A hole in the commentary on Judge Sotomayor

I won’t comment on whether Judge Sotomayor is discriminatory for having said that a class of people, white males, are inferior in judgment to a class of people, Latina females.

I won’t comment on whether life experience does or should shape a judge’s rulings.

I restrict my comment to the public commentary on Sotomayor’s experience, which is taken to be complete. Only on that basis do the arguments begin on what her experience does or should mean for a judgeship.

Sotomayer’s personal journey is heroic. She symbolizes the American dream even if she is ultimately not confirmed by the US Senate for the Supreme Court. Appellate judgeships, such as her own, are very difficult to achieve.

Her academic record, her persistence, her professional longevity on the court are all highly admirable. She has overcome orphanhood, disease and poverty to reach an American pinnacle. To which I say: Bravo!

Yet, isn’t it strange that if we are already arguing about life experience, a deep hole in her experience seems to be widely regarded as not a hole at all?

Is it not strange that this hole is so widely ignored that, to my knowledge, not a single commentator has mentioned it in the debate about her?

For medical reasons, not everyone can have children, and of those who can, many cannot find a husband. But these are not the issues raised by both the admirers and the detractors of Judge Sotomayor, who has no children. Her heroic personal story is taken to mean that her life experience is complete, but is there any greater teacher in the experience of life than being a parent?

The childless can and should become judges. Sotomayor’s experience is nothing less than very unusual and — if you believe that life experience is a vital criterion for being a judge — qualifying.

The last thing needed in a society already excessively divided by categories is the addition of still another class of people, the childless. Just this: In a discussion of life experience — and remember, in Sotomayor’s case, it is not her professional experience that is deemed the unique “valued added,” but her personal background — it apparently occurs to no one to take note of that most universal, illuminating, consuming and challenging of all of life’s experiences: raising a child.

Apparently, we live in a society in which continuity no longer merits even a mention among life’s most highly valued experiences.

It is taken for granted that the fact that Judge Sotomayor is not a parent does not affect her status as a person of the broadest possible experience. Not so — just as a person who has children may also lack the broadest possible experience due to deficiences in other vital areas of life.

Only in part does the irrelevance of parenthood result from the distorting effect of the boomer generation, which, with its demographic dominance, is overly focused on itself.

The larger cause is an undercurrent of nihilism that has our society questioning life itself. There is a bleakness about the future.

To many, the earth and its welfare are more important than its inhabitants. Consumers, i.e., people, are enemies. The issue here is not environmentalism per se. Waste is diametrically opposed to Jewish law. Concern for environmental causes of disease or other difficulties is part and parcel of the Torah’s high value of chesed, of aiding others.

The issue here is a set of values that would put the earth over its inhabitants; a new SUV over a new child; professional achievement over time devoted to raising the next generation.

If anything, the childless deserve an added dose of understanding. As I said, for a variety of reasons beyond people’s control, not everyone can have children, and they should not be judged. But the opposite should also be true. To be a parent should not be judged irrelevant in a discussion of the fundamentals of life experience. The issue isn’t Judge Sotomayor’s life per se; it is the nature of the commentary that has arisen around it.

I raise the issue of parenthood in the context of Judge Sotomayor and not of Justice Souter, who is also childless and whom Sotomayor is nominated to replace, only because when Souter was nominated, no one made an issue out of his life experience. Only to the extent that personal experience becomes part of the commentary on a potential Supreme Court justice does parenthood deserves to be a vital part of the discussion.

I find it sad that, at least in the public square, childraising seems no longer to have a place on any scale of our high values.