#‘i love you’ ‘the supreme court just made it legal to discriminate against gay and trans people’ <- formatted as funny goofy meme.

[fizzlehead]

at a certain point i think that the people on here who insist on making destiel confession meme format posts about every single news story that ever breaks need to perhaps consider if using said meme format is really appropriate or not in the context of the individual news stories they are using it for. just thinking

[eleanorblue]

EleanorBlue’s Five-Part 2022 Midterm Recap; Part Two, Section B: The Deep Red States

It has come to my attention that my source for ballot initiatives may not have been complete. That's a yikes. Forgive me if I miss anything--if I find important ballot initiatives I didn’t cover, I’ll add them in post-publication. 

Don't come at me if you don’t think some of these states are deep red, please. They’re all red! And, as this part of the recap will show, even the most Republican states can vote for Democrats and Democrat policies.

Let’s go get this over with.

Florida

Guys. Florida is not a swing state. I’m sick of pretending it is. Sure, it went blue for Obama in 2008 AND 2012, but things changed fast. Incumbent Governor Ron DeSantis (R), who passed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill severely restricting any mention of LGBTQ topics in school, declared war on Disney after Disney spoke out against the aforementioned bill, banned abortion at 15 weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest, essentially banned any discussion of discrimination or racism in public schools, used Florida tax dollars to fly legal Venezuelan asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard to own the libs...

Where was I going with this?

Oh, right. Incumbent Governor Ron DeSantis (R), who did all those horribly shitty things and many more, beat Congressional Rep. Charlie Crist (D) by 20 points (59.4% to 40%). Republicans held their trifecta in Florida. Florida is no longer a swing state!

Ron DeSantis had a fantastic night, which sucks for all of us because he's a fascist nematode in a suit, but it’s also kind of funny because it made someone else really, really unhappy.

And really, really nervous.

But we’ll talk about him later.

That’s all I have to say about state government elections in Florida, I think. Let’s go north a bit.

North Carolina

Yeah, I know. This is what I meant with the “don’t come at me’ bit. Look, I love North Carolina! I have family from North Carolina! But ever since 2012, it’s had kind of a hard time.

North Carolina is kind of like Wisconsin in regards to the party makeup of its state government. It’s gerrymandered like nothing imaginable, but has a Democrat for a governor. In fact, it’s so gerrymandered that in 2016, the Electoral Integrity Project said it was no longer a democracy. Governor Roy Cooper wasn’t up for reelection this cycle, but the state legislatures were. Republicans had a chance to obtain a supermajority in the House and the Senate. What happened?

Well, they got the Senate, but they fell one seat short of the House. This is...good? I mean, it means that they still won’t be able to pass abortion bans through Roy Cooper. But it’s SO close. It’s uncomfortably close. I don’t really like that. Unfortunately, Republicans ALSO flipped the state supreme court, giving them control for the first time since 2016. That eliminates one more check on the very red legislature.

I don’t know. It could have been worse. It could have been a hell of a lot better. We could really help ourselves--and a hell of a lot of people in North Carolina--if we did something to straighten out that anti-democratic state.

Texas

Beto tries, and clearly he resonates with people. Greg Abbott is phenomenally terrible in a way that is hard to match. But the demographics of that state are just too much right now. Incumbent Governor Greg Abbott (R) won over former Congressional Representative/2018 Senate candidate/2020 presidential primary candidate Beto O’Rourke (D) by 11 points, 54.8% to 43.8%, and the state legislature remained red. For context, Biden only lost the state by six points, 52.1% to 46.5%.

I’m really not surprised by this result (maybe a little by the size of the split given Beto’s performance against Cruz in 2018). I just wanted to take a moment to talk about Texas because I can’t stop thinking about the families of the children of Uvalde. I’ve seen some of their statements on Twitter. Those poor people are going through hell. I cannot imagine what it it’s like to lose a child to a gunman in school, where they were supposed to be safe, while officers twiddled their thumbs outside the door. I cannot imagine going through that and then hearing the governor say “It could have been worse.” I cannot imagine having to live in a community that then reelected that asshole.

I don’t have any more words about Texas.

Kentucky

Let’s talk about Kentucky, a deep red state with a Democrat governor! Make no mistake--unlike North Carolina, Kentucky really is deep red, voting for Trump in 2020 by 25 points (62.0% to 36.6%). Governor Andy Beshear was not up for reelection this cycle, and both chambers of the the state legislature remained red, but there was an interesting ballot measure. Kentuckians voted on Amendment 2, which would have added language to the State Constitution stating that citizens do not have the right to abortion in Kentucky and the government is not required to provide funding for an abortion.

