Sexism and Sonia Sotomayor
A month ago Josh Barro (a man) at the Atlantic wrote a piece headlined Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now. Around the same time the Guardian’s Mehdi Hasan (a man) similarly opined that “for the sake of all of us, Sonia Sotomayor needs to retire from the US supreme court.” The University of Colorado Boulder law professor Paul Campos (a man) also went on CNN to argue that 69-year-old Sotomayor should consider stepping down as a justice in order to give Joe Biden time to fill the seat with another liberal judge should the worst happen. And pundit Nate Silver (you guessed it … another man) said much the same thing.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that once you can count at least three instances of something, then, congratulations, you’ve got a trend. In this case, various commentators proclaimed, an extremely gendered trend. The fact that a bunch of men were clamouring for a high-profile woman to retire immediately sparked cries of sexism.
In Slate, for example, Dahlia Lithwick pointed out that “virtually every prominent person pushing [the argument that Sotomayor should retire] is male. And the people defending her are female.”
Please, I’m begging everyone, let’s not have this ridiculous debate again. We had this exact same conversation last year, you may recall, in relation to the late Dianne Feinstein. The Democratic senator, then 89 years old, was urged to step down after health issues caused her to miss a number of important judiciary committee sessions. These calls, in turn, were labelled sexist. “I don’t know what political agendas are at work that are going after Senator Feinstein in that way,” Nancy Pelosi said at the time. “I’ve never seen them go after a man who was sick in the Senate in that way.”
Do women in positions of high power frequently get judged by higher standards than their male peers? Yes, of course they do. But criticizing a woman is not, it goes without saying, automatically sexist. It certainly wasn’t sexist to suggest than an 89-year-old senator with obvious health problems might think about retiring. Nor is it sexist to suggest that we might learn a little something from the fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to quit the supreme court only to die in 2020 and have the highly conservative Amy Coney Barrett nominated as her replacement by Donald Trump just eight days after her death. In no world is it sexist to suggest that we might want to do everything possible to avoid a repeat of this.
It’s also wrong, it should be noted, to suggest that it is only female justices who have been urged to retire. Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest jurist in the court’s liberal faction, stepped down in 2022 following what the Washington Post described as “an extraordinary campaign designed to pressure him to retire and make way for a new nominee to be named by a Democratic president”. A truck even drove around the supreme court building with a billboard that said: “Breyer, retire.” And the pressure worked. Breyer stepped down and was replaced by 51-year-old Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the supreme court.
Breyer, of course, was 83 – far older than Sotomayor is. Amid the gerontocracy that is the US government, Sotomayor is basically a spring chicken. Nevertheless, she is still the oldest of the three liberal justices (Elena Kagan is 63). It would be remiss not to at least have a conversation about how best to avoid an RBG repeat. We have no idea what will happen in the future, but we can make sure we learn from the past.
It can’t be particularly nice for Sotomayor, I will acknowledge, to have her health and mortality be a widespread talking point. It can’t be very pleasant for people to seize on her diabetes, the early death of her father, and the fact that she has travelled with a medic, as evidence that her health might be compromised. But now is not the time to be pussyfooting around the issue in case Sotomayor’s feelings get hurt. Now is the time to be terrified that, should the worst happen and another rightwing justice takes Sotomayor’s place resulting in a 7-2 conservative majority, the civil rights of millions will be irrevocably hurt. Now is the time to be strategic.
Let me clear: none of this is meant as a slight to Sotomayor, who has consistently shown herself to be, as the Nation put it, “the conscience of the supreme court”. She’s an incredibly impressive truth-teller whose impassioned dissents frequently go viral. At a time when many public servants seem more interested in private enrichment than protecting civil liberties, Sotomayor is out there fighting the good fight. Her retirement would be a huge loss. But if the worst-case scenario does transpire, it’s nothing compared to what the rest of us are set to lose.
The US supreme court heard one of the most sadistic, extreme anti-abortion cases yet
The latest example of Sotomayor being an inspirational badass came at a supreme court hearing this week when she pushed back on Idaho’s assertion that its strict abortion ban supersedes a federal emergency care law. Sotomayor told the story of Anya Cook, a Florida woman who was turned away by an emergency room after her water broke at 16 weeks because her treatment required an abortion. She was only able to get treated the next day, when she was near death. “What is at stake now – what was being debated in court on Wednesday – is how much women can be forced to suffer, how much danger they can be placed in,” Moira Donegan wrote in relation to the case. “The anti-choice movement, and its allies on the bench, have shown once again that there is no amount that will satisfy them.”
Fifty women talk about life as a domestic worker under the Gulf’s kafala system
“Under kafala (‘sponsorship’) laws, domestic workers are vulnerable to abuse within their employers’ home – and leaving their workplace is a criminal offence,” the Guardian reports. A decade after Qatar was advised by the UN to abolish kafala and replace it with a regulated labour network, the system is thriving across Lebanon, Jordan and the Gulf states and vulnerable women are suffering.
Honduras referred to UN human rights committee over total abortion ban
Campaigners filed a petition on behalf of a woman known as Fausia, who was raped and then forced to give birth under Honduras’s extreme abortion laws.
The Viking women with intentionally reshaped skulls
While examining Viking remains from the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, researchers found oblong-shaped adult female skulls. They think the skulls were deliberately reshaped in order to signal status.
Anne Hathaway says she had to kiss 10 men during ‘gross’ chemistry audition
This sounds extremely unhygienic.
The week in pawtriarchy
A Utah couple thought they’d lost their beloved cat, named Galena. Turns out they’d accidentally shipped her in an Amazon return package, alongside five pairs of steel-toed work boots but without any food or water. Galena was rescued six days later by an Amazon worker in California who took her to a vet. She’d lost a bit of weight but was otherwise completely unharmed. Cat-astrophe averted!
