Sotomayor for the Supreme Court

[netmouse]

btw, regarding the Supreme Court nomination, RH realitycheck writes:

Sotomayor's trail of opinions paints a picture of a fair-minded, incisive legal scholar who is unafraid to stake out unpopular but legally meritorious positions. Right-wingers are going to oppose her nomination with full force - we would be foolish to do it for them.

I quite agree with that last bit. With regard to her history, I still don't know a lot, but the NYT article has a lot of links, here's a bit on the empathy thing, and here's Obama's own video about it.

ETA: comments lead me to read this Salon.com discussion by Greenwald, which is also good and contains links to more material relevant to the topic.

Comments

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

ps. I know plenty of catholics who are pro-choice, which is something I find a little baffling but have encountered enough that I do not consider membership in the church to be positive proof of someone's beliefs one way or the other, all by itself.

Sotomayor did decide against a group of people who were trying to sue to overturn Bush's decision to remove federal funding to overseas groups that provided abortions. I don't know the legal details of that case, however.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

I don't consider it to be either. The problem is, we don't know about her beliefs, and the two pieces of information I have, while of very little use in guessing, both lean negative.

[sueij.livejournal.com]

The Catholic Church actually asserts the "primacy of conscience," which says that each Catholic should get all the information, especially considering and valuing the Church's doctrine, and then make their own prayerful decision.

Unfortunately, even most Catholics don't know about this, since it's not in the Church's interest to have its members off making their own (informed) decisions. So most Catholics who hold differing opinions based on their own research, consideration, and prayerful process just figure they're "bad" Catholics.