And how did Amendment 2 do in very red Kentucky?

It failed, 52.3% to 47.7%, even as the state legislature remained under Republican control.

Hmm. I wonder if Roe v. Wade may have galvanized some parts of the electorate. Seems as if people aren’t too happy about losing the right to choose.

Montana

Montana no longer has a Democrat governor and is pretty red (Trump won by 16 points, 40.5% to 56.9%). State legislature stayed red, because of course, and there was no gubernatorial race, but again I want to talk about a ballot measure. This one is also about abortion, but in a sneakier way. The measure, called the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act” was claimed by its proponents to be necessary to protect the lives of fetuses that survive abortion (which is something that totally happens all the time and is definitely not outrage fodder for the right). It required medical providers to essentially do whatever they could to save the lives of infants born prematurely, or face $50,000 in fines and up to 20 years in prison. Opponents of the bill said that it would rob families of the opportunity to spend the last moments of their infants’ life with their dying child and it would force practitioners to perform painful and unnecessary procedures to avoid prison time.

Are you noticing a trend here? The measure failed, 52.6% to 47.4%.

Missouri

Missouri is yet another state without a gubernatorial race and an unchanged red state legislature that I wanted to talk about. Missouri had a ballot measure not about abortion this time, but about marijuana legalization.

That’s definitely not part of the Republican platform, and make no mistake, Missouri is very red, going 58.6% to 41.4% for Trump in 2020. And what happened?

Ballot measure passed, 53.1% to 46.9%.

Sometimes I think people like Democrat policies but just not Democrats.

Kansas

Kansas is a pretty red state, going 56.1%-41.5% for Trump in 2020, so this definitely won't be a competitive governor’s race, right? There’s no way it’ll break blue, I mean--

*record scratch*

Admittedly, I know very little about the Kansas state government. I didn’t even realize Governor Laura Kelly (D) was an incumbent. But still. How did she hold on in such a red state against state Attorney General Derek Schmidt (R)?

“[Schmidt] pledged to ban abortion across the state...”

Ah. Okay.

Let’s not forget: earlier this year, Kansas held a referendum on an abortion amendment that, if it had passed, would have added language to the state constitution stating that citizens do not have the right to an abortion in Kansas. It failed by eighteen percent. Now, as I’ve said previously, I am not a political analyst. I just follow politics closely and have a tumblr. But it seems to me, that if my state had just resoundingly turned out in a special election to vote decisively against an abortion ban, I would not come out in favor of said ban.

So Governor Laura Kelly won by two points, 49.4% to 47.4%. It is worth pointing out that in the Secretary of State race, incumbent Scott Schwab (R) beat businesswoman��Jeanna Repass 58.5% to 38.7%, and the state House remained red (the state Senate was not up this cycle), so it’s not like Kansas is suddenly a swing state.

But still. Don’t come for abortion.

Wrap-Up

Is that it for the deep red states? Please, let that be it for the deep red states. I think I’ve covered the big surprises and key races, at least. I’ll just run through the non-surprises really quickly.

Gubernatorial Races: Incumbent Kay Ivey (R) won by 38 points in Alabama, Incumbent Mike Dunleavey (R) obtained a majority in the first round of Alaska’s ranked-choice election, former Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) won by 28 points in Arkansas, incumbent Brad Little (R) won by 40 points in Idaho, incumbent Kim Reynolds (R) won by 19 points in Iowa, Jim Pillen (R) won by 24 points in Nebraska, incumbent Mike DeWine (R) won by 26 points in Ohio, incumbent Kevin Stitt (R) won by 13.7 points in Oklahoma, incumbent Henry McMaster (R) won by 17 points in South Carolina, incumbent Kristi Noem (R) won by 27 points in South Dakota, and incumbent Mark Gordon (R) won by 62 points in Wyoming.

Secretary of State Races: Wes Allen (R) won by 35 points in Alabama, incumbent John Thurston (R) won by 34 points in Arkansas, Phil McGrane (R) won by 45 points in Idaho, Diego Morales (R) won by 13.9 points in Indiana, incumbent Paul Pate (R) won by 20.2 points in Iowa, incumbent Bob Evnen (R) won an uncontested race in Nebraska, Michael Howe (R) won by 36 points in North Dakota, incumbent Frank LaRose (R) won by 20.1 points in Ohio, incumbent Mark Hammond (R) won by 26.8 points in South Carolina, Monae Jackson (R) won by 27.8 points in South Dakota, and Chuck Gray (R) won an uncontested race in Wyoming.

