It must be a great gig to be white, male, and a "conservative" opinion columnist at the New York Times. Given that the "Gray Lady" is one of the  favourite examples trotted out to prove the "liberal media conspiracy" in this country (despite the fact that Judy Miller, the Bush administration's fluffer for the invasion of Iraq, was a NYT writer), if you are lucky to win the conservative column lottery at the Times, well, you can pretty much write what you want--no matter how vacuous and unaware--and you can't get fired. If you were to get fired, howls would erupt that the Times quashes free speech among its conservative writers. 

Which is too bad, because the Brooks/Douthat duo this morning gave me agita. 

 I'm not sure that David Brooks has ever considered any other viewpoint than the one he was born into. This morning's column, in which he openly mocks the idea that being born into a Latino, African-American, Caucasian, Asian or Native American family might have some impact on the way you look at life, displays such ignorance, I'm not sure where to start. 

According to Brooks, if Sotomayor had been a little older, she would have gotten the message that in order to make it in America, she would have to assimilate--that is, be as close to being a white male as she could--if she wanted to get ahead. 

But she happened to attend Princeton and then Yale Law School in the 1970s. These were the days when what we now call multiculturalism was just coming into its own. These were the days when the whole race, class and gender academic-industrial complex seemed fresh, exciting and just.

There was no way she was going to get out of that unscarred. And, in fact, in the years since she has given a series of speeches that have made her a poster child for identity politics. In these speeches, race and gender take center stage. It’s not only the one comment about a wise Latina making better decisions than a white male; it’s the whole litany. If you just read these speeches you might come away with the impression that she was a racial activist who is just using the judicial system as a vehicle for her social crusade.

I should mention, before I go on, that Brooks examines Sotomayor's record, decides she's not a racist, and decides to support her nomination to the Supreme Court. That's great. I'm glad that he has bestowed his blessing upon Sotomayor. 

But it's the rest of the column that makes me ill. You see, Brooks apparently cannot stand the idea that at one time, it occurred to people that the ways that history gets interpreted, or the way the law is applied to you, or your chances of getting hired, or of getting into college, or of being able to buy a house, or of being able to move into a particular neighborhood could have ever had anything to do with race. And for a while, a lot of consciousness-raising went on on college campuses. 

History got rewritten. We began to understand, for example, that Native Americans might have a different view of the "conquest of America" than, say, WASPs; that the threat of lynching might have kept African-Americans, Catholics, and Jews from participating in Southern politics; that not being able to get a loan without your husband's co-signature might have had an impact on women's economic freedom. 

Instead, Brooks acts as if Sotomayor's awareness that Latino/a history in this country is a mixed bag makes her untrustworthy. No mention of the continued prejudice that Latinos face in this country; no mention that the taunts of "illegal immigrants" are still used; no mention that historians like Peggy Pasco have documented that Latinos couldn't marry whites. 

In Mr. Brooks' world, everything should be read through the lens of being white, male, and upper middle class like him. Anything else reeks of "identity politics." Mr. Brooks is simply normal. It's the rest of us who need to shape ourselves to fit into the system. So regardless of our race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or religion, we need to disregard all of that and think like Mr. Brooks does before we can say that we truly understand the law and are therefore fit to serve on the Supreme Court. 

In short, Sotomayor’s career surpasses the crude categories she sometimes articulates. Despite the ideas she picked up while young, she has, over many years, chosen to submit herself to the discipline of the law, and she has not abused its institutions. I hope she’s confirmed.

In other words, the law, despite its origins, is color-blind, gender-blind, sexual-orientation-blind, class-blind. How can Mr. Brooks say this? May I suggest that he only sees what he wants to see? 

How cool it would be to get paid for a world view based on what Mr. Brooks sees.

 And then, we have Ross Douthat, who, this morning, decided to weigh in on the assassination of Dr. George Tiller.

When Douthat began his column, I actually thought that perhaps he understood what was at stake. He writes: 

Tiller did abortions in third trimester, when almost no one else would do them – which meant, inevitably, that he handled the hardest of hard cases. He performed abortions on women facing life-threatening complications, on women whose children would be born dead or dying, on women who had been raped, on “women” who were really girls of 10. His Wichita, Kan., office, barricaded against protesters, was reportedly lined with thank-you notes.

But then, Douthat argues, perhaps Dr. Tiller wasn't such a saint after all. 

But such narratives are not the only story about George Tiller’s clinic. He was a target of protests — and, tragically, of terrorist violence — because he performed late-term abortions, period. But his critics were convinced that he performed them not only in truly desperate situations, but in many other cases as well. Over the years, they cobbled together a considerable amount of evidence — drawn from the state’s abortion statistics, from Tiller’s own comments, and from a 2006 investigation — suggesting that Tiller abused the state’s mental-health exemption to justify late-term abortions in almost any situation.

This evidence is persuasive, but not dispositive. We may never know how many of George Tiller’s abortions were performed on healthy mothers and healthy fetuses. But whatever the verdict on Tiller’s practice, most abortions in the United States bear no resemblance whatsoever to the hardest third-trimester cases.

Yes, many pregnancies are terminated in dire medical circumstances. But these represent a tiny fraction of the million-plus abortions that take place in this country every year. (Almost half of that number are repeat abortions; around a quarter are third or fourth procedures.) The same is true of the more than 100,000 abortions that are performed after the first trimester: Very few involve medical complications of any kind. Even the now-outlawed “partial-birth” procedure, which abortion-rights supporters initially argued was only employed in the direst of dire situations, turned out to be used primarily for purely elective abortions.

It turns out that it's us pro-choice folks who are responsible for Dr. Tiller's murder. You see, if, as we believe, as long as a woman is pregnant, it's her body and her right to determine what to do with it, we are the unreasonable ones. It is our unwillingness to set any kind of limits on abortion that have driven the terrorists of the anti-choice movement to act as they do.

If only we would compromise. If only we would say that "yes, you're right."  No abortions after the first trimester unless the woman's life is in danger. It's us. We're undemocratic. Let me explain. 

If anything, by enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be. One reason there’s so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions — Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? — is that Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything else. Under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate.

If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester — as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases — and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.

See? Those of us who consider ourselves pro-choice with no exceptions killed Dr. Tiller. We drove the other side to its craziness. If we left it up to a democratic process, then surely we would peacefully agree to a reasonable policy on abortion.

Um. Douthat. You do remember South Dakota, right? The state that recently democratically voted to outlaw all abortions even in cases of rape, incest, and the mother's health? Democracy in action.

Because you see, the other side of this extreme says that if life begins at conception, you can't have abortions--ever. To do so is to kill a fetus, a soul. It doesn't make a difference if you abort a two-week embryo or a six-month fetus.

Douthat says we are the unreasonable ones. The other side would be willing to settle for what the democratic process brought us. They would be willing to accept abortions up to 13 weeks. But clearly, he hasn't read the anti-choice materials. 

He doesn't have to. He knows who the unreasonable ones are. It's people like me, who trust women and their doctors to choose what is best for the woman. Those other people, the ones who don't trust women and don't trust doctors, they're the ones who would settle down if we just compromised with them. 

Does he think that people started opposing Roe v Wade yesterday? Does he not understand that certain churches teach that if one has to choose between the life of the mother or the life of the fetus, the fetus takes precedence--mother's life be damned? 

I'm not sure why I'm writing about this again. It feels, again, like we're getting nowhere. 

All I know is that the conservative columnists at the New York Times have got it good. They can write twaddle and they're protected. They're supposedly a minority at the Times, according to the rightwingers.

I guess Brooks and Douthat owe their jobs to affirmative action. 

Imagine that.