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Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick finds herself very reassured that young people don’t care whether about Elena Kagan’s sex life or clothing style:

Young people reading Robin Givhan’s article on Kagan’s scandalously open knees think they’re reading something hilarious from their grandparents’ stack of dating magazines from the 1950s. When they hear us yelping about racial diversity at the court, they think about the fact that their classrooms are already incredibly diverse and their Facebook friendships span continents. When they hear us shrieking over women’s softball, they shake their Title IX heads and figure we’re just idiots for thinking straight women don’t play sports. And when they hear us whispering behind our hands about whether someone is gay, most of them tell me they think we’re just freaking idiots. Just as they embody Barack Obama’s post-racial America, they identify almost completely with Kagan’s post-gender America—in which womanhood simply isn’t defined by skirts, babies, or boyfriends anymore.

Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum rightly points out that while that’s all well and good, maybe theres’s still some other stuff we might want to be concerned about:

Good job, young people! But we still have that whole judicial philosophy thing to hash out. It would sure be nice if we knew a little more about that.

Digging a bit deeper into Lithwick’s actual post, though, I find myself more than a bit skeptical about even the relatively useless claim she is making.

I might be more encouraged about the increasing tolerance and openness of our society were Lithwick not apparently drawing her examples entirely from a) people who call into political radio shows that she has been on, and b) people who respond to her Slate posts via email, Facebook, and Twitter. Mind you, I don’t have any data myself, but I’d bet there’s at least a possibility that those to groups don’t constitute a particularly random sample of “20-somethings”.