State legislatures: The Alabama state legislature remained red, we don’t really know what happened in Alaska yet but it looks like both chambers might be controlled by a bipartisan coalition, the Arkansas state legislature remained red, the Idaho state legislature remained red, the Indiana state legislature remained red, the Iowa state legislature remained red, the single-chamber Nebraska state legislature remained red, the North Dakota state legislature remained red, the Ohio state legislature remained red, the Oklahoma state legislature remained red, the South Carolina House remained red and the Senate was not up for election, the Tennessee state legislature remained red, the Utah state legislature remained red, the West Virginia state legislature remained red, and the Wyoming state legislature remained red. 

Ballot Initiatives: Ohio passed a ballot initiative requiring citizens to have been registered to vote for 30 days to be eligible to vote in an election. Super democratic, guys. Iowa added language to the state constitution enshrining the right to bear arms. (Friends: this one is in the federal Constitution. You know, the big one. That’s why you guys yell about the second amendment all the time. Not sure why you needed it here, too.) Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota failed to legalize marijuana. (Very cool, very chill.) And...that’s it. 

Whew! That was fun. Next up, we have state government races in blue states. See you all tomorrow, and thanks for reading this far. 

[yourreddancer]

Heather Cox Richardson

March 22, 2022 (Tuesday)

Right on cue, Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana today told a reporter that states not only should decide the issue of abortion but should also be able to decide the issues of whether interracial marriage should be legal and whether couples should have access to contraception. He told a reporter: “Well, you can list a whole host of issues, when it comes down to whatever they are, I’m going to say that they’re not going to all make you happy within a given state, but we’re better off having states manifest their points of view rather than homogenizing it across the country as Roe v. Wade did.”  

After an extraordinary backlash to his statements, Braun walked back what he had said, claiming he had misunderstood the question. “Earlier during a virtual press conference I misunderstood a line of questioning that ended up being about interracial marriage, let me be clear on that issue—there is no question the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race, that is not something that is even up for debate, and I condemn racism in any form, at all levels and by any states, entities, or individuals,” he said.But he had stated his position quite clearly, and as he originally stated it, that position was intellectually consistent.

  After World War II, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights in the states, imposing the government’s interest in protecting equality to overrule discriminatory legislation by the states. Now, Republicans want to return power to the states, where those who are allowed to vote can impose discriminatory laws on minorities. 

Senator Braun is correct: it is not possible to overrule the Supreme Court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights on just one issue. If you are going to say that the states should be able to do as they wish without the federal government protecting civil rights on, say, the issue of abortion, you must entertain the principle that the entire body of decisions in which the federal government protects civil rights, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending segregation in the public schools, is illegitimate.  

And that is off-the-charts huge.

It is, quite literally, the same argument that gave us the claimed right of states to enslave people within their borders before the Civil War, even as a majority of Americans objected to that system. More recently, it is the argument that made birth control illegal in many states, a restriction that endangered women’s lives and hampered their ability to participate in the workforce as unplanned pregnancies enabled employers to discriminate against them. It is the argument that prohibits abortion and gay marriage; in many states, laws with those restrictions are still on the books and will take effect just as soon as the Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges are overturned.

Braun’s willingness to abandon the right of Americans to marry across racial lines was pointed, since Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearing for her elevation to the Supreme Court is currently underway in the Senate, is Black and her husband is non-Black. The world Braun described would permit states to declare their 26-year marriage illegal, as it would have been in many states before the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision declared that states could not prohibit interracial marriages. This would also be a problem for sitting justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni

.But it is not just Braun talking about rolling back civil rights. This week, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has challenged the Griswold v. Connecticut decision legalizing contraception, and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) has questioned Obergefell.

Seventy percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. In 2012—the most recent poll I can find—89% of Americans thought birth control was morally acceptable, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of 2008, 99% of sexually active American women use birth control in their lifetimes. And even the right to abortion, that issue that has burned in American politics since 1972 when President Richard Nixon began to use it to attract Democratic Catholics to the Republican ticket, remains popular. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans believe it should be legal in most or all cases.

A full decade ago, in April 2012, respected scholars Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, and Norm Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, crunched the numbers and concluded: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream,” they wrote, “it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

And yet, in the last decade, the party has moved even further to the right. Now it is not only calling for an end to the civil rights protections that undergird modern America, but also lining up behind a leader who tried to overthrow our democracy. A column by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post yesterday was titled: “Fringe Republicans are not the problem. It’s the party’s mainstream.”

