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Here's a parallel, and frustrating, situation I've encountered. In a (rather large) North American metropolis I've lived in, there is a (very bad) t-shirt shop. It sells "black" t-shirts. Shirts that say, "It's a Black thing, you wouldn't understand," and "Fight the Whitey" and other things that I find racist, but that are currently vaguely "OK" to present anyway.
If the shirts and the business were judged strictly on their merits alone, the shop would probably go out of business. Shoddy workmanship, never open on time, trashy rude counter staff, cheap materials.
But there is enough sentiment in the "black community" in this city that "all new black businesses need to be supported" that, even if they don't agree with the shirt slogans, many people buy enough to keep them in business. "We want to give them a chance to succeed." I hate it.
Are those t-shirt makers "whores" or just good businessmen? Are they "inappropriately" playing the race card, just as this budding lawyer is accused of "inappropriate" playing the soul card?
Similarly, in a choir I was once in, I experienced the following. A soprano was very enamored of the works by a particular living composer, a modernist from her home land. She worked for several years to convince the conductor to put one of his pieces on our repertoire. Ins and outs of season after season went along, she was a successful mainstay of the soprano section, reliable and a strong singer.
Finally, the conductor included that guy's music in a concert. She was elated, and even more so, it was a piece with a sizable soprano solo in it. She auditioned for that solo, as did a few other weaker singers who had very little personal interest in this particular composer or the process by which his work had become part of our concert.
The manner in which the auditions were held required that the prospects sing their potential solo before the entire choir. So I heard all four auditionees. Three were horrendous. Couldn't sing loud enough, didn't keep time, didn't know the notes, clearly would never be able to master this complicated modern piece in time for the concert. One, the woman who loved this piece and this composer, was excellent. And I think my judgment of her is not extreme. It was a clear case of A, F, F, F, and I'd bet all the non-auditioning choir members would have agreed with that assessment.
She was so excellent partly because of her love of the work, partly because she knew the language natively, partly because she viewed this as a chance in a lifetime and therefore worked quite hard to prepare -- much harder than any of her competition.
But the conductor gave the solo to one of the other three. "I wanted to give her a chance," he explained. "She auditions all the time and never gets to do a solo."
He was judging on the basis of something other than ability or righteousness. He thought he was being nice. But every time you choose someone or something out of a set of options, you also by definition reject the remainder of the options. He forgot that part.
I almost quit that choir over that incident. The performance sucked, mostly because the soprano soloist couldn't hack it AND DIDN'T CARE ENOUGH to learn the work. But also because solidarity among the whole group who knew the sob story was just shattered.
What the conductor did, what the t-shirt guys did, and what this lawyer is evidently doing, is human nature.: hope to include context that should not be involved in a decision. Pick which Presidential candidate has the nicest smile, or seems least likely (or most likely) to sleep around and be sexy, rather than choose the one whose policies most mesh with our own.
I don't like it when people do that. But I find that when I DON'T -- and say something like, "But the real issue here is X, not Y" -- people get pissed off at me. "How can you ignore the fact that he does / doesn't seem to sleep around?" What does that have to do with politics?
What did the skin-color of the t-shirt guys have to do with the desirability of their product? Nothing. What did the singing ability of the loser who got the solo have to do with her successful audition? Nothing. What does a church attendance have to do with whether or not a lawyer can defend a case well? Nothing. Nothing at all. But people are stupid enough to think it does.
The Baptists always seem to me to be the worst at this -- they always "make sure to give business to members of our community." That's just SO bigoted ...
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The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. Friedrich Nietzsche
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