Ted Kennedy decided to take another judicial nominee to task for membership in a club that excludes women by drawing a strange deadline for political-correctness epiphanies. In his written questionnaire to Jerome Holmes, nominated to the appellate court, the Senator wants to know why Holmes failed to resign before February 2nd of this year:

"What is your reason for failing to resign from the club any earlier than February 2, 2006?" Mr. Kennedy demanded in writing of Oklahoma lawyer Jerome A. Holmes, nominated to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Documents provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee and obtained by The Washington Times show that Mr. Holmes belonged to the Men's Dinner Club of Oklahoma City but quit after expressing interest in becoming a federal judge.

Mr. Holmes told the committee in writing that he never perceived the dining club to harbor any bias toward women but he resigned to clear up any appearances of impropriety.

"Its membership consisted of widely respected business, community and government leaders, including at least two judges of Oklahoma's courts of last resort," he explained to Mr. Kennedy. "I recognized in February 2006 that some might perceive the Men's Dinner Club as being an improper organization of the kind discussed above. That was unacceptable to me."

As the Washington Times notes, that Groundhog Day deadline appears mighty suspicious, since Kennedy only terminated his own 50-year membership in a males-only Harvard alumni club less than a month earlier. Normally one would expect such circumstances to keep a politician somewhat less eager to act as the morality police on club memberships, but Kennedy's hypocrisy apparently knows no bounds.

The issue amounts to almost nothing, anyway. At some point we will see the Judiciary Committee start to bludgeon nominees for associations with the Boy Scouts as evidence of their intolerance and animus towards women. If Kennedy wanted to remain a member of the Owl Club even twenty-two years after Harvard banished it from the campus for its exclusionary membership policy, it would make little difference to me or anyone else. The Owl Club, contrary to popular belief, does not equal the Ku Klux Klan, and neither does the Men's Dinner Club of Oklahoma City. Persecuting people for such associations is yet another example of political correctness run amuck.

However, Kennedy's use of this particular issue shows him for the contemptible lout that he has proven himself to be over the course of his career. Kennedy belonged to the Owl Club for fifty years, almost half of which occurred after the Harvard expulsion on this very issue. Either Kennedy was too dim to notice that they didn't admit women and that they didn't have on-campus offices for over twenty years, or he has decided that his resignation four weeks prior to that of Holmes gives him the moral authority to lecture him on the evils of single-gender socialization.

Either way, the question itself is repugnant, and Kennedy's moral outrage is laughable and pathetic. It reveals that Kennedy will do anything and say anything for cheap partisan point-scoring.

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