“Washington State’s newest justice is a black, gay, disabled, lesbian immigrant,” tweeted left-wing website Slate on Sunday.
“Does she have a name?” Post Millennial writer Chad Felix Greene tweeted back, rhetorically.
A better question is: Is she qualified?
Slate doesn’t trouble itself much over such pesky details. Instead, in a Friday article headlined “Washington State Now Has the Most Diverse Supreme Court In History,” it complains that “Donald Trump’s presidency has been a disaster for judicial diversity. His judges are overwhelmingly straight, white, and male.”
A sentence later it avers, “In other words, Trump judges do not look like the country they serve.”
Well, perhaps not completely. Straight, white men are only maybe 30 percent of the population. I’m not sure, though, how “a black, gay, disabled, lesbian immigrant,” reflecting a group well less one percent of the population, does reflect the country. But, hey, I’m not “woke.”
Slate’s article’s thesis is simple. “While the federal bench grows more homogeneous by the day, Democratic governors are diversifying their state judiciaries to an unprecedented degree,” it writes. “On Monday, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, elevated Grace Helen Whitener (shown) to the state Supreme Court. Whitener is a disabled black lesbian who immigrated from Trinidad.”
So she does have a name. As for more names, Slate tells us that Whitener “joins Inslee’s two other appointees.” One is, to quote the site, “Raquel Montoya-Lewis, a Jewish Native American who previously served on tribal courts.” Well, Inslee dug deep on that one!
The other is “Mary Yu, an Asian-American Latina lesbian who officiated [at] the first same-sex marriages in the state,” Slate relates.
Now, note here that the Washington Supreme Court (WSC) has eight members. Leaving the others aside, Whitener’s and Yu’s presence means the “Looks like the country” court is 25 percent lesbian. So America is one-quarter non-white lesbian? I had no idea.
As for Montoya-Lewis, I don’t know if she can beat Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 1/1,024th Indian heritage, but “a Jewish Native American who previously served on tribal courts” is, well, a constituency of approximately one.
This illustrates one of the many lies of Diversity™. Achieved is not really “total” or actual diversity; that’s perhaps impossible. It’s only “diversity” as defined from a certain narrow perspective, with favored qualities (e.g., “gender” identity, race, sexual inclination) used as criteria and the favored people possessing them getting positions.
Conservatives often respond to this leftist handiwork by asking, “Where’s the diversity of ideas?!” This is a mistaken notion, too. Consider that assembling a group comprising an alchemist, a Marxist, a Nazi, a pedophile, a Wiccan, and a Satanist might provide tremendous “diversity of ideas.”
What should we emphasize? Well, imagine you needed to choose a team of doctors to perform neurosurgery on your child or a pilot to fly the jumbo jet he’d be traveling on? Would physical diversity or even that of ideas be a priority?
When we know the job really matters, all we care about is field-specific expertise and skill.
Speaking of which, given that justices enjoy extra-constitutional judicial supremacy and can essentially “make law” for all 331 million Americans, theirs is a pretty important job. So you may be concerned that when filling your “disabled black lesbian who immigrated from Trinidad” slot or “one-legged, blind, Persian, ‘transgender,’ primordial dwarf who identifies as a 6’ 10” African-American circus performer” slot — that is, when drawing from a <2-size talent pool — it may be hard finding qualified candidates. You should be.
Just consider how Whitener complained last year that the WSC is “not reflective of the population that it serves,” Yu said judges should “reflect the community we serve,” and Montoya-Lewis stated she was “honored” to bring her “perspective” to the court. The problem?
Unless the population “reflected” and the “perspective” themselves reflect constitutionalism and only constitutionalism — unless it somehow really does mean ruling based on law and not men (even pseudo-diverse men) — these priorities don’t even remotely correspond to the women’s job description.
Don’t tell “Superior Court Judge” Whitener, however. The video below shows that she’s all in on the faux diversity illusion (not to mention the victim identity one).
But “the value of diverse perspectives,” as Slate put it, was touted often in its article. Of course, leftists are to a man relativists to whom Truth (absolute by definition) is an alien concept and all is “perspective.”
Funny thing, though, all these “diverse” judges of oh-so different “perspectives” almost always vote on cases the same way: hard left. (As Slate writes, the WSC “is notably liberal.”)
(Ya’ don’t say!)
And that’s how Diversity™ yields uniformity.
Sending a message, Slate also writes that the WSC is “what the federal judiciary might look like if a Democratic president and Senate controlled the judicial confirmation process.” You can bet on that, too. Heck, the Barack Obama administration even prioritized diversity over merit among our air-traffic controller corps, valuing candidates whose worst high-school subject was science and who played a lot of sports over “licensed pilots and those with extensive air traffic control knowledge” (seriously), as the Blaze reported in 2018.
So Slate is certainly right about one thing: If you want diversity, as tendentiously defined by leftist social engineers, vote Democrat in November. You’ll get it good and hard.
(Hat tip: American Thinker.)
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
