Consider two judicial nominees, both of whom have won bipartisan support and praise for their distinguished service on lower courts.

Nominee No. 1 had been a not-very-active member of his grandfather's all-male fishing club in Western Pennsylvania. It had a ramshackle old building with bunk beds, wooden tables and benches like a boys' summer camp. He resigned two years before his nomination.

Nominee No. 2 was a member of a single-sex club described on its Web site as "a constellation of influential... decision makers in the profit, non-profit and social sectors; who build long term mutually beneficial relationships." That club has periodic meetings in New York and other cities and an annual retreat in Latin America, including cocktail parties with U.S. diplomats and host-country officials and panel discussions on public policy and business affairs.

Nominee No. 1 came under attack from the National Organization for Women and Senate Democrats. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, now chairman of the Judiciary Committee, fumed that the fishing club "invidiously discriminates against women," and thus that the nominee had violated the Canon 2 of the official Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges.

But hardly anyone is very concerned about Nominee No. 2's club, excepting a few conservatives and my friend Michael Kinsley, the liberal columnist, for reasons of his own.

Nominee No. 2 is, of course, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Her all-woman club was the Belizean Grove, which touts itself as a women's alternative to "the power of the Bohemian Grove, a 130-year-old, elite old boys' network of former Presidents, businessmen, military, musicians, academics, and non-profit leaders." She resigned on June 19 to quiet the conservative fuss, while denying that the Belizean Grove excluded males or practiced "invidious discrimination."

Nominee No. 1 was Judge D. Brooks Smith, a Reagan-appointed federal district judge in Pennsylvania who resigned from the Spruce Creek Rod and Gun Club in 1999. He was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2001 (and eventually confirmed) for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. His flaying by Democrats was recently detailed in the American Spectator.

Conservatives complain that Democrats are once again applying a familiar double-standard, denouncing white male Republicans as sexist or racist for relatively innocuous forms of discrimination or remarks while smiling on analogous conduct by female and minority Democrats.