Why Obama Needs To Appoint A Woman To The Supreme Court

A Representative Court
-and a tribute to Constitutional law expert Mark Tushnet-

Roughly half the country consists of females. Eve was the "only acceptable helpmate" to Adam. Yet, they still have little real voice in some arbitrary decisions that affect them daily. Women did not even get to vote in this country until 1920. That means that women have not even held the vote in this country for a hundred years.

Woman have been historically not just disrespected but ABUSED by spouses, employers, and the Church, and it still continues. ABUSED. Insulted, Demeaned, Belittled, Trashed and ABUSED. It was just recently that serious protections against domestic violence became law, thanks in large part to Joe Biden's efforts. It's outrageous and inexcusable that the status of women has not progressed with more deliberate speed. They still are hired at substantially less wages and rates and employed less readily than men of comparable talent- even prevented from certain professions all together in some part of the world. The numbers of women partners in major law firms you can still count on your hands, the numbers of women CEOs that did not inherit the family business is also abysmal. Women of national prominence who did not piggy back their careers on the panache of their husbands and rise to prominence on their own talent and merit you can count on one hand.

The Catholic Church is made of an all male hierarchy who sincerely believe that the Holy Spirit only works through the men of the hierarchy. Women just don't rank enough in piety definitionally. They either get with the program or get off the bus in the Catholic Church (if they are not booted off the bus for being too vocal.) They don't have any real power- decisions about what is or is not "sin" is therefore an exclusively male determination. Regardless of the personal holiness, sanctity or piety of any one of them- whether an Archbishop is a pedophile or Gay or not (as one retired one recently confessed) they still maintain that they -only men-are exclusively qualified over every woman in the world to know the Will of God on earth and hear most clearly the Holy Spirit. All Moral law from a Catholic Church perspective is thus filtered through a male prism. This obviously is scripturally suspect and rejected by the entire Protestant world but the catholic church implicitly still maintains that this is true--and actually punishes dissent.

As evidenced by the Bishop's Conference and Archbishop Burke-the Canon Law Supreme Court equivalent- condemnations of people like Kathleen Sebelius, they not only insist on their right to condemn people like Kathleen Sebelius, they openly seek to damage them reputationally-and make no bones about their believed mandate to do this from their perspective of what is "right."

The old testament (the Jewish bible) had female judges like Deborah when the role of Judge was more akin to ruler (absent a King), and female women of faith who played critical roles in Jewish history- several of whom are named in the litany of the genealogy of Jesus.
We have FIVE Supreme Court justices who are Roman Catholic MEN at least four of whom subject themselves to this Father-Knows-Best philosophy. A philosophy of the world that maintains that women don't even get a voice or a say over key aspects of their destiny because God can't talk to them or the Holy Spirit doesn't work through them. This, let me tell you, should scare the begeezes out of everyone.
I say that without comment specifically on the qualifications of any one of them- all most admirable. I find Scalia even quite witty. I comment on the total lack of respect for the power of the Holy Spirit to communicate through women at a level deserving of the respect of a Supreme Court Justice.

Mark Tushnet, a Constitutional expert and Professor of Law at Georgetown and now Harvard Law who is an expert on the Federal Courts and has written a seminal treatise on the subject puts it thusly (as quoted from the Politico):

"Most presidents have wanted to have a Supreme Court that 'looks like America', as they understand what America looks like. In the past, Presidents sought to achieve something like regional representation--a "Westerner" a "Southerner" and some degree of religious diversity on the court. The reasons for seeking this sort of representation have always blended political concerns- bolstering support in the West, for example--and the sensible view that diversity perspectives on the issues that come to the court will improve the quality of the court's decision making. Westerners for example, were thought to bring special insights to the court's (the) many cases involving the allocating of water rights in the West. The current academic jargon for this is that 'many minds' make for better decisions."

Women clearly are in the minority of ONE on the bench at present and Madam Justice Ginsburg might not hold out another ten years. I will pray she does but that might be pushing it.

The abortion controversy in the country and the finer points pertaining to the authority of the Court to issue rulings pertaining to it, dissolve statutes touching on alleged rights, and other issues regarding what half the aisle calls "reproductive freedom" and the other half calls "murder" is something that a woman's voice MUST be heard on.
It is therefore absolutely critical that Obama appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.

Mark Tushnet is a genius. He was one of my favorite professors at Georgetown. Here is his bio

Professor Tushnet, who graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law. His research includes studies examining (skeptically) the practice of judicial review in the United States and around the world. He also writes in the area of legal and particularly constitutional history, with works on the development of civil rights law in the United States and (currently) a long-term project on the history of the Supreme Court in the 1930s. This fall he is organizing a conference on American constitutional development and another that features a conversation among several current and former judges on the world's constitutional courts.

After receiving his J.D. from Yale, Professor Tushnet served as a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall from 1972-73. He then was a member of the law faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison until joining the Law Center faculty in 1981. He is co-author of three casebooks, Federal Courts in the 21st Century: Policy and Practice; Constitutional Law: Cases and Commentary; and co-author with Vicki Jackson of a coursebook on Comparative Constitutional Law. His other recent writings include The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education 1925-1950, which received the Littleton Griswold Award of the American Historical Association; Red, White and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law; Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961; Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961-1991; and Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts. He was the secretary of the Conference on Critical Legal Studies from 1976-85, and is President of the Association of American Law Schools for 2004.