Are you a non-liberal female or minority? Then Democrats hate you!!!

Rich Lowry at National Review Online lays the smack down about the sexist opposition of Democrats against women and minorities who dare not be liberal fascists. I don't agree with him absolving them of their endemic -isms, but whatever.

Priscilla Owen, 50, is one of the more talented women of her generation. She finished third in her class at Baylor Law School. She had the best score in the state on the Texas bar exam when she took it in 1977. Her performance as a judge on the Texas supreme court has earned her the highest rating from the American Bar Association. It's the sort of career that liberals promoting the advancement of women should swoon over. But Senate Democrats are blocking her nomination to a federal appeals court, not just because she is supposedly too conservative, but because she is too female.

White guys who are as or more conservative than Owen have been confirmed as appellate judges, while her nomination has languished for four years. So it goes in the judicial wars. A woman. A black. A Catholic. A Hispanic. It sounds like the beginning of a bad ethnic joke, but it's the lineup of the Democrats' top filibuster victims.

If the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were reviewing the Democrats' filibuster choices, it would have grounds for a disparate-impact lawsuit. The over-representation of minorities and women...is not a coincidence. Democrats fear that a non-Protestant, nonwhite non-male might be easier for President Bush to elevate to the Supreme Court from a federal appeals court, so they want to keep nominees with the "wrong" demographics from getting on an appeals court in the first place.

But that doesn't make the Dems' racial and gender profiling any less awkward. In the filibuster fight, Democrats invoke minority rights. What they are attempting to vindicate is the right of the Senate minority to block minorities.

The logic of the Democratic position entails a kind of inverse Leninism — better is worse. The more attractive a nominee's personal story, the more imperative it is to oppose him or (especially) her. Democrats might have filibustered California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown anyway, but her fate was surely and truly sealed by the fact that she is black, was raised by sharecroppers in segregationist Alabama, and worked her way through law school as a single mother after her first husband died. This background screams "attractive U.S. Supreme Court nominee." So for the left, Brown is "a dangerous black woman."

Because Democrats have used unprecedented judicial filibusters to block the nominees, they have had to apply red-hot rhetoric to justify themselves. Priscilla Owen might have been a garden-variety conservative if she had a Y chromosome, but as a woman she is deemed an "extremist" undeserving of an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

When it comes to Owen, Brown, or presumably other compelling conservative women appellate nominees, Democrats have a simple message: "You've come a long way, baby. Go no further."

Got that, ladies? If you aren't hewing to the victimization cliques dependant on white male racists and mistress-killers like Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy, then you're going to be battered into oblivion for fighting the power.

Sad thing is, as long as no one touches abortion, too many women are plenty satisfied to remain chattel, literally and figuratively.