Rubin points out that Republicans refused to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol, refused to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (which as recently as 2006 enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support), and refused to impeach Trump for an attempt to overthrow our democracy. The party brought us to the brink of defaulting on the debt, and it tolerates white nationalists in its ranks.

At the state level, prominent Republicans spread covid disinformation, suppress voting, and harass LGBTQ young people. To end abortion, certain Republican-dominated states are offering bounties to anyone reporting women seeking abortions beyond six weeks in a pregnancy. Worse, Rubin notes, “a law in Idaho would force rape victims to endure nine months of pregnancy—while allowing their rapists to collect a bounty for turning them in if they seek an abortion.”

The confirmation hearings this week for the elevation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court have illustrated that Republican lawmakers are far more interested in creating sound bites for right-wing media and reelection campaigns than in governing. Led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Republicans have tried to label Judge Jackson as soft on child pornographers, a smear that has been thoroughly discredited by, among others, the conservative National Review, which called it “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” Their attacks, though, will play well to their base on social media.

Similarly, Cruz made a big play of accusing Jackson of pushing Critical Race Theory in a private school on whose board she sits. “Do you agree…that babies are racist?” he asked, sitting in front of a poster with blown-up images from a book by African American studies scholar Ibram X. Kendi that the school has in its library. 

On Twitter, the Republican National Committee cut right to the chase, showing a picture of Judge Jackson under her initials, which were crossed out and replaced with “CRT.”

[if-only-angels-could-prevail]

DEAR STRAIGHT PEOPLE,

Why do you hate gay people so much?

Gays are hated. Prove me wrong. Your top general just called us immoral. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is in charge of an estimated 65,000 gay and lesbian troops, some fighting for our country in Iraq. A right-wing political commentator, Ann Coulter, gets away with calling a straight presidential candidate a faggot. Even Garrison Keillor, of all people, is making really tacky jokes about gay parents in his column. This, I guess, does not qualify as hate except that it is so distasteful and dumb, often a first step on the way to hate. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama tried to duck the questions that Pace’s bigotry raised, confirming what gay people know: that there is not one candidate running for public office anywhere who dares to come right out, unequivocally, and say decent, supportive things about us.

Gays should not vote for any of them. There is not a candidate or major public figure who would not sell gays down the river. We have seen this time after time, even from supposedly progressive politicians such as President Clinton with his “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military and his support of the hideous Defense of Marriage Act. Of course, it’s possible that being shunned by gays will make politicians more popular, but at least we will have our self-respect. To vote for them is to collude with them in their utter disdain for us.

Don’t any of you wonder why heterosexuals treat gays so brutally year after year after year, as your people take away our manhood, our womanhood, our personhood? Why, even as we die you don’t leave us alone. What we can leave our surviving lovers is taxed far more punitively than what you leave your (legal) surviving spouses. Why do you do this? My lover will be unable to afford to live in the house we have made for each other over our lifetime together. This does not happen to you. Taxation without representation is what led to the Revolutionary War. Gay people have paid all the taxes you have. But you have equality, and we don’t.

And there’s no sign that this situation will change anytime soon. President Bush will leave a legacy of hate for us that will take many decades to cleanse. He has packed virtually every court and every civil service position in the land with people who don’t like us. So, even with the most tolerant of new presidents, gays will be unable to break free from this yoke of hate. Courts rule against gays with hateful regularity. And of course the Supreme Court is not going to give us our equality, and in the end, it is from the Supreme Court that such equality must come. If all of this is not hate, I do not know what hate is.

Our feeble gay movement confines most of its demands to marriage. But political candidates are not talking about — and we are not demanding that they talk about — equality. My lover and I don’t want to get married just yet, but we sure want to be equal.

You must know that gays get beaten up all the time, all over the world. If someone beats you up because of who you are — your race or ethnic origin — that is considered a hate crime. But in most states, gays are not included in hate crime measures, and Congress has refused to include us in a federal act.

Homosexuality is a punishable crime in a zillion countries, as is any activism on behalf of it. Punishable means prison. Punishable means death. The U.S. government refused our requests that it protest after gay teenagers were hanged in Iran, but it protests many other foreign cruelties. Who cares if a faggot dies? Parts of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. are joining with the Nigerian archbishop, who believes gays should be put in prison. Episcopalians! Whoever thought we’d have to worry about Episcopalians?

