Sotomayor Nomination Unleashes Furious Attacks
The nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, who would become the court鈥檚 first Hispanic if confirmed, has been met by a cacophony of right-wing attack dogs sounding a single furious note: 鈥淩acist!鈥�
Reacting to Sotomayor鈥檚 membership in the Latino rights organization National Council of La Raza and comments she has made on her judging, radio fulminator Rush Limbaugh compared her to KKK leader David Duke, suggesting she is a 鈥渞everse racist.鈥� William Gheen, president of the nativist extremist group Americans for Legal Immigration, called her a 鈥渂rown or Hispanic supremacist.鈥� Former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, the Colorado Republican and one-time presidential candidate who long headed the far-right Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, attacked Sotomayor for her membership in La Raza, which he said was a 鈥淟atino KKK.鈥� Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described the high court nominee on Twitter as a 鈥淟atina woman racist鈥� and said she should withdraw.
Now comes the (CCC), a white supremacist hate group which has called black people a 鈥渞etrograde species of humanity,鈥� with : a computer-generated 鈥減hoto鈥� of 鈥渨hitey-hating鈥� Sotomayor in Klan robes that fits in well with the tenor of the more 鈥渕ainstream鈥� attacks from politicians, pundits and nativist leaders.
That鈥檚 par for the course for the gutturally racist CCC, which is descended from the White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s that battled school desegregation. Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court Justice, once referred to that group as 鈥渢he uptown Klan.鈥�
Despite the furious comments from people like Tancredo, La Raza is hardly a racist group 鈥� indeed, it is a thoroughly mainstream human rights organization.
As to her comments, Sotomayor is being attacked for saying in a 2001 university lecture that she 鈥渨ould hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white man who hasn鈥檛 lived that life.鈥� President Obama said earlier this week that Sotomayor wishes she had phrased that differently, but that the comments simply suggested that a diversity of experience helped judges make good decisions. Sotomayor made similar remarks, saying earlier this week: 鈥淢y hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept that there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.鈥�
