Originally Posted by roachboy

thanks for dodging my question, zenturian. perhaps you imagined that will's one-dimensional reponse covered what i was asking you. but you'd be wrong.

as for your "argument"--it's curious that santomeyer's legal work isn't relevant, don't you think?
perhaps i was mistaken in imagining that a supreme court nominee should be debated on the basis of what she might have actually done as a judge. strange to see that somehow it's not relevant here.

but seriously, why do you ask, zenturian? why is this important?

Originally Posted by dippin

First of all, it was a speech given at the Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture, it was only reprinted in that journal and was not prepared for it, as you are trying to imply. As such, to try to link her to a provocative add for a DVD is nonsense.

Second of all, this attempt to claim that La Raza is somehow a Hispanic KKK is ridiculous. While La Raza translates literally as "The Race," the reason the organization has this name is because of an essay called "La Raza Cosmica," a future race denomination that would be a mixture of all races and create a place called "universopolis," where there would be no race division and no racism. It is basically an advocate group for Latinos.





I guess this answers my question about whether or not you read the entire transcript. To try to focus on one sentence on a transcribed speech and ignore the context completely is not really the way to go if anyone wants to have an honest discussion about her views. I posted the entire speech, with the sections where he says stuff where she clearly contradicts what you claim she is saying, and you've ignored it so far.

As I said before, if one out of context sentence transcribed from a speech she gave 8 years ago is the best that her opposition can do for someone with hundreds of published legal opinions and judgments, who has been on the bench for 17 years, she will have an easy time being confirmed.

---------- Post added at 09:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:58 PM ----------

The fact is, if this was the only sentence she ever said, we could have this discussion about what it is and what is means. I think that it is open ended enough that there is at least some ambiguity about what she meant.

But this is not the only sentence she ever said. In fact, that sentence is a part of a speech, and a part of a long judicial career. So the question becomes: do we have any other evidence to support the interpretation that you are making, that she is in fact a racist that thinks that Latinos make better judges?

And the answer is clearly no. She says multiple times in the same speech that the experiences of being a minority or a woman does not make one more enlightened in general, or a better judge, or a representative of an entire group of people, and that the person should not be biased by their race. And that the point she is making in her speech is that the experience of being a minority or a woman can enrich one's perspective, that one can be wise in different ways, that multiple decisions can be simultaneously wise, but that the real challenge is knowing when one is allowing that experience to enrich their judgment and when one is allowing that to cloud their judgment.

I think a debate of her views is welcome, but I think that willingly reducing the amount of information we have on her to one sentence so that people can be persuaded that she is something she has no other signs of being is really uninteresting.