Opinion: Ungated communities

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As confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor near, my inbox runneth over with commentary on the nomination from special-interest groups. the latest is a release from the conservative group Committee for Justice (not to be confused with the Committee for Public Safety). Here’s the leadoff:

‘In a letter released today and attached below, more than two dozen leaders of the Second Amendment community from across the nation urged senators ‘not to confirm Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the next associate justice of the United States Supreme Court,’ citing their ‘grave concern’ over her Second Amendment record.’

This irked me for a reason that has nothing do with the merits of Sotomayor’s nomination. I’m not surprised that the gun lobby has ‘grave concern’ about the judge (someday I’d love to receive a press release expressing ‘mild concern’). It’s the use of the term ‘Second Amendment community,’ the latest in a long line of psuedo-communities.

I still find the term ‘intelligence community’ bizarre, maybe because it conjures up the image of a suburban cul-de-sac where every father playing basketball with his kids is a spy. But there’s also the ‘gay community,’ the ‘disability community’ and, of special interest to Angelenos, the ‘entertainment community.’

This perversion of the word ‘community’ has insinuated itself into dictionaries. Webster’s online version offers eight definitions of ‘community.’ Fittingly, the first is: ‘A group of people living in a particular local area.’ But No. 4, with a bullet, is: ‘The body of people in a learned occupation.’ (I suppose firing a gun is a learned occupation if you’re a sniper.)

‘Community’ bothers me not just because it’s a cliche; the use of the term in political contexts is freighted with the dubious assumption that ‘communities’ are monolithic. What is the ‘black community,’ invoked so facilely by activists and politicians? Or the ‘Latino community’? As the liberal-conservative schism over the policies of the current pope demonstrates, a cohesive ‘Catholic community’ is also an illusion.

Our current president was a community organizer, but the ones the young Barack Obama organized were real communities, not constructs. Maybe Obama’s experience will rehabilitate the original connotation of the term -- including in the journalistic community.