Well, whoever thought we’d have to worry about Florida? A young gay man was just killed in Florida because of his sexual orientation. I get reports of gays slain in our country every week. Few of them make news. Fewer are prosecuted. Do you consider it acceptable that 20,000 Christian youths make an annual pilgrimage to San Francisco to pray for gay souls? This is not free speech. This is another version of hate. It is all one world of gay-hate. It always was.

Gays do not realize that the more we become visible, the more we come out of the closet, the more we are hated. Don’t those of you straights who claim not to hate us have a responsibility to denounce the hate? Why is it socially acceptable to joke about “girlie men” or to discriminate against us legally with “constitutional” amendments banning gay marriage? Because we cannot marry, we can pass on only a fraction of our estates, we do not have equal parenting rights and we cannot live with a foreigner we love who does not have government permission to stay in this country. These are the equal protections that the Bill of Rights proclaims for all?

Why do you hate us so much that you will not permit us to legally love? I am almost 72, and I have been hated all my life, and I don’t see much change coming.

I think your hate is evil.

What do we do to you that is so awful? Why do you feel compelled to come after us with such frightful energy? Does this somehow make you feel safer and legitimate? What possible harm comes to you if we marry, or are taxed just like you, or are protected from assault by laws that say it is morally wrong to assault people out of hatred? The reasons always offered are religious ones, but certainly they are not based on the love all religions proclaim.

And even if your objections to gays are religious, why do you have to legislate them so hatefully? Make no mistake: Forbidding gay people to love or marry is based on hate, pure and simple.

You may say you don’t hate us, but the people you vote for do, so what’s the difference? Our own country’s democratic process declares us to be unequal. Which means, in a democracy, that our enemy is you. You treat us like crumbs. You hate us. And sadly, we let you.

Larry Kramer (1935-2020)

[coquesne]

Lmao you gotta love those bumbling governments forgetting about lesbians when they made sodomy laws.

(When I say gay people or lesbians I use it as an umbrella term for people who engage in same-sex sexual activity or people who are same sex attracted, including multi-gender attracted people)

Take for example Kansas, who has a long history of making gay sexual activities illegal and was one of a few states that had sodomy laws specifically for gay people, that only got nullified in 2004, when gay sex became legal nationwide. To be clear, Kansas still has on the books that anal intercourse is illegal, they just have no power to enforce it. Now, Kansas has a really bad track record with the gay people. It only became illegal for employers to discriminate against employees based on sexual orientation in July 2020 with a Supreme Court decision. By 1948, the state of Kansas had sterilized over 3000 gay people. They also outlawed pretty much every kind of sex that wasn’t good christian missionary penis-in-vagina sex for a VERY long time, labeling it all sodomy.

Now, 1989 came rolling around. The Kansas Supreme Court heard a case on whether or not cunnilingus constituted sodomy. They voted overwhelmingly that it wasn’t sodomy, doing everything but just coming out and saying that they were only trying to go after gay men with sodomy laws, and they weren’t very worried about lesbians and just didn’t care what straight people did. Very quickly, the state legislature amended the sodomy law to include cunnilingus, because they hated for people to have fun, I guess. The catch? The wording. They included this to be against the law, “oral-genital stimulation between the tongue of a male and the genital area of a female”. These fuckers forgot about lesbians. So, for two years, the only people allowed to completely legally engage in cunnilingus were lesbians, until they amended it. 

[transadvice]

I just found this blog, so I don't know if you're from the U.S, but I wanted to know. If Trans rights are repealed due to political stuff in the next few years, will Top Surgery still be an option?

I am in the U.S., and the thing about the U.S. is that any legal protections for trans people that exist are almost entirely on the state level. There is very little federal protection for trans people enshrined in federal law; the first time the Supreme Court even addressed trans people was three months ago, in a June ruling which decided that Civil Rights employment protection laws that protect people on the basis of sex also protect people on the basis of sexual orientation and being trans. And trans-ness is an afterthought to those decisions, which were both about gay men. So, there’s not much to be repealed, really.  Certainly, a second Trump administration could make things even harder for us. It’s not that Trump hasn’t made things worse for us in his first term. Three days before the Supreme Court’s employment discrimination ruling, the Department of Health and Human Services erased Obama-era protections on trans people’s health care and defined sex narrowly as sex assigned at birth.  Individual states very a lot in their treatment of us. Some states have positive laws which protect us, while others have negative laws that harm us. The Transgender Law Center has a good map. Generally if you live in one of the “good” states, I imagine they’ll continue to be good regardless of who’s in the White House, though “bad” states could become emboldened to be even worse (and are unlikely to be stopped).  The National Center for Transgender Equality has a good summary of our current rights when it comes to health care, insurance, and discrimination. While laws can change, as you know, it might be comforting to learn the basis of our current rights and how hard or easy various parts of it might be to change. 

