But more interesting to me is the question Sotomayor's comment raises: How does experience, gender in particular, impact political judgment?
Via Economix I see this study found that having a daughter makes parents "two percentage points" more liberal, while having a son moves parents two notches to the right. Why does that make any sense? The authors explain:
But, you might ask, what does this have to do with Sotomayor, who has no children? The moral of the study is not that boys cast soft conservative spells on their parents, but that experience -- in ways that are unexpected, but logical from an economic standpoint -- can and does color perspective. Conservative fathers who have a bevy of daughters are likely to be more than commonly sympathetic to issues that effect them. So when Sotomayor says things like this -- "I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage" -- it's very easy to label her an scourge of identity politics, but it's more accurate to call her self-assessment honest.The authors theorize that the political influences children have on their parents may be due to "male" and "female" economic policies. Women experience pay discrimination. Women are also, the authors say, more likely than men to benefit from, and support, activist government in the form of greater public services.
Men bear a relatively greater share of the steeper tax rates needed for those additional public services. Having children of the opposite sex may make parents more sympathetic to the opposite sex's stake in the matter: Having daughters may make fathers more sympathetic to higher tax proposals that would enable provisions of more public services, and having sons makes mothers more sensitive to the fact that men would bear the brunt of these higher tax rates necessary to provide more services.
An honest self-assessment, perhaps, desirable in a supreme court justice, debatable.
Realistically, we know that even our top jurists are going to be products of their environments but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and find those who recognize the biases they might carry, acknowledge them and stipulate that it's part of their job to do their very best to eliminate them from their deliberations.
Sotomayor's comment is one that was probably better left unsaid. It would be refreshing to hear her say that her job is first and foremost to apply the law neutrally and that neither her cultural heritage or sex should or will have a bearing on her decisions.
Sotomayor’s detractors have falsely accused her of claiming superiority to white males by virtue of her gender and ethnicity, based on the following citation from a Sotomayor speech in 2001 - "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." The critics have seized on the remark as a sign she engages in "reverse racism", but anyone who makes the effort to read her actual speech would find that she was referring only to court cases involving race or gender discrimination, rather than judicial decisions in general. Her point - if you're a member of a group that has been discriminated against ("lived that life" in her words), you might be able to bring more insight and wisdom to those specific discrimination cases than a white male who never suffered that experience. The implication that she was asserting an overall superiority to white males is refuted by the context of her remarks, and it's unfortunate that those who quoted her have often either misinterpreted or misrepresented the meaning of what she said.