If you were going to have open heart surgery, would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who was chosen because he had to struggle to get where he is or by the best surgeon you could find— even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had every advantage that money and social position could offer?
As usual, Thomas Sowell gets it exactly right. We want the best, in all things, not the affirmative action candidate.
Sowell didn't get it right because he is Black, nor should Sonia Sotomayor be considered as a Supreme Court judge because she's a woman. Their race or gender are superfluous, or those characteristics should be.
The double-standard of Sotomayor's nomination is grating: She was nominated because she is a woman, but if we criticize her for her abilities or lack thereof, there are accusations of misogyny. Nice pedestal women have created for themselves.
I thought the idea of equality was about the destruction of pedestals and that everyone had equal opportunity to demonstrate that they could cut it and compete in the big leagues, without handicapping for being a woman or a member of privileged class.
That isn't the thing that bothers me the most about all of this. What is truly maddening is referring to anything a judge should do as having an element of "empathy," especially having empathy for women over men, or minorities over majorities.
Justice is supposed to be blind.
A judge is supposed to determine that laws are followed, not that empathy is meted out.
Acting as the referee for the law has nothing to do with empathy. The word that people are looking for is mercy; as in, "throwing themselves on the mercy of the court."
Mercy has a completely different meaning from empathy. Mercy, unlike empathy, flows from someone admitting their mistakes, of owning up to what they have done, and asking the courts for leniency based on the admission of guilt.
Empathy concerns itself with something else. It considers the feelings of those who stand before the law, regardless of what the law says or if the person has admitted their guilt, and told the whole truth. A judge cannot dismiss the law in determining guilt or innocence, but it can show mercy when meting out fines and punishments. Guilt or innocence is binary.
Absolution follows confession and penance, not the other way around.
The Supreme Court is liberty's last refuge, and empathy has no place in the Court's decisions. If the Court has done their job, and the society determines the law to be too cruel or harsh, it is the society who can change the laws under which the Court is bound.
The quality that judges must fight to expunge from themselves, to properly execute their duties as a judge of the law (not of the person), is empathy; otherwise, there is one law for me, and other for thee. That's not justice and that is not the liberty we stand for as a nation.
"The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens."- Thomas Jefferson, 1816
"Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine."- Thomas Jefferson, 1776
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