I can just hear it now. In fact, I’m reading it all over the Internet and seeing it all over the liberal television news. Howls of outrage that Neil Gorsuch has been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“How dare Donald Trump nominate…a white…male…cisgender…
(It’s almost like men like Gorsuch and Trump had founded the United States or something.)
Amazingly, the U.S. Supreme Court currently consists of five Roman Catholics and three Jews. Three justices — Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg — were born and raised in New York City. Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer are the only non-Easterners on the court today, and they’re from not-so-middle-of-the-road California. Retired more than ten years now, Sandra Day O’Connor was the last Supreme Court justice from a non-coastal Western state (Arizona). One Midwesterner serves on the Supreme Court — Chief Justice John Roberts, from Indiana.
The court has zero Southerners. (Sorry, but black & intermarried Clarence Thomas doesn’t count.)
The court has zero Protestants.
Even a cursory glance at the religious affiliations of the people who founded this country — such as the signers of the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution, for example — reveals that 98 percent of them were white male Protestants. And many of them, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Charles Pinckney, were Southerners, to boot!
Again: The ethnoreligious group that provided 98 percent of the people who brought this country into its legal existence as an independent nation currently has zero representation on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Is it because white male Protestants have magically lost their ability to adjudicate legal cases? Have they all fled the legal profession? Hardly. If that were the case, what would the diversity police in the legal profession spend all day doing? In fact, according to a 2015 Washington Post opinion piece by a Stanford University legal expert, 88 percent of lawyers are white and nearly two-thirds are male. The author of that piece complained about how many legal firm partners and high-ranking attorneys were “not diverse enough.” So if that is the case, how is it so difficult to find a few good WASPs when seats on the nation’s highest court open up?
If white, male, evangelical, heterosexual privilege were real, why then would it take a political revolution like Trump’s election to get a male WASP even nominated to the Supreme Court?
The cat ladies doth protest too much, methinks.
| Tweet |
|
|
|
