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Jun. 28th, 2003 09:38 amSlate's "breakfast table" email conversation this week has been about the Supreme Court, and I haven't been reading it. But yesterday's letter about Sandra Day O'Connor was really interesting, at least to someone like me with virtually no prior knowledge of her biography.
I read an article in the Times magazine last year about Senator Pete Domenici, a "hard-line conservative" who "has become the Senate's leading advocate for the mentally ill." It turns out his awareness of the issue stems from his daughter's struggles with schizophrenia. The point was not about personal pork--he didn't vote for government spending on the mentally ill because it would save him some money on care. It was that personal experience with a problem had given him compassion.
As always, the personal is political.
She also has a sense of tolerance that is sometimes lacking in political conservatives. No doubt that is partly due to her experience of "otherness" as the rare woman in law school in the '50s, and the ensuing discrimination she faced. But that's not all of it. One fact that is buried on her long résumé is that as a busy young mother and lawyer in Arizona, she found the time to take a leadership role in the local Fellowship of Christians and Jews. This is not unrelated to one of her most important contributions to the Supreme Court--her critically influential role in rejecting government actions that so "endorse" one religion, or religion in general, that they make religious minorities feel like strangers in their own schools and towns.The response is about Scalia, and is not surprising, but does point out that the quote "I have nothing against homosexuals," disseminated widely this week, is so far out of context as to be incorrect.
I read an article in the Times magazine last year about Senator Pete Domenici, a "hard-line conservative" who "has become the Senate's leading advocate for the mentally ill." It turns out his awareness of the issue stems from his daughter's struggles with schizophrenia. The point was not about personal pork--he didn't vote for government spending on the mentally ill because it would save him some money on care. It was that personal experience with a problem had given him compassion.
It is strange to think that government works that way, that the fact that a senior senator has a mentally ill daughter can spur governmental action on mental illness. Yet on many issues, politics really is that personal and lawmaking that arbitrary. ''You'd be surprised how often legislation is directly informed by our lives,'' Lynn N. Rivers, a Democratic member of the House from Michigan, says. ''In the field of mental health, I think it's possible that nothing at all would have been done by Congress if it weren't for legislators like Domenici who were galvanized by personal experience.'' Rivers herself has had very direct personal experience; she is a manic-depressive. At a committee hearing this spring, after a couple of witnesses suggested that mental illnesses were not really illnesses, she snapped open her purse and extracted an amber vial -- the pills that keep her healthy -- and shook it like a maraca as if to wake them up.
As always, the personal is political.
