“Elena Kagan Is Miles Away From Mainstream America” is the headline on Kathleen Parker‘s Washington Post column this morning (5/12/10). What exactly does that mean?
Well, on first blush, it seems to have to do with where she’s from: “Coincidentally, she shares the same home town as the other two women on the court. Assuming Kagan is confirmed, all three women will hail from New York.” And why does this matter? “Spending one’s formative years walking past the infamously crime-riddled Murder Hotel en route to school, as Kagan did–and, say, walking past the First Baptist Church to ballet class–are not the same cultural marinade.”
To which, as a proud adopted New Yorker, I say: Huh? The “Murder Hotel” was a dilapidated residential hotel on the Upper West Side block that got its tabloid nickname from a murder that occurred there; it’s not particularly infamous, but it was on the block that Kagan grew up on, and her dad helped shut it down.
But we also have ballet classes in New York City–actually, there are even famous ballet troupes based here–and, believe it or not, we also have Baptist churches here–249 of them, according to this church-locating service. I don’t know if Kagan ever took ballet class, but if she did, she could very easily have walked by the First Baptist Church on her way to them–it’s at Broadway and West 79th Street, about four blocks from her house.
But this fantasy that New York City is some kind of alien world, where ballet and Baptists are unknown, is the crux of Parker’s argument: “It seems remote to unlikely that a woman whose life has involved Baptist churches and ballet slippers would find herself on a track to today’s Supreme Court, though that ought not to be the case.”
Could it be that Parker’s argument is not really about dance class, or even about New York City? That is suggested by her examples of justices whose backgrounds, unlike Kagan’s, are a “help in claiming identity with ordinary people”: She cites Clarence Thomas (“from a rural Georgia backwater”) and Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito (each is a “the child of recently arrived immigrants”). Scalia, like Kagan, is a native of New York City, and yet, puzzlingly, he’s a poster child for fitting in with regular Americans. Could there be something else about Kagan that sets her apart from “mainstream” Americans?
Well, yes, there is something. “More than half the country also happens to be Protestant, yet with Kagan, the court will feature three Jews, six Catholics and nary a Protestant. Fewer than one-fourth of Americans are Catholic, and 1.7 percent are Jewish.” Though, again, the Catholics Scalia and Alito are held up as exemplars of ordinariness, so their religion isn’t putting them outside that “mainstream”–you know, the one where people attend churches, Baptist or otherwise.
Conservatives have made a trope out of “San Francisco values”–a phrase that mainly serves to link Democrats to the most gay-identified city in hopes of attracting homophobic votes. When I hear conservative media figures going on about New York City, I hear the same thing–only with Jews instead of gays.
We atheists are shut out completely. Apparently we’re not part of Kathleen Parker’s mainstream either.
I grew up in Houston, in a Jewish family who had lived in the south for four generations by the time I came along (rural Mississippi, Memphis, New Orleans, Fort Worth, Luling–a farm town near San Antonio). After that I mostly lived in El Paso. I can’t count the times people said to me “You’re from New York, aren’t you?”
Ms. Parker says that “geography may well be Kagan’s wound.”. I think that the geography that would truly benefit this country, would be to relocate all the Republicans to Arizona and Texas and allow them to secede! What a delightful prospect. Then the rest of us could finally create a society that is based on compassion and cooperation. One where the common good comes first. Thanks FAIR, for all that you do!
I’m so sick of this kind of political candidate/appointee coverage, especially from a purported ‘serious’ source like the Wa Po! The MSM needs to return to the old 8th grade civics lesson: ‘you should primarily judge a political candidate (or appointee) by his/her previous political ACTIONS, NOT by their words or appearance’. I don’t care where the hell Kagan/Scalia/Alito or any other politico came from, OR what their hobbies are/were, OR how they dress/talk, OR what their marital/family status is, OR what their race/gender is*, OR anything else about their personal situation unless it DIRECTLY relates to their ability to perform their prospective position (ie; like health or age issues)– I want to know HOW they have politically aligned themselves in their past political decisions/actions! I want to see some kind of scorecard of their political history, because THAT’S going to be the best predictor of their future political decisions! Yeah, it’s not 100% reliable, but it’s probably close to 90-95% correlation, while the other personal factors mentioned are virtually 0-5% correlated — let “US” or “People” or the tabloids cover that unrelated stuff.
(*as we learned with Condee Rice/Hillary Clinton/Clarence Thomas/Colin Powell, etc)
Oh no, Jim. Are you going on about the “New Anti-Semitism”?… LOL! I work in a large NYC-based publishing company, with 58 other senior and managing editors (i.e., editors who report to VPs). I’m one of the very, very few non-Jews in that group. Nobody complains… the office shuts down for Jewish holidays too – yippee! I wouldn’t sweat it, Jim. High-profile Jews in the US aren’t in any risk of losing their positions… even if they occupy those high status and lucrative positions in numbers massively disproporationate to their fraction of the population. (Yawn.) I think it IS a bit bizarre that there are no British, German, and Scandinavian Protestant types on the court… or for that matter, a Black Protestant… since together, that’s over half the population of the country. I also hope that you’re not running BS interference for a stealth Obama-like reichwinger such as Kagan… next, you’ll be telling us about a “high tech lynching”. Finally, your political-tactical analysis is off: the GOP may hate LGBTers like me, but they are trying to WOO Jews from the Democrats… why? Jews provide most of the funding for the Democratic Party. Why do you think the GOP claim of the US as a “Christian nation” is now ALWAYS rephrased as “the US is a JUDEO-Christian Nation. Never met a Judeo-Christian, but there you have it.
Somebody give Kathleen the job at Fox that she’s bucking for so we can ignore her properly.
As a politically-independent Jewish male, Kathleen Parker represents me far more than FAIR ever will. Her excellent book “Save the Males” could never have been produced by the left.
Parker’s point with regard to Kagan is quite clear: The left has hypocritically pushed identity-analysis for so many decades, that it has become deaf to its own hypocrisy; for example, one rarely hears the “affirmative-action and diversity” crowd object to the de facto quotas upon Asians and Jews in place at too many top universities.
In the matter of the Supreme Court, Parker is correct that the Court can now be perceived as the province of elitist Ivy-Leaguers from the left or right coasts, with nary a single Oklahoma WASP among them.
And the tag “anti-Semitism” is even more ridiculous, considering that Parker is a columnist for the Jewish World Review.
Thanks for convincing me that FAIR are loony-left nutters, to be ignored.
Esteban
Oh no, Jim. Are you going on about the “New Anti-Semitism”?â┚¬Ã‚¦
No, he’s not. He’s trying to falsely tar Parker, a columnist for the Jewish World Review, with the defamatory tag of “anti-Semitism” because she has had the audacity to criticise Obama’s nomination of yet another leftist-apparatchik-ideologue to the Supreme Court.
Except that some of us Jews won’t fall for Jim’s trick.