Sotomayor Gay? Who Cares?

Okay, now the speculation about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is getting stupid.  Whether she’s the sharpest knife in the drawer, or a bitchy bully, or a reverse racist seems mild in comparison to the current “is she a Lesbian?” nonsense.  So what?  Even if she is, what the hell difference does it make?

Don’t get me wrong, some things I don’t know about her do worry me.  Mainly because Barack Obama chose her, and I don’t trust him as far as I can throw the Empire State Building.  I worry that she might not be supportive of abortion rights, or gay marriage.  But, that’s because I worry that the Pretendident’s lip service to those issues hides a contrary agenda.  The fact that he won’t actually take a stand and actually do something to protect women and gays not only worries me, it pisses me off.  And, because I don’t trust him, I wouldn’t put it past him to try to put a stealth candidate on the Court.  Sotomayor’s reticence on those issues is not exactly confidence building, ya know?

But, whether or not she’s gay matters not one whit to me.  If she is, and prefers to keep that information to herself, so be it.  By just about all accounts I’ve read, Judge Sotomayor’s record on LGBT cases is almost as thin as her record on abortion.  They’ve gone as far back as her Princeton days, and, besides a few cases, the best they’ve come up with is a letter of support she signed in college advocating for protection for gays from what are now called hate crimes.  But, like pro-choice organizations, and women in general, gay activists are clearly on her bandwagon.  From what I can tell, that has more to do with the fact that she’s Puerto Rican and female than any indication that their collective gaydar is twitching.  None of which has a damned thing to do with how she might rule on anything affecting anybody.

Some might posit that a closeted Lesbian is likely to take a harsh stand on gay rights issues in order to avoid being outed, while others would suggest that closeted or not, a gay person is more likely to have empathy for plaintiffs they can relate to identity-wise.  Pure unadulterated happy crappy hogwash, if you ask me.  Gay people are no more likely to behave monolithically than black people.  Okay, bad example.  But, I’m black, and knowing that doesn’t mean squat when it comes to my lack of support for the most Historically Historic Conveniently Black Candidate of Color Ev-ah being elected President of the United States of AmeriKKKa.  Or, however the ya-gotta-vote-for-the-brother, Sistah, folks put it.

Like Sotomayor’s sexual orientation, Barack Obama’s skin color means nothing to me.  The fact that it seems the feeling’s mutual means a lot to me however.  I resent the fact that he exploits blackness, and black people, to his advantage, while refusing to address a single issue relative to African Americans specifically, unless he’s dissing us for making him look bad. When he does speak on the subject of race, he uses it like a “get out of jail free card,” like he did when the white voters he coveted were demanding he divorce himself from his pastor, and by proxy, his “deep abiding faith.”  It was an insincere, embarrassing speech that made Chris Matthews leg tingle, and my ass itch.  Like he does on everything, he refuses to take a definitive stand, preferring to encourage people who are polar opposites, and never going to agree on anything, to just, I don’t know, act like you don’t think the people calling you stupid are the assholes you know they are.  So, on that day in March, 2008, when he stood in front of 6 flags, (not the amusement park, just 6 or more freaking flags) and basically enacted the internal war raging in his own soul between his black half and his white half, and pretended to care about stuff he hasn’t yet come to grips with, I knew that he would never stand up for anything, or anyone.  He said he could no more disassociate himself from his pastor than he could his white grandmother, and, then, proceeded to tell us how unreasonably scared she was of men like him.  He, and most of the country, saw no irony in that.  Few people realized how painful that must have been, and obviously still is, for him.  Or, how his background shapes his perceptions, negatively, for the most part.

Black paternal abandonment is a big deal for him; you don’t have to be Freud to see how that fact colors his perceptions of other black men, and shapes his agenda.  They’re “boys” who have to be parented into shape, not victims of the kind of pervasive, systemic, ingrained, racism he has little first-hand experience of.  Except, in his own house, from his own grandmother.  Yet, he would argue that he is objective and impartial when he is no such thing, he is judgmental and condescending, and all things black are expendable.  They disappoint him, don’t they?  Are white people any better?  Read his poem “Pop,” and you tell me.

