“Public schools, this Court has said, are “at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny.” … They offer to children of all faiths and backgrounds an education and an opportunity to practice living in our multicultural society. That experience is critical to our Nation’s civic vitality. Yet it will become a mere memory if children must be insulated from exposure to ideas and concepts that may conflict with their parents’ religious beliefs. Today’s ruling ushers in that new reality.”
—-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting (ignorantly as usual) in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor, the 6-3 ruling in which the Court held that schools have to give parents the option of having their children absent themselves from lessons that are adverse to the family’s’ religious beliefs.
Ethics Alarms already weighed in on this case earlier here, but I neglected to focus on the full calamity of the Wise Latina’s sinister dissent. The flood of incompetent, woke garbage spewing from her colleague Justice Jackson of late has raised a lively debate over which of the two women was the worst DEI appointment. Obama picked Sonia before DEI was a thing, so maybe Jackson, Biden’s selection, wins by default; still O made it clear that it was Sotomayor’s ethnicity and gender and not her legal acumen that got her the “historic” seat on the Court.
The debate was re-ignited yesterday after it was noted that even Sotomayor criticized Jackson’s dissent in Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, announced yesterday, pointing out that Jackson didn’t seem to grasp what the case is about. Wow—when the previously acknowledged dimmest bulb on the Court calls you dumb, that’s gonna leave a mark.
But I digress: I should have flagged the quote above in the earlier post because of the totalitarian, anti-American attitude it emits.
The SCOTUS description of the mission of public schools the Justice quoted speaks of our “common destiny,” meaning that public schools exist in great part to teach rising generations about the unique values of the United States so students will mature into civically informed, productive citizens who can fulfill the Founders’ vision for this unique nation. Yes, that’s indoctrination, the kind that unifies the culture and ensures a cohesive society. Since among those American values is individualism, opposition to abuse of authority, respect for the beliefs and opinions of others and freedom of expression, the danger of a competently and responsibly run school leading children astray is minimal. But we don’t have competent and responsible—or trustworthy—public schools now, and Soromayor’s rhetoric demonstrates why. The United States has been built and thrives on the assimilation of other the followers of other cultures into American culture, our “common destiny.” Multi-culturalism is a formula for division and disaster. It is arguable the most destructive (among many) of President Jimmy Carter’s misguided initiatives. President Trump’s Executive Order (finally) declaring English to be the official language of the United States was a deliberate and necessary move to begin inoculating the U.S. against the insidious multiculturism pathogen.
However, another core American values is the primacy of the family. Hillary Clinton’s controversial “it takes a village” trope was recognized at the time as an ominous nod to totalitarian societies, where the government raises children to accept its beliefs, and their parent’s beliefs be damned. The holding of Mahmoud was not that children must not be exposed to ideas challenging their family’s religious beliefs, but that families could not be forced to allow their children to be proselytized and indoctrinated by teachers who embrace and advocate views antithetical to those beliefs. Public school teachers in Maryland and elsewhere openly advocate for LBGTQ sexual orientation and practices, and that is not part of the nation’s “common destiny” that public schools exist to teach.
What “new reality”? That was my reality when I was in public school, and I was exposed to the world of alternative sexuality many years later, and not in a classroom. The Left’s new reality is to have school teachers pushing socialism, transexualism, open borders, critical race theory, climate change hysteria, DEI mythology and more on young minds too submissive to challenge these dubious (I’m being kind) concepts. When the private school we foolishly sent our son to showed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in his 6th grade class, I objected. The climate change documentary wasn’t intended to launch a fair discussion of the climate change controversy, but to stand as “fact,” which it was not and is not. I also demanded that if my son was going to be exposed to political opinions and activist position in a class, I wanted advance notice so he could stay home that day. Later, we pulled him out of the school entirely.
Sotomayor is so dim that she doesn’t realize that the aspirations of the party she belongs to are not the ethical goals of public school education. I guess we should be grateful for the warning.
She really thinks she is stating the accepted view of public education. It is, if you lived in the old Soviet Union. States, she believes (along with her party) should be the primary sculptors of young minds. The Federalist correctly notes that “from William Blackstone to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the founding-era Anglo-American legal tradition clearly affirmed that parents have the primary duty to protect, care for, and educate their children. And because rights stem from duties, parental rights over children are indeed natural rights.”
