...for those, such as Politico writer Josh Gerstein and anyone who wants to run with the concerns that he outlines in his insidious little story about the impact that Sonya Sotomayor's Type 1 diabetes may have on her ability to serve as an Associate Justice on the SCOTUS, I have one friendly little piece of advice:
Don't go there.
No; seriously. Do not travel down this trail. Those people who have been living with Type 1 diabetes don't want to hear it and those of us who have spent years - 8 years in my case - or face years to come trying to convince their children who have this form of diabetes that they can lead full, meaningful lives absolutely, positively DO NOT WANT TO HEAR IT...
Type 1 (frequently called "juvenile" because of the usual time of onset) diabetes is an autoimmune disease that is poorly understood by the population at large because it is not all that common. Even now, here at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, I have people saying about my diabetic second-born "oh, that poor dear; he can't eat anything with sugar, can he?". There is no particular understanding that managing Type 1 diabetes is mostly - as I have written many time in the past - a math exercise involving the balancing of grams of carbohydrate intake vs. the units of insulin necessary to account for metabolizing those carb's (with the amount of exercise being a bit of a wild card character that needs to be factored in). Because of that lack of understanding, there is a subsequent lack of understanding of what is actually meant by Sotomayor's efforts to exert tight control over her blood sugar...
Now for the technical part:
The normal range of blood sugars that most doctors wants to see for an adult Type 1 diabetic is around 80 to 120 milligrams per deciliter, which most closely approximates the normal blood sugar values for the rest of us whose pancreatic function hasn't fled to the hills. The A1c value (a measure of how much glucose is sticking to red blood cells) that those doctors - including my second-born's endocrinologist - are looking for is somewhere between 6 and 7.5, with 7 being a "good" number and anything between 6 and 7 being an excellent number with respect to long-term health prospects. The long term health issue here is that 'sticky' red blood cells burdened with a load of extra glucose cause damage to the smallest capillary blood vessels in the body, resulting in circulatory failure in the extremities (particularly the feet and legs), the eyes, and internal organs like the kidneys. But let us get back to the point of all of this...
This Politico article is, to my eyes as the parent of a Type 1 diabetic rather than as a Dirty Fricking Hippy liberal, just another piece of work intended to create a space within which discrimination against an otherwise fully functional American citizen can be made acceptable. Sotomayor isn't about to be vetted for a position as the captain of a passenger airliner or a ship; she is not asking to become an air traffic controller or a member of a Marine rifle platoon. She has not been nominated for any position that has some sort of erratic and unpredictable physical demand that would result in her efforts to tightly control her blood sugar putting her at physical risk. She has been nominated for a position that - from the standpoint of physical demand and management of her diabetes - looks a whole lot like the jobs she has held over the last seventeen years, never mind those other years of work in NYC or in private practice...
There's a simple bottom line to understand here; in a few small, dark, fetid corners of the grim world where the remnant survivors of the failure of conservative governance live, a new angle on an old form of discrimination is being pushed quietly onto the table. What Gerstein's piece tries to suggest in a nudging way without coming right out and saying it is that Sonya Sotomayor is not qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice because she is a Type 1 diabetic. What this posited argument is saying is that, along with not being a True-Blue Caucasian, she is somehow fatally flawed because her pancreas don't produce insulin to regulate her blood sugar in the same way you and I expect. What this posited argument is saying is that all those years of effort by those of us who are the parents of diabetic children to convince them that their lives can still be productive and meaningful have been essentially a lie and and a waste of time, because in the strange shadowy world of the wingnut mindset we are the creators of lesser beings who do not deserve to have a shot at any sort of life that matters...
The ultimate harm that we parents of children who are juvenile diabetics have fought for longer than wingnut idiots like Josh Gerstein have been around has been centered on the whole question of what our children can be when they grow up. The fundamental failure of faux journalists like Gerstein to actually try to understand what Type 1 diabetes means as a lifestyle and the simply absurd suggestion fronted by Gerstein that her status as a diabetic might...maybe...wink wink nudge nudge...be a disqualifying factor to Sotomayor's nomination is the sort of dismissive and discriminatory attitude that turns otherwise placid people like me (no, seriously) into flaming activists. What is being suggested by Gerstein's piece is that the profoundly sedentary job of being a SCOTUS justice is somehow beyond the physical capabilities of a person who is a Type 1 diabetic. It apparently doesn't matter in the case of this particular attack that there isn't any evidence that she has suffered from a failure of performance owing to her diabetes as a Federal District judge or Circuit Court of Appeals Judge or NYC prosecutor or counsel in private practice...
This is grasping at any opportunity to carry out a wingnut hatchet job, pure and simple. Beyond that, it is purely offensive even beyond the otherwise usual offensive racism that has tinged Republican statements of objection to Sotomayor's nomination from the outset. And, because of the ham-handed way that conservatives are handling this particular part of Sotomayor's story, it is now going personal for a whole lot of people who might not have seen a need to weigh in on the Sotomayor nomination...
People who write for Politico aren't bright enough to figure this all out, but members of the Senate of The United States had better be able to do so. Being a Type 1 diabetic is no more a disqualifying factor for service in the judiciary than being a Type 2 diabetic is for serving in either the judiciary, legislative, or executive branches. In fact, being a Type 1 diabetic shouldn't be a disqualifying factor for any judicial nomination in any event, and it hasn't been on two separate occasions for Sonya Sotomayor, but it is now the case that people with the journalistic ethics of hyenas and the human compassion of mealworms are weighing in on the subject...
One more time, let me suggest a bit of friendly advice:
Just don't go there. As the parent of a Type 1 diabetic, I can assure that you will not like how the day turns out...