On the Supreme Court, Representation Matters

This is a long one, so I’ll try to be as charming as possible to make it easier on you.

I get a zillion action alerts in my inbox every week. So every Monday, I post a bunch of links to online petitions on my blog. A couple of weeks ago, one of the petitions I linked to was from NOW urging President Obama to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. And the shit storm begins.

Some guy: I’m curious. If you’re all about “equality”, why should I “urge” Obama to appoint a woman? I would urge him to appoint the most qualified person for the position, regardless of gender. Appointing a woman for the sake of having a woman on the SC is ridiculous. Appointments based on gender are not equality, they are sexism.

I was surprised that someone would think that encouraging the President to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court meant that the new justice wouldn’t be qualified. So, I said that and added,

The purpose of appointing a woman is to have a more representative Supreme Court. There’s only one woman on the Supreme Court. To represent the 51% of Americans who are female, the Supreme Court needs closer to five female justices. Given that bit of information, there’s no need to get your thong in a knot over suggesting to bring the grand total of women justices to two.

Seriously, don’t be afraid, some guy. People who look like you still have the majority of the Court and the rest of government, despite the fact that women make up most of America. But this guy’s fears went way beyond challenging his privilege and escalated to serious paranoia.

Some guy: Yes, but you’re saying “appoint a qualified woman and ignore qualified men.” [don’t know where the quotes came from, since I didn’t say that]. Equality, again, would mean appointments based on skill, not gender. It shouldn’t matter what the sex of the person is. Sadly, most feminists (apparently like yourself) wish to elevate women over men, regardless of any other factors. You just want a woman there because you’re a woman. She could be less qualified than a likely male candidate, and you’d still be satisfied, because someone with your genitalia would be in a place of power. And that’s sad. I want qualified individuals in my government, not a selection of vaginas and penises.

He’s the only person on earth other than Stephen Colbert who doesn’t see gender, and Stephen Colbert is joking. And again, this guy is assuming that “qualified” and “woman” are mutually exclusive. But now we’re all getting a better idea of what this guy’s really afraid of. One more powerful and erudite woman in government takes us one step closer to the grand lady takeover of the country. Well, he’s got us there. Now where did I place that teeny violin? I thought this guy was in a better place in front of the computer instead of huddled in the fetal position in his sock drawer, so I said this:

I’m encouraging him to appoint a qualified woman to the Supreme Court to balance things out. The Supreme Court is hardly representative; it still wouldn’t be if the President appoints a woman. I don’t think I’m asking for much to have better representation on my Supreme Court. You talk about equality, but you’re satisfied with a Supreme Court with 8 men and 1 woman, and you become outraged at the very thought of a Court with one less man. Excuse me for being suspicious over what your real problem is. President Obama is most likely going to be appointing a woman to the Supreme Court. She’s going to be the kind of justice that he’s been describing for the past couple of weeks. She’s not going to be less qualified than any man he could have chosen. She’s going to be at least as qualified as any man he could have chosen. The only difference is that she’s going to be a woman. Her mere existence on the Court is going to make it more representative, which is something a male justice can’t do.

Yes, no matter how qualified any male nominee would be, he couldn’t make the Court more of a cross-section of the electorate. And that bothers the guys who look over their shoulders nervously while walking alone at night hoping nobody sneaks up behind them and takes their privilege. This guy gets real flustered and picks apart my argument sentence by sentence, which is something only a really pissed off person on the Internet does. He’s also so bewildered that he forgets what “representative” means and tells me this:

If Obama’s views match your own, would you say he represents you? Even if you’re (for instance) a white geriatric female [one out of three ain’t bad], and he’s an early-middle aged black man, he’s still representative of you. That’s the kind of point I’m getting at. Whether or not the appointee has a vagina isn’t going to matter. Would you feel represented if he appointed someone like Ann Coulter? She’s a woman, after all, but her views are markedly different than yours [then he calls me paranoid for questioning his intentions, which is real rich] . . . . You look at the court and say “Oh no! Too many penises! Not enough vaginas!” and see a problem. I look and say “Too many conservatives, not enough moderates/liberals.” . . . . I really don’t think people like you would be satisfied until the entire government was populated with women only [which, according to this guy, shouldn’t make a difference, because gender doesn’t matter].

I call bullshit. No one in their right mind would be afraid of the President appointing anyone but a good lefty. Well, maybe he’s blinded by his privilege, so he doesn’t recognize that. And no one with an IQ above their shoe size would think that I was only talking about myself when I was talking about better representation on the Supreme Court. If 8 out of 9 Supreme Court justices are men, but only 4.9 out of 10 Americans are men, that’s not representative. Something just isn’t right. This guy doesn’t understand that, since the mere mention of a powerful woman in the political world gives this guy diarrhea. He continued to stand by his delusions for the next couple of comments, I told him he was too big of a nutbar to talk to any longer (in so many words), and now I ask those readers who stuck around this long:

What the hell is wrong with people? I mean, this country has been ruled by men and patriarchal values since . . . always. Most of us, thankfully, have survived and continue to thrive in the patriarchy, but it’s still a huge struggle. All I ask is for the American Supreme Court to look more like the America in which we live. Values are important, and I cared more about values when George W. Bush was nominating justices. But we already know that a staunch progressive is going to be appointed. Why not make that staunch progressive a woman? Why do people think the male options have to be exhausted before a woman is considered? It’s purely ridiculous how anxious people get at the thought of losing a man in a powerful position to a woman.

And why don’t people recognize the value of having a diverse group of people on the Supreme Court? Remember the pictures of little African American children watching Barack Obama speak? It makes a big difference to see people who look like you in influential positions. If young girls and women only see men in positions of power, no matter how great these male politicians represent the girls’ and women’s values, they’re never going to grow up thinking that they can aspire to in those positions. That’s why representation matters.

Thanks for listening.