Jennifer Rubin’s excellent cover article in the new issue of the Weekly Standard explores Judge Sotomayor’s “wise Latina woman” speech more fully. Two key excerpts:

Sotomayor’s speech is in many ways a distillation of the most extreme views of the liberal civil rights establishment. They have dispensed with Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a “colorblind” society, in which people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The notion of a shared American tradition is considered a dodge for maintaining white, male domination of society. Instead, they aim to secure the levers of power, to empower disadvantaged groups to pursue their distinct ideology, culture, and language. It is not enough to eliminate barriers to entry in business, universities, government, or the bench; numerical quotas are essential to securing each group’s “fair share.” And most critically, group identity and goals supplant individual identity and professional obligations. Each of these elements, the core of the most extreme variety of contemporary multiculturalism, is prominently featured in Sotomayor’s speech and law review article.
She also denigrates the notion of a neutral, objective judiciary which treats all citizens alike and removes personal bias from the judicial branch. The goal here is not to remove racial or ethnic bias from judging, but to make sure the right bias is given voice–secured by increased numbers of minority judges. And her qualms about intellectual rigor and impartiality extend to virtually all that judges do (“I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases“). This is legal relativism, if not nihilism. No objective truth, no objective judging, only power politics.