When I was a teenager, I had great hopes for my generation. We had seen so much change in this country, so many people who demanded that people be treated fairly and as equals, and I thought the rest of my generation had absorbed all those lessons just as I had. I believed in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, for goodness sake. Call me the eternal optimist.
Throughout the years, I've been disappointed in my generation; at times, very disappointed. We still have people who feel it's OK to yell ethnic, racial, and homophobic slurs; feel proud about it. We still have hate crimes--lots and lots of them, to put a number on it.
But I've always found reasons to be optimistic--we have an African American president, we have lots of smart women doing lots of cool jobs, we have the first Latina nominee for the Supreme Court. And then I read the newspaper, or news on the internet machine, and I sigh....and wonder...will we ever reach that thing we pledged as kids, "....liberty and justice for all"?
First case in point--the trial...I mean...the confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor. By this time, I shouldn't be surprised, and yet I am, by the behavior of Republican senators in the United States Congress. Their behavior was despicable; because of what some of them actually said, and by the fact that they were allowed to get away with it. I saw and read a lot of quotes from Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Jeff Sessions, mainly because they were the worst of the lot, and what I read made me angry (OK, angrier--it's been that kind of week). It also made me ask the question, "Who elected these guys anyway?" Sessions just couldn't seem to grasp "life experience" and "My quote was misconstrued." But the worst was Graham. I quote:
"Graham read out loud a laundry list of complaints about the nominee....Graham went through insult after insult from anonymous reviews about Sotomayor's temperament, including ones that called her 'nasty,' 'a terror,' 'a bit of a bully' and one that said she lacks any 'judicial temperament.' Graham then asked her directly: 'Do you think you have a temperament problem?'"
"Graham later said, 'I never liked appearing in court before a judge I thought was a bully.'"
It goes on to say, "After voicing those complaints and telling Sotomayor that 'maybe these hearing are a time for self-reflection' for her, Graham became a bit of a bully himself, asking her if she remembered her 'wise Latina' quote. When the judge answered in the affirmative, he asked her to recite it--twice."
Do you think, in the history of hearings for potential Justices of the Supreme Court, that any of the men were ever accused of being a bully? Do you think any of them were ever asked if they thought they "had a temperament problem"? I did listen to one analyst, who said they had reviewed all previous hearings, and could not find one instance where a male was asked that same question.
Are these men really so threatened by women? By someone who is not white? To date, there have been 109 white people, and 108 men, who have served on the Supreme Court. Our current court comes nowhere close to mirroring the gender or race makeup of the United States, and yet our Republican senators feel that one Latina woman would be one too many. Shame on them for their conduct, and shame on them for pandering to the "threatened white heterosexual male" voter.
That being said, they are better behaved than the Houston Fire Department, but that's not saying much.
This week, I read the very disturbing story of two female firefighters in Houston. The two are the only female members of Fire Station 54 at Bush Intercontinental Airport. On July 6, 2009 (that's right, 2009--not 1959), someone scrawled sexual and racial slurs in the secure area of the station directed at Paula Keyes. Fellow firefighter Jane Draycott’s photo of herself and her late daughter on her locker was mutilated, and the word “die” scrawled on her face and “dead” over that of her daughter, who was killed in an auto accident. I guess Ms. Draycott was spared the racial slurs because she's white. The Houston mayor said he is unaware of prior harassment complaints by either woman, but Ms. Draycott told of a series of incidents over a two-year period; she described the cutting of a cold water line in her shower that resulted in her being scalded by hot water, the vandalism of a women’s rest room and insults by male colleagues. All of which were reported to her superiors. Which leads me to ask why HFD Chief Phil Boriskie was quoted as saying, “I’m having difficulty today because I’m mad, mad as hell.”? Was it because he was rightfully appalled by the behavior of his male firefighters, or was it because they finally went too far, and the rest of the world got wind of it? After all, Houston's first female firefighter, Dr. Linda Honeycutt, says the harassment has been going on for a very, very long time.
Men, it's time to step up and say that these kinds of things are wrong. Otherwise, your fellow men will think it's OK. And they'll probably think they're right in believing that "We never should have let those women learn to read. That's where it all started, this uppittyness."
And then all of us are in trouble.
