{"id":503,"date":"2009-05-27T21:28:08","date_gmt":"2009-05-27T21:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/sotomayor-gets-it-from-the-rig.html"},"modified":"2009-05-27T21:28:08","modified_gmt":"2009-05-27T21:28:08","slug":"sotomayor-gets-it-from-the-rig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/sotomayor-gets-it-from-the-rig.html","title":{"rendered":"Sotomayor gets it from the Right…and the Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conservatives are honing strategies to take down Sonia Sotomayor<\/a>, and are coming up with some of the usual beauts:<\/p>\n

\n

After several conference calls to talk strategy with other conservative leaders, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said they would be “aggressively” looking into Judge Sotomayor’s record, encouraged in part by the last-minute disclosures about previous Obama nominees for high positions.<\/p>\n

“This has not been an administration that goes through things with a fine tooth comb,” Mr. Perkins said. “They leave a lot just barely under the surface, where a little bit of digging will bring it out–whether it is tax problems or whatever. There may be something in her judicial background that could be explosive. So I have got my metal detector out.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hoping for tax problems doesn’t seem like the high road, or even a good strategy, but Karl Rove’s spawn lives. <\/p>\n

And at least Perkins et al got her name right, unlike Mike Huckabee, who called her “Maria.”<\/a> (Well, gee, aren’t they ALL called Maria? I mean, Catholic Hispanics. Hey, “West Side Story” is in revival. So who can blame him?)<\/p>\n

But as the NYTimes reports<\/a>–citing reporting by our colleague Steve Waldman<\/strong><\/a>–abortion rights folks are getting nervous because of doubts about Sotomayor’s commitment to Roe and her scant paper trail on the abortion issue:<\/p>\n

\n

In a letter to supporters, Nancy Keenan, president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, urged them to pressure senators to demand that Judge Sotomayor reveal her views on privacy rights before any confirmation vote.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Discussion about Roe v. Wade will–and must–be part of this nomination process,” Ms. Keenan wrote, adding. “As you know, choice hangs in the balance on the Supreme Court as the last two major choice-related cases were decided by a five-to-four margin.” <\/strong><\/p>\n

Because Judge Sotomayor was the choice of a president who supports abortion rights at a time when Democrats hold a substantial majority in the Senate, both sides in the debate have tended to assume she could be counted on to preserve the Roe decision. Immediately after Mr. Obama announced his selection on Tuesday, leaders of several other abortion-rights groups immediately spoke out in support of Judge Sotomayor, and several conservative groups opposed to abortion rights immediately attacked her, saying they were convinced that the president would not nominate someone who opposed abortion rights.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But in his briefing to reporters on Tuesday, the White House spokesman, <\/strong>Robert Gibbs<\/strong><\/font><\/a>, was asked whether Mr. Obama asked Judge Sotomayor about abortion or privacy rights. He replied that Mr. Obama “did not ask that specifically.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So maybe the conservatives want to keep their powder dry, or they may wind up shooting themselves in the foot. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conservatives are honing strategies to take down Sonia Sotomayor, and are coming up with some of the usual beauts: After several conference calls to talk strategy with other conservative leaders, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said they would be “aggressively” looking into Judge Sotomayor’s record, encouraged in part by the last-minute disclosures…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nSotomayor gets it from the Right...and the Left - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/sotomayor-gets-it-from-the-rig.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sotomayor gets it from the Right...and the Left - 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}