So, yeah, he understands empathy, as well as he understands that that does not automatically make one sympathetic.  You can understand how somebody feels and still hate them for it.  In Sotomayor’s case, however, she seems to carry her ethnicity with a lot more pride.  It’s her statements about who she is as a Latina that have gotten her in trouble.  As far as I can see, there’s little ambiguity about how she feels about that.  And, if she is indeed gay, not being out doesn’t necessarily mean she’s ashamed of that fact.  She’s my age, so I know the world was different when she was growing up, going to law school, becoming a judge.   There could be a lot of reasons besides shame that would keep an ambitious woman of color quiet about her sexual orientation.

All that being said, who they are is not nearly as important to me as what they do.  Curiously, I think Obama’s inherent wishy-washiness might make him an exemplary judge.  The same quality that makes him tone deaf and useless to me as a politician, could work well in a courtroom.  He seems to be able to see both sides and make a determination based on the letter of the law.  Which probably wouldn’t make him a popular, or particularly sympathetic judge, but a pretty fair one, on the whole.  But that kind of impartiality is a hindrance in a partisan situation like politics.  A politician’s  gotta believe in something, take a stand for something, set goals to achieve something, and work like hell to accomplish whatever that something is.  Something besides jut getting elected or, being president, that is.

There is no such thing as absolute objectivity.  We all bring our prejudices, however we got them, with us wherever we go, whatever we do.  We ask judges to set them aside as much as possible, but we want our politicians to wear them on their sleeves, passionately, with conviction.  So, Sotomayor’s personal issues don’t matter quite as much as her record.  But given that her record on issues I care about seems ambiguous, I’d like to hear what she has to say about them.

People like Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff, and self-proclaimed “muckraker,” Andy Martin’s “I hate to bring it up, ‘cuz, I’m no homophobe, but, I think maybe, you could make a pretty good case that Sonia Sontomayor just might be, you know…(whisper) gay,” pretty obviously have issues of their own.  Neither of them have shown any evidence that any of her actions on the bench have been, or, could have been, influenced by her sexual orientation.  That’s the only issue that counts.  Just as in Obama’s case, when one can speculate that had his parents had more children together, one might have grown up to be a radical, militant, Black Panther-type, while another could have turned out to be a conservative, suburban, soccer parent, one’s background does not necessarily indicate future behavior.  It’s only in hindsight, upon reflection and examination of one’s record, that assessments can be made of the how a person’s worldview may have been shaped by their upbringing.

So, yeah, I want to know what  is likely to shape her decisions re: Roe v. Wade, but given the lack of a solid record on the matter, hearing from her is the only way I’m likely to get a feel one way or the other before she’s charged with reviewing it, given that her Catholic background is just about all I have to go on.  How does she feel about gay marriage and the law?  Again, her record doesn’t tell us much, hopefully, she will.  But, whether she’s Catholic, or has had, or, considered an abortion, is as irrelevant as whether she’s gay.  I’m not Catholic, (but, what most people don’t know, for a lot of black people, Christian’s Christian, so, there were people in my family who went to a lot of different churches depending on what day it was, and I grew up going to all of them) and, I’ve never had or considered an abortion, either, but I support another woman’s right to have one.  And, to tell you the truth, if I was a judge, I would hope I wouldn’t have to try to bend the law to uphold that position.  And, to be even more honest, I probably would, just like the court has had to do many other times when the law was wrong.  Brown vs. the Board of Education comes to mind.  There’s not a lot in my personal history that would lead you to think that would be my position though, except I’m a black woman.  However, being gay, it’s not like it’s a decision likely to affect me and a lover personally.  That being said, if you talked to me for 5 minutes or so, you’d have a pretty good idea where I’m coming from.

We need to know from Sotomayor, either through her record, or from her own lips, how she “feels” about certain issues.  We also need to keep in mind that judges often turn out to be not quite what you thought they were when confirmed.  I’d even argue that some, on occasion, have ruled counter to their personal beliefs when the law is clear.  Is Sotomayor an Obatool, or, is she independent enough to do her own thing, follow her own mind, make her own decisions, based on whatever criteria she has allowed to shape her perspective?  I can live with the latter, I dread the former.  She can be a bully, a bitch, and a proud, loud, Catholic Puerto Rican all she wants to.  You go, girl.  Whether she’s gay or not, I really don’t care.

On that score, I just hope she loves somebody who loves her back.