Samuel "The Bull" Alito

Much has been made of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's prior record on civil rights in the past few days. Alito possesses the requisites for consideration as a conservative in that he opposes a broad reading of anti-discrimination laws, but he also brings forth skeletons from the Princeton past. While a law student at Princeton, Alito was quite the liberal in terms of sexual mores.

As a student at Princeton, young Alito came out against government regulation in the boudoir, stating that "no private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden.” This was some thirty years before the Supreme Court decriminalized gay sexual conduct, thereby inserting a constitutional right to such behavior into our jurisprudence. Alito could thus be looked upon as an intrepid trailblazer in legal philosophy by liberal groups, but it is doubtful that this will happen.

The motto of today's liberals is clear: What have you done for us lately? Samuel Alito, alas, has done little. He has set the bar high in discrimination cases, finding that the use of prosecutorial strikes against black jurors in 13 of 14 instances indicated the very reasonable possibility that such strikes were racially motivated. Fourteen out of fourteen would have cemented his certainty in that instance, but a paltry thirteen merely piqued his interest at the possibility.

He also supported the idea that women should be legally required to notify their spouses when seeking an abortion, but fortunately for the liberal cliques, he was a simple dissenter on the issue. The audacity of his legal reasoning is clear even today: why, men could be taken to be equal partners in conception with an equal say if Alito's views were allowed to prevail! It shows how far we have come as a society: equal partnership in conception used to be considered a prerequisite for the act, perhaps even a positive thing, but nowadays it is a mere albatross around the neck of oppressed wives who simply want to be able divorce their husbands from the decision to terminate a pregnancy they jointly entered into with said husbands without having to formally divorce them in a court of law. The gall, I say!

Lest you think it was easy for Justice Alito to arrive at such a gutsy dissenting viewpoint, consider what he is quoted as telling Senator Dick Durbin, the number two man in the Senate minority and the fifty-seventh ranking Senator overall: "He told me that “he spent more time worrying over it and working on that dissent than any he had written as a judge.”" One can see Judge Alito in that crucible of a moment where, sweating blood and cracking under the strain, he crossed his personal Rubicon, never to look back on those glorious days of youth spent discouraging government interference in private acts between adults lest he be turned into a pillar of salt.

Yes, Samuel Alito is a rare breed of jurist. He agonizes, pains even, over his decisions. The law is an occasion to emote, dear citizens, for such a man as Alito. I feel a groundswell, a massive surge of support arising for Samuel Alito from that bastion of legal emoting and hand wringing known as the Democratic Party. He is their kindred spirit, a man who realizes that the law has a human side that sits opposite the ink and pulp if you will flip the pages over often enough in an effort to discover it.

There is hope in Spintown, just as there is balm in Gilead and respite in Nepenthe. A bipartisan fervor of goodwill is swelling beneath the epidermis of Washington, waiting to burst forth like a blemish on the pristinely rancored complexion of a town known for pointless donnybrooks over judicial appointments. We will see the hyperbole flowing, uncorked, into the champagne flutes of conservatives and liberals alike as they celebrate the coronation of Alito! Maybe not.