It was a very simple point

"To understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."

Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich are literally sick with fear that you might read the above paragraph. Why? Because it's the rest of what Sonia Sotomayor said. They've lied yet again, and their worst nightmare is that they'll get called on it. I'm more tempted by the minute to throw up my hands in despair that people fall for their garbage time after time.

What Sotomayor said was perfectly valid and needed saying, hearing, and taking seriously. The Supreme Court accepts all sorts of cases, including family law cases, hiring and firing cases, cases about police conduct during searches and arrests, just to name a very few examples. In each of them, understanding what exactly went on and what it meant is a difficult, complex task. The easy cases are filtered out by the lower courts: what reaches the Supreme Court is what no one else could resolve.

And have you ever noticed that both the Senate and the House of Representatives are diverse by design? They include people from all different parts of the country, because much of the legislation they consider looks very different to people who live in different places, and it's important to include all their perspectives in the vote. And have you noticed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff is made up of the heads of each of the different branches of military service? Whenever you must get the decision right, you've got to take input from people who bring every kind of background to the table. Refusing to do so, or even arguing against doing so, is sheerest imbecility. No one's proposing that we give Latina women all nine votes on the court. But Judge Sotomayor is saying it improves the Court's functioning to include one such vote, and she's dead right. Slam dunk. Not even close.

In my Organizational Communication class, we have a unit about diversity, and a lot of my students are surprised to find that among corporate CEOs, there's roughly zero-point-zero disagreement that diversity is good for business. In any organization, it's a powerful advantage, a generator of profits, to have people of different sexes, different races, different demographics of every description at the table, and the reason can be summed up as, they know things. They have different traditions upon which they draw, different experiences to bring to the discussion, identify with the public outside the organization a little differently, and in ways that add data to the decisionmaking pool. In the business journals, this is as obvious as gravity: diversity is good. Why a few wingnut loudmouths can't figure it out is a mystery to me, since you'd think as much as they worship at the feet of business leaders, they might pay some attention.

And yes, I know, there are some folks reading this who think that the law is simply the law, and interpreting it is no more complicated or ambiguous than double-checking the math after someone balances their checkbook. I'll refrain from calling that viewpoint stupid, in the face of very strong temptation. Instead, I'll just say that if that's your stance, then you don't know anything at all about the law. Nothing. You are miles and miles, light years upon light years, from understanding anything at all about legal decisionmaking. And anytime you're out of your depth, the humble and gracious and virtuous thing to do is to listen more than you talk. If you can't bring yourself to do that, and you simply must bray someone else's talking points over and over again, then be good enough to forgive us when we ignore you. Shh. Grownups are talking.