“Why wasn’t this reality constitutionalized?” the conservative publication wonders. I think it was because the idea seemed intrinsically obvious. The omission was a serious mistake. The Founders couldn’t imagine, perhaps, someone as addled as Sonia ending up on the Supreme Court.
Ethics Alarms 
I don’t know these people personally, but sometimes I wonder if the dimness of some of these people is a show. Sotomayor hits me as similar to Maisie Hirono in that she just doesn’t seem to have a full grasp of what’s happening around her, and a complete lack of self awareness that doesn’t filter out her saying a whole lot of stupid things. But you don’t become a Senator (even one from Hawaii) or a lawyer, or a judge, or a SCOTUS judge by collecting bottlecaps. Are they politically cunning idiot savants, is this a show, or is that just really who they are and they failed up so spectacularly I can’t even conceive of it, boosted, perhaps, by identity politics?
Bias makes you stupid, but it’s a different kind of stupid, Jackson is more ideologically poisoned, which I think caused her to overlook that the case before the court had to do with whether the administration could even come up with a plan to cut bureaucratic bloat, not whether the action of cutting that bloat was constitutional absent an act of congress. Maybe she would have understood the concepts before the court if she could have gotten past orange-man-bad.
But I’m not going to give her a pass on base intelligence or knowledge of the law either, some of the questions she asks during oral arguments are horrifyingly bad. And again…. I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know her personally, but I think she gets there by not being prepared. She doesn’t know what she’s looking at, and she doesn’t care to know… Her butt is in the seat, she can figure it out after. And that, I think, makes her the more DEI candidate: I don’t think she respects the office past what it can do for her personally. The unearned entitlement of sitting on the highest court in the nation explicitly because the president wanted to put forward a black woman, while phoning it in because she can’t be bothered to understand the issues before the court is about is peak wokery.
Sotomayor graduated with highest honors from Princeton and was law review at Yale Law School. She was an ADA Manhattan, did intellectual property work in private practice, and was considered a hot ticket when then-Senator Moynihan recommended her to the Federal Bench, where she was nominated by Bush the younger, since she was considered a centrist at the time. I don’t know where her intellect tanked or what happened along the way. She shouldn’t be a dim bulb ruling on feelz at this point.
Holy cow! Sotomayor is older than I thought. She was born in 1954! I thought her Commie leanings were a result of decay in the academy following my graduating in 1973, but she and Hillary were all in on Communism in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. These kinds of tenets are not bugs, they are features.
Though unlikely our only solution is the occasion to arise for Trump to suggest the appointment of another Supreme who will have longevity.
It seems that judicial restraint and the rule of law have been insurrected by the feelz.
From Turley today:
I had no idea that feces was left in the wake of the J6 mob. My sarcasm is now totally fully and blindly convinced it was a true insurrection, too bad there weren’t fireworks.
The Wise One seems to be chanelling a bit of German authoritarian fear mongering:
Does she want to prohibit parallel societies too?
It seems ironic to me that a parent’s religious beliefs is the issue when it is Sotomayor’s beliefs and the current state of progressivism that is a religion. Their god may not be an entity per se, but their assertions are ideological, moral (don’t get me started), and call for others to believe the same way. Quite frankly I’d like to see the Bible’s creation story taught in schools as a way to compare and contrast the evolution theory. But could you imagine the backlash of so-called unreligious parents who would freak out if their child was exposed to such ideology. If we’re going to say schools should be multi-cultural, then surely any creation story, from Christianity to Hinduism should be taught for a well-rounded view of how we began. But if a parent was not okay with such exposure, should their kids be forced to go to that class that day, like they would for a story about two dudes who get married?
I’m a lady married to a lady and quite frankly I didn’t need to read a book or hear my teacher talk about same-sex attraction. Just about everyone will at some point be exposed to every letter in the rainbow milieu so the exposure excuse I don’t buy. I also don’t buy that schools are trying to help people like me “figure it out earlier.” People with same sex attraction or gender identity, I’m not convinced, are helped or understood when mostly bored, straight, white, progressives tell them “love is love” and “it’s okay to be you.”
I see almost daily totally heterosexual gender conforming progressives use pronouns after their name. I almost never see actual trans people use them. Why? Because LGBTQ has become the hot ticket for the personality type that needs to rescue and feel sorry for others while self-righteously telling all who will pay attention, “look at me! I’m nice and supportive and on the right side of history because I think of trans people and therefore put pronouns after my name!!!!” As someone who has been around gay and trans folks since 1990, I can tell you all these folks figured it out without progressive interlopers making declarations.