The United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Religion and Race applauds the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The reason? Because she extends the racial spoils system, according to an article from the UMC’s General Board of Church and Society newsletter:

The United Methodist General Commission on Religion & Race (GCORR) applauded President Barack Obama’s historic nomination of an Hispanic woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 26, Obama nominated Federal Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Associate Justice David Souter.

If confirmed, Sotomayor will become the first Hispanic ever seated on the Supreme Court, as well as only the third woman to take a seat on the bench.

Judge Sotomayor hails from New York where she grew up in the Bronx projects. She is the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants. “She has Ivy League credentials and has enjoyed bipartisan acclaim as one of America’s finest legal minds,” GCORR pointed out.

Those credentials, and that acclaim, would aptly describe a good many more judges and lawyers in America (I also have real doubts about the validity of the statement that such acclaim is “bipartisan,” but let that be). Sotomayor’s nomination has nothing to do with her attending Yale Law School or her “legal mind,” it has to do with her ethnicity and her gender combined with her reliably liberal judicial philosophy. The president is certainly free to pick someone of the latter mindset, but why exactly do the other items matter?

GCORR joins a list of national civil rights and advocacy organizations that see Sotomayor’s nomination as a major step towards bringing the ideology of inclusiveness to all levels of the nation’s political system.

Ah, there’s the rub. It’s actually about the “ideology of inclusiveness,” which is another way of saying that we’ve jettisoned Martin Luther King’s vision of America, and replaced it with a racialist system that is based on irrelevancies such as skin color, ethnic background, and gender in placing people in positions that are supposed to be colorblind and gender-neutral.

“For the Latino Community, to have a Latina nominated to the highest court offers the prospect of providing a voice that has been lacking in the Court’s long history,” said GCORR assistant general secretary for Latino concerns, the Rev. Eliezer Valentín Castañón. “The opportunity for the Senate to affirm this nomination is to embrace the future of this country. We will be praying for Ms. Sotomayor and praying that she will judge with justice and compassion.”

“A voice that has been lacking.” To show how ridiculous this is, consider this: in the long history of the Supreme Court, there has never been a justice of Slavic descent, nor has there been one of Asian descent. No American Indian has ever served on SCOTUS. When do those millions of Polish and Russian immigrants, Japanese-Americans, and Cherokees get their seats? And if they do, how will that change the decisions the Court makes? And why should it?

The fact is that racial spoilsmen such as Castañón don’t understand that we aren’t supposed to have “Latina judges” and “African-American judges” and “women judges” and “white judges.” We’re supposed to have judges, individuals who lay their race and ethnicity and gender aside when they rule on a case. The people who come into their courtrooms aren’t supposed to be judged on the basis of their skin color or their language but on the basis of the justice of their claims before the law. And if such is not the case, then we are right back where Jim Crow had us–treating people on bases that civilized society should have rejected as proper bases for judgment long ago, and would have, but for the corrosive effects of sin. It’s amazing, really. Instead of combatting the continuing tendency of sinful people to divide up humanity into little pieces based on color or language or ethnicity or chromosomes, GCORR has bought into that sin hook, line, and sinker.

I don’t have any particular axe to grind regarding whether Sotomayor is confirmed or not. But as one who believes that Dr. King spoke out of the heart of the Christian tradition when he envisioned a nation that judges people not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character, I can’t help but see this racial cheerleading on the part of some United Methodists as a step backwards for us all.

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