I think you will find almost no one who argues for equality of outcome. When you say equality of opportunity, again, if you mean that everyone starts in the same place in terms of opportunities, I think no one supports that. Perhaps we are equal in that no one stands in the way of our taking an opportunity -- but poverty, a broken civil society, poor schools, etc., esp. as contrasted with the benefits of wealth and good schools mean that the effective opportunities people have are very unequal.

Sotomayor's comment about a 'wise Latina' was not, in context, an essentialist statement about identity; rather, it referred to the (likely or imputed) differences in life experiences and hence perspectives .... To me, references to the personal in terms of econ theory are usually irrelevant. That he was childless, gay, bisexual, whatever, would like not have changed the comment; conservative economists were always talking about how in the long run things would work out; Keynes gave an obvious riposte.

Perhaps, since Bush liked to invade countries, you would suggest (and favor?) that we invaded Libya and invade Syria?? Give me Obama, please, on foreign policy. Obama's response to the Great Recession was basically to continue Bush's policies -- although, as a Democrat, he favored labor over stockholders and corporate officers in some cases of corporate effective bankruptcy, such as GM. Bush, I suspect, would have kept in office the very executives who led the corporations into such dire straits. Perhaps you prefer Bush's response to Katrina rather than Obama's response to Sandy?

(Sometimes faculty have learned that *they* have not been clear in their expectations -- at Vassar, we are trying to emphasize collaborative work, but sometimes it is not clear to the students when they are plagarizing [if the assignment is to work together]. Or faculty have not been clear in their statements on their syllabus about plagarism ...)

I have very mixed feelings here. At Vassar, for academic offenses (such as plagarism) we have a student-faculty committee (plus the Dean of Students) who hear evidence, ask questions, do not allow lawyers, and pass judgment. I think it works pretty well, and it works well partly because there are no lawyers and no written records. (To me, the greatest difficulty may be in getting faculty members to press charges, rather than deal with it themselves.) So I think inserting lawyers into college proceedings is almost sure to mess things up -- everyone will play at Law and Order, the college will have to pay for a college lawyer to be present, and the whole quality of the hearing will change -- no chance it will be a learning experience.

If life begins at conception, why does God allow so many miscarriages?

Again, evidence please. (Do you think that gays engage in sex with animals more than straight men? It would be difficult to get data on that, but it would be fascinating ....

Do you have any evidence for that? even a url or an article? (Among other things, it seems unlikely that any white racists at Hopkins would have links to the KKK or any of those groups -- the differences in class, status, income, and style are so great that, on the surface, it just seems unlikely.)

As the questions to Rand Paul at Howard U demonstrated, many blacks do know the history of political parties. That blacks supported the Republican Party of Lincoln is no reason for them to support the Republican Party of Reagan, who demonized the 'welfare queens,' or of Rand Paul, who would repeal parts of the Civil Rights Act. That conservative or segregationist whites were Democrats until -- in LBJ's interpretation -- the Voting Rights Act only means that they are now Republicans. Elder's history is a caricature because it stops around 1960 ....

You know that the analogy of immigration to robbery and murder is just plain silly (and irrelevant). Laws against robbery and murder are constant (even if the penalties change); but US immigration laws have changed drastically over time, in all sorts of different ways, favoring some and disfavoring others. So there is no problem in changing laws against immigration.