Home > Articles about Justice O'Connor > Letters to the editor: “Cheers and Jeers for O’Connor,” “I was O’Connor’s Bailiff,” and “Nothing Sadder”

Letters to the editor: “Cheers and Jeers for O’Connor,” “I was O’Connor’s Bailiff,” and “Nothing Sadder”

July 29, 1981

ITEM DETAILS

Type: Letter to the editor
Author: various
Source: New Times
Collection: The Kauffman-Henry Collection
Date is approximate: No

DISCLAIMER: This text has been transcribed automatically and may contain substantial inaccuracies due to the limitations of automatic transcription technology. This transcript is intended only to make the content of this document more easily discoverable and searchable. If you would like to quote the exact text of this document in any piece of work or research, please view the original using the link above and gather your quote directly from the source. The Sandra Day O'Connor Institute does not warrant, represent, or guarantee in any way that the text below is accurate.

Transcript

CHEERS AND JEERS FOR O’CONNOR

The rave reviews of Jana Bommersbach, Southern Arizona ranch hands et alia are not enough. Sandra O’Con’nor just isn’t much to get excited about – even excited enough to support her nomination. Remember the folks who made that nomination
Sure she’s no Rehnquist. Somebody broke that mold soon after his birth. But she is still quite conservative. And people have known for 10 or 20 years that a conservative woman can rise to fairly great heights in the good old U.S.A. The point is people like Sandra O’Connor do not have a coherent view of society that they will try to put forward such that people, especially female people, can be liberated in a meaningful sense of the word.

The questions are these: should she have received the nomination if she hadn’t had a pretty wealthy start in life, including horses (note the plural), prep school and Stanford Law? Could she have risen so high in Arizona politics without the connections offered by her family and her marriage? Would she have been so respected if she had remained childless? (Or if her sons hadn’t gone to Brophy Prep?) Would she have advanced in the Arizona Judiciary if she had made any public statements regarding the injustice, racism, sexism, and general anti-democratic (note small d) sentiment in Arizona state government? Would she be so popular if she hadn’t joined (and led) the Right women’s clubs? And why were they single-sex clubs anyway? Finally, regarding endorsements, how much respect

© COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This Media Coverage / Article constitutes copyrighted material. The excerpt above is provided here for research purposes only under the terms of fair use (17 U.S.C. § 107). To view the complete original, please retrieve it from its original source noted above.