I don’t believe there is currently any movement to make top surgery illegal, and I think it would be a fairly hard sell in a capitalist society to tell plastic surgeons they can’t do such-and-such an elective procedure. It’s possible that health insurance plans could stop being required to cover it, which I’m sure they’d love to do because it would save them money, but I think even that would vary a lot by state. Anyway, people got top surgery long before it was covered by health insurance. It’s a procedure that generally costs five or ten thousand dollars, which is a lot of money, but not that much as far as surgeries go. If you’re asking because you want to know if you should go for top surgery sooner rather than later? I mean, I always feel like you should go for it as soon as you can, since, if nothing else, it maximizes the amount of time you’ll be able to enjoy your new chest.  If you’re asking because you want to know if you should despair? No, don’t despair. I think you’ll be able to get it some way or another. If a new obstacle crops up, you can cross that bridge when you come to it. If your insurance stops covering it, you can get another insurance, move to another state, or save up. If it becomes hard to get in the U.S., you can get it in another country (trans women have been going to Thailand for SRS for decades). Trans people have been transitioning in spite of all the chips stacked against us for generations. We’ll figure it out. 

[theconservativebrief]

India’s highest court has just struck down a more than century-old prohibition on gay sex, calling the Victorian-era law “irrational, indefensible, and manifestly arbitrary.”

The ruling represents a hard-fought victory for gay-rights activists in India, who have been battling the law for more than a decade. But it’s also a symbolic break with India’s colonial past. The law, known as Section 377, dates to when the British Empire ruled India.

The court’s ruling on Thursday effectively makes it illegal to discriminate against people based on sexuality, though it doesn’t permit same-sex marriage. Section 377 was inconsistently enforced, but police and others sometimes weaponized the law to harass, blackmail, or extort transgender or gay people — especially men. Gay rights advocates said it also deterred victims of sexual assault from reporting crimes over fears of prosecution.

And that contributed to a culture of fear across India, according to activists who celebrated the ruling. A man named Krishna, one of the petitioners in the case, told the BBC: “I don’t know how it will change our lives yet but it helps us lead them without fear or depression.”

An Indian supporter of the LGBT community takes part in a pride parade in Bhopal, India, on July 15, 2018. AFP/Getty Images

A five-judge panel, in a unanimous decision, overturned Section 377 on Thursday, though the same law had been upheld by the same court just five years earlier.

“We have to bid adieu to prejudices and empower all citizens,” India’s Chief Justice Dipak Misra said as he read the decision striking down the nearly 160-year-old law.

Section 377 criminalized “whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” and sentences ranged from 10 years to life in prison.

Indian supporters of the LGBT community take part in a pride parade in Chennai on June 24, 2018. Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images

Activists have been trying to change the legislation for more than a decade.

In 2001, the Naz Foundation, an Indian organization that works on HIV/AIDS advocacy, disputed the constitutionality of the law. The legal challenge wove its way through the courts for years. Finally, in 2009, the Delhi High Court overturned the ban on gay sex, but the ruling only applied in that specific jurisdiction, not across the country.

That early gay rights victory almost immediately faced a setback. Proponents of Section 377 took the challenge to India’s Supreme Court, which fully reinstated the ban on gay sex in 2013.

In that 2013 decision, the court said that gay people made up a “minuscule fraction” of India’s population, and left it up to India’s Parliament to change the laws.

But it was another landmark decision by India’s Supreme Court in 2017 — this one about privacy — that provided opponents of Section 377 a new avenue with which to challenge the law.

In August 2017, India’s highest court ruled that Indians have a fundamental right to privacy, and it included sexual orientation among those protected rights. “Discrimination against an individual on the basis of sexual orientation is deeply offensive to the dignity and self-worth of the individual,” the Court said in its decision.

And a year later, India’s highest court strengthened that principle when it struck down the law criminalizing gay sex. “What makes life meaningful is love,” Justice Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud wrote in the decision. “The right that makes us human is the right to love. To criminalize the expression of that right is profoundly cruel and inhumane.”

India’s gay rights advocates won a major victory on Thursday — but there’s still more to do.

Issues like same-sex marriage, adoption, and inheritance rules have yet to be decided, and could lead to court battles in the future.

