Sotomayor resigns from all-women club

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor resigned Friday from an elite women’s club after Republicans questioned her participation in it.

Sotomayor said she resigned from the Belizean Grove to prevent the issue from becoming a distraction in her confirmation hearings.

In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the committee, the federal appeals court judge said she was convinced that the club did not practice “invidious discrimination” and that her membership did not violate judicial ethics.

But she said she did not want questions about it to “distract anyone from my qualifications and record.” Federal judges are bound by a code saying they should not join a group that discriminates by race, sex, religion or nationality.

The Belizean Grove bills itself as women’s answer to the 130-year-old all-male Bohemian Club in California.

Chief Justice Earl Warren belonged to the Bohemian Club beginning in the 1940s, before he joined the court and long before the federal judiciary adopted a code of conduct.

“The Belizean Grove is a constellation of influential women who are key decision-makers in the profit, non-profit and social sectors; who build long term mutually beneficial relationships in order to both take charge of their own destinies and help others to do the same,” the group’s website says. It has about 115 members.

Earlier in the week, Sotomayor defended her membership, telling senators that the group involved men in some of its events and that she was unaware of any man who had tried to become a member.

Sotomayor’s backers noted that the current court’s only woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, belongs to the International Women’s Forum. So did former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who defended her involvement in all-women groups during her 1981 confirmation hearings.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy faced similar questions over his membership in the all-male Olympic Club in San Francisco. Kennedy gave up his membership in 1987, as he was under consideration for the high court.