Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson/ Wikimedia Commons
Long-time Croton resident Maria Cudequest has the right to post anything she wants on her blog, EverythingCroton, and she certainly does. Many and even most of her posts are about Croton community life and events. To the extent she sticks to those subjects, she performs an important public service.
But the blog is also a major platform for the kind of equal opportunity bigotry that has become a blight on our nation and society in recent years, after this country had made considerable progress towards tolerance and equal rights.
This morning the blog featured an article in the right-wing publication Townhall about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and her lone dissent in the Court’s decision in a Colorado case involving the state’s ban on so-called “conversion therapy,” which is employed in attempts to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQ minors. The article declared that Justice Jackson’s “primary qualifications — according to President Biden, who nominated her — are that she's Black and a woman.”
These statements are both racist and sexist, and also false: Former President Joe Biden never said that Justice Jackson’s identity was her primary qualification to be on the Supreme Court. While the nomination and confirmation of the Supreme Court’s first Black woman justice was historic, Justice Jackson’s career and experience is comparable with those of many other justices.
In the Colorado case, Chiles v. Salazar, the Court ruled by an 8 to 1 majority that the Colorado law constituted an “egregious assault” on First Amendment rights.
Each Justice is entitled—indeed obligated—to come to their own careful conclusions about a case before the Court. The fact that liberal Justices such as Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor sided with the majority (the opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch) indicates that this particular ruling crossed ideological lines.
Nevertheless, Justice Jackson had her reasons for dissenting, which clearly were not frivolous. In her dissent, as the New York Times reported, Jackson wrote:
“The Constitution does not pose a barrier to reasonable regulation of harmful medical treatments just because substandard care comes via speech instead of scalpel,” she wrote, criticizing her colleagues for having made a decision that she said “risks grave harm to Americans’ health and well-being.”
It is not unusual for the courts to rule in cases that pit First Amendment considerations against other legitimate concerns, and such balancing acts are an almost daily occurrence in local, state, and federal courts across the United States. The editors and contributors to Townhall and any other publication are also entitled to their opinions about court rulings. But the publication’s statements that Justice Jackson’s “primary qualifications” are that she is an African-American woman constitute outright racism and sexism.
In fact, Justice Jackson followed a career trajectory that is not unusual for a Supreme Court Justice. She earned both her undergraduate and her law degrees from Harvard University; clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer; served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission; worked as a federal public defender; spent eight years as a U.S. District Judge; and then a year on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, before Biden snapped her up for the Supreme Court.
In other words, Justice Jackson was a highly qualified candidate for the Court, in addition to providing our nation an opportunity to redress a historic wrong by appointing a Black woman at long last.
We have discussed the EverythingCroton blog before in this kind of context, in particular the role it has played in encouraging the kind of anti-immigrant prejudices that led a Croton resident to engage in a blatantly racist act at our local ShopRite. While Maria Cudequest has the First Amendment right to publish whatever she wants, no matter how racist, we—and that includes those in our community who are opposed to hatred in all its forms—have the free speech right to comment and disagree.
And so we are, and so we will do again, when it becomes necessary.
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A comment from me. I'm going to suggest that folks read this editorial carefully before commenting on it. No one is denying that Biden sought to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court. That was to address a historic wrong, and it's a different question from whether Jackson is qualified to be on the Court. She clearly is, based on the comparable criteria used for other justices over the past many years. I suggest that readers do those comparisons. Eg, Jackson has a roughly equivalent career path to Amy Coney Barrett and also to Brett Kavanaugh, both Trump appointees whose qualifications were not questioned by those who are questioning those of Jackson now. Also, the second Black Justice and the first woman justice were appointed by Republican presidents who specifically noted the historic nature of those appointments at the time they were made.
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