Lady Justice: Eyes Wide Shut?
Choosing the rule of law over the rule of man marked a signal event in the history of civilization. Those seeking to implement “social justice” through the courts want Lady Justice to take off her blindfold so she can see the faces of the poor huddled victims of American class injustice—and rule accordingly.
Make no mistake about it, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s comment regarding the ability of a “wise Latina woman” to render a better judgment than a white male (which was not a one-time, off-the-cuff remark) is met with knowing smirks and snickers by those that travel in her ideological circles. It would not be considered a controversial statement on any college campus where “patriarchy” is considered a socio-political pathology comparable with fascism, racism, sexism, etc. Such indoctrination is not confined to women’s studies curricula; it is standard fare in (often required) undergraduate social science courses. Thus it comes as no surprise when President Obama initially dismissed criticism of her remarks as “nonsense.” To him, and all similarly educated “progressives,” it is just that.
The identity politics crowd views the concept of blind justice as a quaint artifact of an unenlightened era, as opposed to the evolved concept of a malleable standard of justice (the “living Constitution”) that empathizes with the social condition and feelings of the litigant. They consider affirmative action, feminist jurisprudence, etc., as progressive, representing a higher truth that trumps the obsolete, patriarchal thinking of the “white-male power structure.”
According to Sotomayor, the rule of woman is a superior legal mode whose time has come. They are wrong. Far from being progressive, identity-sensitive jurisprudence is literally regressive, as in harkening back to an earlier, unenlightened time when kings and oligarchs ruled by fiat, like King Solomon, the Politburo of the U.S.S.R, or today’s Iranian Ayatollahs.
Establishing equal justice for everyone, be they serfs or kings, represented a triumph of political thought, as did the presumption of innocence, due process, habeas corpus, freedom of speech, and other milestones that are part of a precious heritage of western civilization extending back through the centuries to the ancient Greeks.
Many who have not had course to find themselves unwittingly involved in civil litigation would be surprised to discover that these precious rights are now under wholesale assault from the left. The expression of opinions that run contrary to the canons of political correctness is not only constrained everywhere from the college campus to beauty pageants, it is firmly on track to becoming criminally actionable (“hate speech”). Men accused of gender crimes like “domestic abuse” are presumed guilty and have to prove their innocence in courts that are little more than feminist tribunals. Due process is also nowhere to be found for men accused in these Kafkaesque courtrooms. Such men are routinely stripped of their children, thrown out of their homes, slapped with extortionary child support orders and often jailed with no more than a hearsay assertion by an angry wife or girlfriend that she is afraid.
Thanks to the racial discrimination euphemistically called “affirmative action” that afflicts law and public policy nationwide, individuals who happen to belong to the wrong class: white males, are discriminated against in employment and school admission policies. The white firefighters vying for promotion in New Haven were blatantly discriminated against as a result of affirmative action policies at the Fire Department, duly affirmed by Sotomayor’s ruling. How ironic that Sotomayor’s own appalling appellate court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano will be heard by the Supreme Court this term. The high court may have been poised to finally abolish affirmative action. If she is confirmed, will she recuse herself?
The present grassroots anti-courts movement is unlike previous cycles of popular agitation against the third branch of government. This time it is borne by a groundswell of righteous outrage at the selective denial of our precious constitutionally guaranteed civil and human rights. It is not just the individual litigants who suffer when justice is administered by courts steeped in victim-feminism, identity politics and affirmative action. Confidence in the legal system entire is undermined when, under the color of law, constitutionally guaranteed civil rights are subverted to promote a self-righteous and flawed vision of political correctness.
That these injustices proliferate in virtual media silence is another scandal that will no doubt continue unabated with people like Sotomayor and other Obama appointees-to-be administering their brand of “progressive” justice.
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June 20th, 2009 at 4:02 am
If they want to emphasize the social conditions of litigants, then why not favor men, who have been treated so harshly by the legal system and society for decades now? But apparently that only cuts one way, just like “victims rights” only applies when it’s convenient for the state.
June 20th, 2009 at 11:17 am
excellent points, mark! thanks for the perspective.
June 20th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
This article is outstanding! I couldn’t have said it better myself. Unfortunately, the “truth” in this op-ed piece, conflicts with the agenda of the hypocrites and racketeers profiting in this country’s unaccountable courts.
June 20th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Going back to the Greeks?? The fight for ‘common law’ rights from which the American Constitution bloomed, was an entirely British development. Europe has a quite different and largely Napoleonic legal structure. The Greeks, even the Roman’s barely come into it. It was Magna Carta and the resritiction on the right of Kings that formed the foundation stone of modern law, with its innocent until proven guilty, rules of evidence, habeus corpus and all the other protections.
The destruction of that tradition built up over hundreds of years of BRITISH history is an ironic outcome of America’s revolutionary war and casting off the ‘oppressive yoke’ of that nasty patriarchal Englishness (a calumny as bad as any modern feminist’s) and the later jealous breaking up of the British Empire; an Empire which would have naturally passed to America as Britain’s ‘golden child’. But no, America had to play the spoilt child, shouting mindless mantras like ‘Down with Colonialism’, and continues today leading the anglophile world in the destruction of the very best parts of it’s rejected heritage.
June 21st, 2009 at 7:36 am
Aeschylus “Eumenidies,” (The Furies), the last play in the trilogy “Oresteia” trilogy that begins with “Agamemnon”, contains what is considered the first instance in w. civilization of the jury trial.
Orestes is acquitted upon appeal by Athena to the rule of law for what is best for society, rather than the desire for revenge for his killing his mother and step-father as revenge for them killing his father Agamamnon… that all began with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis at the beginning of the Trojan War.