Happily unmarried: Why is Kagan hard to believe?

The case of the US Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan gets queerer and queerer. Instead of the prospect of the US getting its fourth-ever woman judge in the apex court throwing up more weighty issues such as her lack of experience on the Bench or at the Bar, controversy has, instead, erupted over her lack of a partner — in the legal sense and otherwise.

And it has been encapsulated in a single word: she is stated to be ‘unmarried’ instead of, well, ‘single’ . By that logic, the US would aver that the boringly-bereft-of-masala elevation of the fourth woman to India’s Supreme Court, Mrs Justice Gyan Sudha Misra just last month went through not because of her indisputable credentials as a senior lawyer and then high court judge but because she achieved the conventional double — a coveted job as well as marriage and children, unlike the unmarried Kagan.

Indeed, whereas the word ‘single’ implies a Carrie Bradshaw-like eternal enthusiasm to mingle, ‘unmarried’ has an unfulfilled-Victorian-spinster air about it. Therefore, ever since the word was appended to the feisty former US solicitor-general’s biodata, rumours have swirled about Kagan’s ‘real’ status.

Did it connote her orientation — a throwback to the time when the word was often a coded euphemism — or her sad inability to find a mate before her marry-by date?

There is more than just a trace of unfairness, however, in capping Ms Kagan’s eligibility for the matrimonial stakes at age 50.

A mature ‘cougar’ is regarded as being cooler these days than being a kitten — Demi Moore, Madonna and their boy toys are merely the known faces in a spreading trend, after all. Besides, there is little reason for a retirement age to be pre-designated for the personal lives of US Supreme Court judges, considering they are empanelled for life professionally.

A far more knotty issue is whether there should be cap on the number of Supreme Court judges from Harvard and Yale. Currently, the two universities have a clean sweep!