To the objection that Sotomayor was just theorizing in a harmless speech, I would respond by reminding you -- again -- of her pivotal role in that now-notorious concrete case of Ricci v. DeStefano, in which she summarily and cavalierly affirmed a district court's decision to cheat firefighters of their duly earned promotions because no black candidates passed the tests.

Talk about empathy all you want, but she and her fellow judges displayed no empathy for those who played by the rules. With strokes of their pens, they discriminated against successful candidates and caused them real damage by changing the rules after the fact -- not to mention the damage their ruling might have caused to the quality of fire departments, whose job is to save lives and property.

Those ordinarily quickest to cry "racism" are expressing outrage that certain commentators have used that term to describe Sotomayor's statements and rulings that would be universally condemned if made by, say, Trent Lott. But the fact remains that Sotomayor apparently approves of reverse discrimination, and President Obama must have known that in advance. Obama is a militant proponent of get evenism, that is, using the power of the state -- actually, misusing the power of the state -- to even the score for minorities and/or the economically less fortunate.

It was Obama, after all, who said: "Solving our racial problems in this country will require concrete steps, significant investment. We have a lot of work to do to overcome the long legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. It can't be purchased on the cheap." Are we to assume that the Civil War and the civil rights movement were "on the cheap"?

And it was Obama's Justice Department that just inexplicably dismissed a slam-dunk case against the New Black Panther members who intimidated voters and polling judges at a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008. This, despite the fact that one civil rights lawyer said it was the most blatant form of voter intimidation he had ever seen and the fact that the defendants didn't even bother to file pleadings with the court or raise any defenses to the charges.

Whether or not race played a factor in this dismissal, President Obama has a long way to go before claiming he's a post-racial president. Reverse discrimination is still discrimination, and reverse racism is racism. None of us is exempted of our duty to rise above them.