Members and supporters of the LGBT community celebrate the Supreme Court decision in New Delhi on September 6, 2018. Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

The end of Section 377 won’t necessarily be embraced across India, and there’s still a lot of skepticism about gay rights outside major urban centers and among conservative religious Hindu, Muslim, and Christian groups. Those who wanted the law to remain in place argued that sexual orientation wasn’t innate, and that decriminalizing gay sex would lead to the spread of HIV, according to the New York Times.

But Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his conservative ruling party, Bharatiya Janata, largely stayed on the sidelines during this latest debate. The government, which had previously supported the law, said during the latest fight that they would leave the decision up to the courts.

This silence was likely driven by a mix of domestic and global political concerns — the desire to balance India’s ambitions as a modern economic power, while trying to placate some of its more conservative supporters.

Still, many advocates interpreted this ruling as laying the groundwork for a greater acceptance of gay, lesbian, and transgender people in India.

“This is not a narrow, do-what-you-want-in-your-bedroom type of decision,” Menaka Guruswamy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the case, told the Los Angeles Times. “This is so much wider than that, and the fact that many of the justices linked this to the idea of freedom and consent, that it was unanimous, that all of them looked to India as a constitutional democracy … it’s huge.”

The question now is how intensely this ruling might reverberate across the region, or in other countries (including former colonies) that have similar laws decriminalizing gay sex. According to the Washington Post, India was the largest country to have such a law — until Thursday.

“I was turning into a cynical human being with very little belief in the system,” Ritu Dalmia, one of the plaintiffs in the case, told the Guardian, “but honestly, this has really shown once again that we are a functional democracy where freedom of choice, speech and rights still exist.”

Members of the LGBT community outside the Supreme Court in New Delhi, on September 6, 2018. “The law had become a weapon for harassment for the LGBT community,” Chief Justice Dipak Misra said as he announced the landmark verdict. Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images

Original Source -> India has struck down a law banning gay sex

via The Conservative Brief

[cotecoyotegrrrl]

by Tom Davila-Witkowski 

 We’re in the final hours of Pride month 2021, so I’m going to take you back in time for a history lesson and hopefully share a little about the importance of LGBTQ+ Pride, and what it means besides parades, celebrations and drag brunches. This photo was taken in August 1991, 30 years ago, and, yes, that is me on the right. 

 Let’s go back to 1991 for a minute—an AIDS diagnosis was still a death sentence. We were still four years from the approval of the combination therapy that would be known as the drug cocktail that would save so many lives and make AIDS a manageable disease. The Catholic Church’s institutional pedophilia was still just rumored while the church devoted its resources to discrimination against LGBTQ+ people (some things never change) and trying to stop people from giving out condoms to slow the spread of AIDS. At this point, the LGBTQ+ community was still fighting to stay alive and activist groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation, two groups in which I played some small role, were on the front lines. Marriage equality wasn’t even on our political roadmap because we were more focused on being more visible as LGBTQ+ people—getting police to stop harassing us, stopping bars from kicking us out for dancing together, and fighting back against gay bashers. That was what our day-to-day lives were like when a group of us in Queer Nation asked what would be more audacious than to not only demand that we be allowed to live our lives in peace, but that our love and relationships be treated as equal and entitled to the same rights and protections as straight people. So in a grand gesture of F—k you to the legal establishment and the Catholic Church, we decided to leapfrog forward and just start getting married. 

 Over the summer of 1991, we met weekly in Queer Nation members’ apartments in Cambridge and Somerville to plan a day of protest and street theater. We connected with another activist group, Food Not Bombs, and had them cater the party—fluffernutter sandwiches for everyone. We planned to take over the streets abutting the Holy Cross Cathedral, the seat of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, as the ideal location for our wedding. We wheat-pasted flyers to poles all over Boston’s gay neighborhoods, Cambridge, and Somerville. We found a pagan priestess to officiate. We recruited couples willing to take vows and commit to each other. And I took on the job as official wedding photographer. We brought hundreds of people to a fabulous wedding that afternoon. It would be another 12 years before the US Supreme Court would rule that same gender people having sex wasn’t a crime, and 14 years before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and 24 years before the US Supreme Court would rule in favor of marriage equality. 

