More questions than answers in nomination
Harriet Miers, whose heart the president claims to know, is starting to scare me.
The story of this woman’s life trickled out slowly last week after President George W. Bush nominated her to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court.
At first she sounded pleasant, reserved and hard-working – the first to arrive at the White House each morning and among the last to leave. She plays a tough game of tennis and helps the president clear brush at the Crawford ranch.
She’s 60. No children. Never married. “A pit bull in size 6 shoes,” Bush has said.
And soon a picture began to emerge.
Miers appears the protypical career woman of her era, from a time when law firms blatantly refused to hire women. Those that did required them to follow a strict code: Pretend you’re a man, and we’ll let you play.
Many of these smart, talented women swallowed that message. The most diligent of them worked incessantly, pursued perfection and avoided a family life. The lucky ones, like Miers, were raised with three brothers. But these imitation men were eyed warily by those around them. Men often felt threatened. Other women admired their achievements, but deplored the sacrifices their example imposed.
Black men and women of that era who similarly tried to fit in were called Oreos. Black on the outside, white inside.
What to call these women? They make me think of pink jawbreakers. Though come to think of it, their male colleagues might have phrased it somewhat differently.
At their worst these stressed-out women resembled the very kind of female hobgoblin that makes conservatives like Rush Limbaugh cower in corners and run shrieking into the night.
As the days went by, of course, the softer side of Miers appeared. Nobody, not Hillary Clinton, not Martha Stewart, and certainly not this woman either, actually lives this stereotype. Turns out Miers once led a Sunday night class of first- to third-graders at her church called the Whirly Birds and now flies home frequently to tend her elderly mother.
But that doesn’t entirely reassure me.
My favorite line in Sandra Day O’Connor’s bio has always been the one about raising three sons long before Ronald Reagan nominated her.
She was the very first American in more than 200 years to bring the wisdom and experience of the American mom to the U.S. Supreme Court.
I’d feel better about Miers if she’d spent some time slathering bread with peanut butter before school, clutching a croupy baby near a steamy shower stall at 2 a.m., or lying in the darkness after midnight, unable to fully rest until the garage door opened.
That life creates a significant depth and range of experience that I’d like the next Supreme Court justice to have. I want the issue of abortion considered by someone with an intimate understanding of the profound ways a woman’s life changes the moment the home pregnancy test turns blue.
As the week went by, I came to learn more about how Miers thinks. She’s been a longtime member of the Valley View Christian Church in Dallas, where she felt born again, underwent a full immersion baptism, and heard the preaching of the inerrancy of the Bible. This church’s Web site even links to the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas.
She’s obviously comfortable with fundamentalist thinking. Given how much damage fundamentalists of all persuasions have done around the world lately, I’m scared of what their ideology would bring to the Supreme Court.
But here’s what frightens me even more. She’s reportedly called President Bush the most brilliant man she’s ever met.
Yet this is a man who rashly started a war that killed nearly 2,000 young Americans of my children’s generation, a man whose administration brutally outed a CIA agent when her husband stood in the way of that war, a man who abandoned the people of New Orleans to flooding and famine. Historians will be fascinated by his lethal combination of arrogance and incompetence for years to come.
That’s makes me afraid. Miers, the obedient career woman who obviously tried so hard to get it all right, strikes me as all wrong.
Only one thing cheers me up these days. Conservatives sound scared, too.