Justice Sotomayor and protecting the Church

On New Year’s Eve, Sotomayor granted the Denver nursing home a last-minute, temporary reprieve from the health care law requirement that health coverage for employees include contraception. She will now have to decide whether to keep the temporary order in place, dissolve it, or take the issue to the other justices, who could decide to review the whole case in the coming months. – from Politico.com

For many conservatives and liberals, this was unexpected. Many conservatives and liberals did not expect a Supreme Court Justice known for voting consistently with the “liberal” block to grant this last minute injunction. Sotomayor may yet remove the injunction on a technical ground. The Little Sisters of the Poor may never have been in danger of having to pay. It turns out that the Justice Department is claiming that the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged uses a Christian health insurer who is already exempt from the contraception part of the law. But, even if the injunction is removed on the technical grounds, I do not want you to miss an important point, because it has to do with the fact that Sonia is a Latina, just like Pope Francis. First, let me give you a little background from an online article about her:

Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, and her nomination was confirmed in 1992. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Her nomination was slowed by the Republican majority in the United States Senate, but she was eventually confirmed in 1998. … In May 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court to replace retired Justice David Souter. Her nomination was confirmed by the Senate in August 2009 by a vote of 68–31. On the court, Sotomayor has been a reliable member of the liberal bloc when the justices divide along the commonly perceived ideological lines.

The article talks about her Puerto Rican background, but you should not miss an important point. Most Latinos in the USA (with the exception of Cubans) mix very progressive social opinions with very conservative moral attitudes. This does not mean that they behave in accord with their conservative moral attitudes. (There really is sin in the world.) But, it does mean that they see no contradiction between progressive social policies and conservative moral policies. I have made this point before on my blog. But, Sotomayor’s granting of an injunction is a perfect example of this. Here is a justice who is known for her perceived liberal voting who grants an injunction favored by very moral Catholics. For too many of today’s divided Americans this does not make sense. After all, you are either fully conservative or fully liberal. This breaks the mold. This cannot be.

Hopefully, Justice Sotomayor will help begin to break some stereotypes with her injunction. We need more people who are not in either current political camp. Our only hope of breaking through the senseless and self-serving impasse found in the current political reality is to have more and more people who do not fit into either camp. Pope Francis has already begun to break some of those pre-conceived notions. He speaks very liberal-sounding things while insisting that the Church’s doctrinal stance has not changed. He has shocked conservative Catholics—thank God—while confusing ardent liberals.

Let me say carefully that Justice Sotomayor is not a Pope Francis, nor is she a saint. But, she and Pope Francis do illustrate in common that one does not need to be tied into the current American obsession with an ideological purity that excludes anything but a particular monochromatic vision of life in which only black and white exist. One can be something other than purely liberal or purely conservative. Let’s say a hurray to that.