When President Obama nominated then-Second Circuit judge, Sonia Sotomayor, to the Supreme Court of the United States, some of us were more than a little dubious about the selection. She wasn’t exactly an empathetic Latina on the bench in Foley Square. We were wrong about her, to a large extent, and while she isn’t exactly the godsend to the constitutional rights of criminal defendants we had hoped, she’s the best we have at One First.

But she’s no Nino Scalia.

While celebrating civility in public discourse on Monday night, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor joked she had thought about hitting her deceased colleague Antonin Scalia with a baseball bat due to their differences in opinion.

The 62-year-old Obama appointee told a group of University of Minnesota she wasn’t always quick to tolerate her coworker’s conservative views.

“There are things he’s said on the bench where if I had a baseball bat, I might have used it,” said Sotomayor, the first Latina appointed to the highest court.

Sotomayor was joking, of course. She wouldn’t really take a bat to Scalia’s noggin. But Nino was known for his acerbic opinions, straight talk as Bryan Garner would characterize it, and his personal graciousness.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw operas with him. Justice Elena Kagan went hunting with him. Justice Stephen Breyer traded playful barbs with him.

The message is that we can have differing views and still be friends. Except when we can’t.

But one liberal justice never fully succumbed to Antonin Scalia’s charm: Sonia Sotomayor.

Whether or not Mark Joseph Stern’s “read” of Justice Sotomayor is real or his fantasy imputation of what was happening inside his head can only be confirmed by the justice herself. But what it does reveal is why there can be no fruitful disagreements with writers like Stern,

Mark Joseph Stern is a writer for Slate. He covers the law and LGBTQ issues.

This is unfortunate for two significant reasons. The first is that Stern is an excellent writer, smart and incisive much of the time. The second is that Slate is a big soapbox, and millions of people will read what he writes and assume that he must have a clue or they wouldn’t let him stand on their soapbox.

But then he does something like this:

About that baseball bat comment: I’d bet good money that Sotomayor was thinking specifically about Scalia’s comments during arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, an affirmative action case. Scalia declared that many black students might not belong at a great school like the University of Texas, because they “come from lesser schools” and may get “pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.” The justice advised that black students might be better off at “a less advanced school, a slower-track school.”

While I have no clue what Stern sees as “good money,” it’s not really important. No matter how much money Stern is willing to put up, he has no clue. He’s just making up what he thinks and trying to attribute his motivations to Sotomayor.  And from there, he takes a dive into classic question-begging.

An ungenerous interpretation of that comment might ask whether Scalia was endorsing a modern version of school segregation. In any event, by the time Scalia closed his mouth, Sotomayor was probably writing a scathing dissent in her head. Ultimately, she never had to put pen to paper. Scalia died two months later, tipping the balance and allowing the court to uphold the university’s affirmative action program in a fairly sweeping decision by Justice Anthony Kennedy. No baseball bat necessary.

See what he did there? He fabricated a motive to Justice Sotomayor’s joke, then used his own openly ungenerous interpretation to create a fictional scenario that exists only in his imagination, which never came to pass because of Nino Scalia’s death, which had nothing to do with a baseball bat.

This reflects why we can’t talk. The old saw, “reasonable minds may differ,” only applies if we accept the notion that people who do not share our views can still be reasonable.* What Stern is saying is that Scalia’s questions (not necessarily his views, which will never be known since he died before expressing them) were unreasonable because they did not reflect his, and possibly Justice Sotomayor’s, views.

And here’s the weird thing: I was on Sotomayor’s side of the argument, but defended Scalia’s question, not because it wasn’t a really bad question, but because asking questions is what oral argument is for.  So when I raise the problem of smart writers on big soapboxes like Stern, it’s not because of an antagonistic political agenda, but because he allows his values to so utterly cloud his writing as to make it dangerously false.

It’s bad enough, though unsurprising, that there is no discussion to be had about politics, as everyone has backed up into their corners and is ready to lie, cheat and steal to win the day. In a post-factual society, where the only thing that matters is how passionately we feel about something, disagreement is intolerable.

But that’s just us, the groundlings, not the stars of the game. It’s not like we get a vote on how the Supreme Court rules, or who gets to nominate new justices to fill vacant seats. So we have no tolerance for disagreement and hate, maybe even despise, anyone who questions our feelings. So what? Even when it’s the smart writers like Stern rationalizing malevolence and the justification for taking a bat to a justice’s head. So what?

The justices of the Supreme Court, not to mention the lesser courts upon which the law depends, on the other hand, should consider views with which they may not necessarily agree. Hopefully, Justice Sotomayor was making a joke and isn’t the close-minded agenda-driven judge that Stern would have her be. Hopefully, she, as well as all the other justices, would be open to all arguments and, upon application of law and logic, reach a decision that is greater than their personal politics.

And hopefully, the smart writers like Stern would stop using their soapbox to extol the virtues of a justice who, should she harbor the motives he imputes to her, should not be on the Supreme Court. Just because us groundlings have forsaken reason for feelings doesn’t mean that’s what we want or need in a justice. Now, play ball.

*No, that does not mean all disagreement is reasonable. You still need to be able to express a rational basis for your position. Sorry.