Sotomayor Failed to Disclose to Senate Memo in Which She Argued Death Penalty Is ‘Racist’ at CNS News.
Will this be discussed beyond the blogosphere?
Memorandum to the Board of Directors of the Puerto Rican legal Defense and Educational Fund. from the Task Force on the bill to Restore the Death Penalty in New York State. March 24, 1981.
Capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society. The number of minorities and the poor executed or awaiting execution is out of proportion to their numbers in the population.
The problem of crime and violence in American society is so complex, it is unreasonable to think that capital punishment will result in preventing it or diminishing it.
Our present perspective on the meaning of our values in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the state of humanistic thinking in the world judge capital punishment as a violation of those values.
Read the rest of the story here.
The WSJ’s Sotomayor and the Politics of Race squarely puts it.
The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America’s first black president, and a man promising the “new,” we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.
Identity politics instead of a nomination based on justice is blind.
See:
- http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49218
- http://judicialnetwork.com/contents/files/Death-Penalty-Report.pdf
- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124442662679393077.html
