Story highlights Mazie Hirono: Hawaii is a state, and Sessions' comments on US judge there reveal prejudice

Administration sees diversity as weakness, but Hawaii is a reminder it's wrong, she says

Mazie Hirono, a Democrat, is a US senator from Hawaii. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) Jeff Sessions, the attorney general of the United States, appears to need a reminder: Hawaii was granted statehood in 1959. I'm happy to tell him where I was when Hawaii became a state. I was in sixth grade at Koko Head Elementary School in Honolulu, and was chosen to pin the 50th star on the American flag in front of my teachers and classmates at a special assembly to celebrate statehood.

Like my fellow citizens in Hawaii, I am a proud American.

Mazie Hirono

This is why Sessions' ignorant comments about US District Judge Derrick Watson from Hawaii were so insulting and prejudiced.

In a discussion of President Donald Trump's executive order that banned travelers from several Muslim-majority countries -- an order that Watson blocked -- Sessions told an interviewer, "I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power."

I would never criticize a judge just because he or she presides in another state, including Alabama. Sessions' Alabamans would be outraged if I did. Yet that's exactly what the attorney general did.

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