Her allies have a point. Anyone who reads the whole speech will indeed find that her comment wasn’t as bad as it sounds. It was worse.

What is clear from the full text is that her claim to superior insight was not a casual aside or an exercise in devil’s advocacy. On the contrary, it fit neatly into her overall argument, which was that the law can only benefit from the experiences and biases that female and minority judges bring with them.

She clearly thinks impartiality is overrated. “The aspiration to impartiality is just that — it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others,” she declared, a bit dismissively. She doesn’t seem to think it’s terribly important to try to meet the aspiration.