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People of goodwill can disagree on matters of public policy. This is an axiom that those of us who write about politics should repeat every day.

But there is also right and wrong; there is also good and evil. Most of the opposition to Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court is at least wrong, and some of it is evil.

Those who seek to block Judge Sotomayor's nomination focus mainly on two facts: First, she joined a ruling by the Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, that upheld the right of New Haven, Conn., to throw out an exam for the promotion of firefighters because no African-Americans passed it.

Second, she gave a speech in 2001 in which she said: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”

In the first instance, Judge Sotomayor and her colleagues were simply upholding existing law. The Supreme Court is currently examining whether that law is constitutional. But it's the wise-Latina quote that has galvanized the opposition.

“The very idea that a judge's ‘life experiences' should influence judicial decisions is as absurd as it is dangerous,” Thomas Sowell wrote yesterday on RealClearPolitics.com.

Newt Gingrich, former Republican House Speaker, twittered: “New racism is no better than old racism. A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

Mr. Sowell's statement is wrong. Mr. Gingrich's statement is evil.

In 1896, seven Supreme Court judges ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that it was constitutional for states to segregate the black race from the white. Their ruling flew in the face of the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

But those seven white men knew that Southern whites were determined to deprive blacks of their civil rights, and nothing short of another civil war would stop them. So the judges perverted the Constitution, the law and the court to provide segregation with a veneer of legality.

Fifty-eight years later, nine white men overturned Plessy in Brown v. Board, the most important Supreme Court decision of the 20th century. Why did the court reverse itself? Because times had changed.

You know two things about yourself. First, you know that your world view has been shaped by the times in which you live, your genetic inheritance and the way your life has unfolded. You also know that you know this, and so you try to be careful not to let your inclinations ride roughshod over the facts. Judges know this, too.

So Mr. Sowell was wrong to assert that judges can, let alone should, apply the law devoid of any personal context. Context mingles with law and precedent to produce judgments.

But what are we to make of Mr. Gingrich's accusation that Judge Sotomayor is racist? He could not have reached that conclusion had he read the complete text of her speech, in which Judge Sotomayor concludes: “I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I re-evaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires.”

These are wise, if not entirely grammatical, words.

So one of two things is true. Either Mr. Gingrich did not bother to read the speech, or he read it and then willfully disregarded what Judge Sotomayor was saying.

In either case, Mr. Gingrich made a vile accusation that cannot be reasonably sustained. I can't know why he made it, but I believe that he was pandering to closed and prejudiced minds within the conservative movement by accusing Ms. Sotomayor of the very racism that he knows infects some of his supporters.

That's not just wrong, that's evil.

There is good and bad across the political spectrum. And it is possible to reasonably disagree with Judge Sotomayor's legal philosophy. But this judge is being persecuted by small, bigoted people who should be ashamed of what they're saying.

That Republican senators, while distancing themselves from Mr. Gingrich's remarks, refuse to disown them tells you everything you need to know about the current state of that party.