It’s sort of astonishing that in her dissent in the 303 case, Sotomayor begins with a soliloquy. “LGBT people have existed for all of human history,” she writes. Of course, all four of these are modern identities — socially constructed, one might say — that don’t map neatly onto sexual behaviors of times past. “The movement for LGBT rights . . . is the latest chapter of this great American story,” she writes as if penning a college-admissions essay.
By the fourth paragraph, she has moved on to describe the history of social discrimination against LGBT people. “Who could forget the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard? Matthew was targeted by two men, tortured, tied to a buck fence, and left to die for who he was,” she writes. But this narrative has long been seriously challenged, by gay journalists, as a moralizing fable grafted onto a more complicated tragedy about drug use and drug-dealing. She continues, “Or the Pulse nightclub massacre, the second-deadliest mass shooting in U. S. history?” But, again, it’s well-documented that Omar Mateen, the shooter who affiliated himself with ISIS, had no idea he was entering a gay club.
As a news report at NBC from 2016 says, “The attack on the nightclub has long been seen as a hate crime directed at the LGBTQ community. But all evidence says the gunman chose it at random.”
There is something almost sick about invoking these crimes in this opinion. It would be like a right-wing justice invoking the crimes of Colin Ferguson before denying a stay of execution. It’s a smear of guilt by association. This website designer is in league with cold-blooded murderers, is the suggestion.
Sotomayor won’t let the facts get in the way of a good moralizing tale. We have heard in the last decade or so of the proliferation of “hate hoaxes.” Sotomayor is a hoax justice of the Supreme Court.