Will She Turn Us All Into Newts?

This is definitely in the X-File category, but there are a couple of people out there on the fruited plains who think that Supreme Court nominee Sonio Sotomayor may be a witch.

Because she refers to herself as a "wise" woman, and "wise women," Latina or otherwise, is modern feminist code for a pagan witch.

In my experience with having been married to an ex-Wiccan priestess, and having a collection of neopagan books I've used for cultural research that total roughly six shelf-feet, "Wise woman" is always a euphemism for feminist witch (neo-pagan). Whenever you see a feminist "scholar" describing, say, the Witch of Endor from the Bible or the witch hunts of the middle ages, they ALWAYS replace the word "witch" with "wise woman". I have never heard a feminist or a neo-pagan use the word "wise woman" to describe an actually wise woman. It's as much a loaded word as a Communist referring to someone as a "fellow traveler".

As for her being "Catholic", frankly, the most intense feminist neo-pagans I know have Catholic backgrounds.

At first, one might dismiss this as too far flung, however when you take a closer look it fits her profile like a glove.

The meaning of the phrase "wise woman" as code for neo-pagan feminist witch is well established. Just Google "wise woman," 10:1 the returns are about neo-paganism, herbalism, moon circles, and aligned products and services. One of the links is to the book "Wise Woman" which is an "intense, absorbing tale, a grisly drama of passion and witchcraft in 16th-century England."

There's a whole lot more, with talk of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and the Belizean Grove, a counterpart organization for women to the Bohemian Grove, which is a spooky organization to which only the high mucky-mucks need apply for membership.

I have to admit that the Belizean Grove membership bothers me, but there's plenty of mainstream stuff she's said and done that, in my opinion, disqualifies her from the high court. I don't think we have to go the Mulder and Scully route on this one to be convinced that she should be rejected by the Senate.

She won't be, of course.