Justice and the Fairer Sex

With the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice comes the tired and lame accusation from radical conservatives that she is a woman.

Radio host G. Gordon Liddy said he hopes “key conferences” don’t happen while she’s menstruating.

This isn’t much different than what I said about Clarence Thomas when he was nominated: I hope “key conferences” don’t happen while he is imagining what someone looks like without her clothes on.

If you compare the amount of time a woman spends menstruating with the amount of time the average man spends distracted by sex or sports, you’ll soon realize that women should be making all the important decisions in this country.

Come on, people.

First of all, Sonya Sotomayor is nearly 55 years old, which means, with all due respect, that she doesn’t have a whole lot of periods left in her. Thus, Gordon Liddy, like most Republicans, is not exactly an authority on women.

Secondly, my experience tells me that any woman is perfectly capable of logical thought at any point in her cycle as long as you don’t tick her off.

(And what on Earth does Liddy mean by “key conferences,” anyway? I should think any conference involving at least one Supreme Court justice would be considered “key.”)

When they’re not attacking her biologically, Fox News types are saying Sotomayor tries to make policy from the bench and rewrite the constitution.

I don’t know where these people have been the last 200 years. Judges are supposed to help the constitution keep up with the times and with changing social standards.

When the Bill or Rights was written, corporations did not exist, nor did cars, global warming, semi-automatic assault rifles, civil rights, the Internet, and bands that give themselves absurd, surreal, non-pluralized names like “Third Eye Blind” or “Theory of a Dead Man.”

(Seriously, we must be running out of band names if all we can do is put random words together.)

Let’s say you start a new band called “Plaid Lobster Retardant.” You try to set up a website for your band, but you’re not allowed to register your domain name because it’s cruel to animals.

If you go by the original wording of the constitution, you and someone from godaddy.com would have to settle the dispute with a duel, because there is no language in the constitution related to animal rights or electronic expression.

Ideally, a judge could step in and declare that naming a domain registration site “godaddy.com” is also pretty stupid, and thus rule in your favor.

All this talk is just a way for conservatives to distract people from Sotomayor’s actual record, which is full of remarkably moderate, common-sense decisions. So far, she has ruled that:

- prison guards should not strip-search any adolescent girl unless there is a really strong reason to think she is hiding something,

- no one should be fired from a government job for exercising their right to free speech in their off time, even if that speech is offensive and evil,

- the government doesn’t have to send money to pro-abortion groups if it doesn’t want to, and

- everyone involved in baseball should stop whining about money and just play the game already (her injunction ended the 1994 strike).

It’s hard to argue with any of that, unless you’re a Pirates fan.

So let’s chalk this up as a political no-brainer victory for Obama and move on to something that really matters, like North Korea.

Next week: Is Kim-Jong Il menstruating?