We should be grateful for the last 18 years of U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, who recently announced his retirement.

Not only did Souter provide a key vote in striking down the Texas consensual sodomy law, he consistently voted to uphold a woman’s right to choose. Had it not been for Souter, the court would have overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that overturned all state and federal laws outlawing or restricting abortion. As a result, the underpinning for Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 decision striking down the sodomy law in Texas, would have been lost. And imagine if Souter had retired a year ago, giving former President Bush a fifth conservative vote.

In replacing Souter, President Obama has a chance to restore diversity to the Supreme Court. By that I don’t mean gender or race. The court has lacked a true liberal voice since former Justice Thurgood Marshall retired, almost two decades ago. The president hasn’t appointed an unabashed liberal since 1967.

There are no liberals on the Supreme Court today. There are four hard-line conservatives, and five moderate conservatives, depending on the issue. The media has misleadingly portrayed the court’s current four “moderates” as “liberals.” They are not. For example, in 1995, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg voted to require mandatory drug testing of all students involved high school athletics. Even Sandra Day O’Connor, a conservative, dissented. Then in 2003, Justice Stephen Breyer voted to drug test students on high school “academic teams,” (the least likely students to use drugs). And, in a few weeks, the court will sanction strip-searching teen girls to find Midol.

So a liberal voice is desperately needed. After all, are these the issues the nation’s foremost court should be addressing? And is this the way we want to address them, by adherence to the letter of the law without taking its spirit into account?

In the ’60s and ’70s, the court ruled on far more substantive matters – civil rights for blacks women and war protesters, for instance, and their decisions were far more progressive. Today we have many similarly serious issues the court should be concerned with, including civil rights for GLBT people.

The problem is, it takes four votes to hear a case, and the four moderates on the court today are no doubt fearful of voting to review cases where a conservative majority could easily end civil rights for GLBT persons, as the 5-4 majority did in Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 decision upholding state laws proscribing private, consensual sexual activity between consenting adults. Nothing would please the right-wing more than to have the Supreme Court rule 5-4 against same-sex marriage. That’s what at stake now: At some time in the near future, the court may confront the issue of whether the Equal Protection Clause prevents states from denying GLBT citizens the right to equality of marriage because of their “gender” or “sexual orientation.” The obvious answer to us is that states may not. Unfortunately, there aren’t necessarily five votes on the court today that would agree.

The metamorphosis of the Supreme Court from progressive to regressive began in the ’80s, with decisions like Bowers. Since then, we’ve heard the Republican diatribe against appointing judges who “legislate from the bench,” meaning justices who introduce an element of interpretation into decision making rather than adhering strictly to original constructions of the law. Republicans don’t want a repeat of justices such as Earl Warren, whose tenure as chief justice resulted in markedly liberal decisions pertaining to racial segregation, civil rights, separation of church and state and police arrest procedure, due to his insistence on making legal decisions with perspective – the context of the society and times within which they were to be applied.

Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, would be a good choice for U.S. Supreme Court. She’s young, 54; she’s a woman; she has experience as a judge (former President Clinton appointed her in 1998), and her mother is Mexican-American, so, like Obama, she’s biracial. Most importantly, she’s liberal. She authored the majority opinion striking down an Arizona strip search of a young girl by school officials. Most of the males on the 11-member panel had found that the girl had not been strip-searched because the officials hadn’t removed her clothing (although they fondled her). Wardlaw would be a voice of humanism among such fundamentalists.