate personhood would still be a distant nightmare and the world would have just waved goodbye to President Gore.

However, if the Supremes weren'tprone to the odd bit of interpretation then the unfortunate Terri Schiavo would not have had to go through that pathetic farrago as the letter of the law would have seen dispatched to the great hereafter on the PDQ.

Is Sotomayer biased? Who isn't? Plainly the rest of the Supremes are. Maybe conservatives would prefer the SCOTUS to consist of a series of Hewlett-Packards running MicroSoft ConJustice™ 2.0 that would digitally determine how the 18th Century Constitution would apply in the 21st, but that would mean that the occasional case would go against them. Grrr! Stoopid activist computers!

So he who hath no sin cast the first stone! Judge not lest ye be judged! And stop being such bloody hypocrites.