 As a protest and street theater, the Queer Wedding was a great success—we achieved the media coverage we were hoping for. The two guys in this photo with me, who were visiting for the summer from France, made the front page of the Boston Herald. I didn’t know them well, and cannot remember their names, but I remember important parts of their story. They were here because one of them had a job with a Boston company for the summer as part of their university education. And, within days of his photo appearing in the Boston Herald, he was fired by that company, his sponsorship to be in the US working was revoked, and they were sent back to France. He was fired from his job for being gay and demonstrating in favor of gay rights. And, until a Supreme Court decision in 2020, that could still happen in many states in this country. 

 Fast forward to about 2006, Mark and I were beginning our journey toward starting a family and meeting with adoption experts. Although marriage equality was now possible in Massachusetts, and we were engaged, we were not yet married. And our adoption agency advised us to stay unmarried. It would give us more options when adopting. You see, in many states LGBTQ+ people were prohibited from adopting and, if we were not married, and we were matched with a baby in one of those states, we could pretend we weren’t gay, one of us would do a single parent adoption in that state, and then he and the baby would fly back to Massachusetts where the other of us would then legally adopt the baby here. That’s right, to create a family, we would have had to deny our relationship and love and closet ourselves until we were back in the safety of Massachusetts. It took a US Supreme Court ruling in 2017—a very different Supreme Court—to make it illegal to discriminate against LGBTQ+ adoptive and foster parents. 

 Until the current Supreme Court, many of our rights as LGBTQ+ people have been upheld by rulings of the Court in our favor, something we can no longer count on, thanks to the supporters of 45 and the ignorant or malicious people who voted for him. And this month, in a case known as Fulton v. the City of Philadelphia, which we have been watching work its way through the courts since 2018, we were given a view of the future under the current far-right Supreme Court. In this case, the city of Philadelphia told two foster care agencies that it would no longer refer children to them if they would not accept same-sex couples as foster parents. One of those agencies, Catholic Social Services, sued the city claiming that because of their religion they had the right to discriminate. After losing the case in the lower courts, Catholic Social Services took the case all the way to the far-right Supreme Court. That’s right, rather than focus on placing foster children in need of families and parents with same-sex couples, the Catholic agency devoted its resources to ensuring it could discriminate against LGBTQ+ people, because the institution that has done so much to protect pedophiles prioritized discrimination over helping children, and a far-right Supreme Court agreed. While the ruling was very narrow and can be easily rectified by the city of Philadelphia fixing its policies, the Court’s written decisions made it clear that this Supreme Court, a far-right Court that we will be living with for possibly the next generation, prioritizes allowing religions to discriminate over LGBTQ+ civil rights. 

 What this means is that in the years to come, court cases that have already been or are going to be filed to try and limit or reduce LGBTQ+ rights in the name of religious discrimination with the express intention of ending up in the Supreme Court will come before a far-right Supreme Court that has signaled it will not protect the rights of LGBTQ+ people at the federal level. 

 And so, as Pride month 2021 comes to a close and I think back 30 years, it’s important to note we’re not celebrating because we’re gay. We’re celebrating because we survived. We survived the bullies and the bashers. We survived the “Moral Majority” and the Reagans. Hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ people died from a disease while conservatives ignored their suffering, blamed them for their illness, and targeted them because of who they were, but for some reason we survived. We survived the people who ignorantly voted for those conservatives, not willing or interested in knowing the impact of their votes. We survived to make great progress in LGBTQ+ rights since those dark, dark days of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But we also survived to once again have to fight battles we thought were long past as we navigate a dangerous time, with a far-right Supreme Court, and the tremendous damage caused by the previous occupant of the White House that it will likely take a generation to repair—if we can at all. And I ask you to understand the pride we celebrate this month is pride in surviving—that the month represents more than parties and drag brunches. And think about where you have stood in these three decades of history. Have you fought for LGBTQ+ rights? Have you fought against discrimination? Have you voted for politicians who have actively (Ronald Reagan, George Bush, George W. Bush) or maliciously (Ronald Reagan and the last occupant of the White House) tried to harm the LGBTQ+ community? Have you been actively working to end LGBTQ+ discrimination, or have you been one of the challenges we have had to survive?

[tjilderda]

*Isocrates' Criteria on Rhetoric*

In this essay, I will examine the following questions: How does or doesn't the following artifact fit Isocrates' criteria of good rhetoric? Is this example of rhetoric ethical/productive for democracy and/or limiting to society? 

On June 09, 2016, then president Obama delivered a speech at the White House at the eighth Pride reception; this speech is the artifact I examined to see if it would be considered “good rhetoric” by Isocrates. Through the narrative Obama creates he portrays such “good rhetoric” due to his timely delivery of such a speech, the appropriateness of the topic of LGBTQ+ Pride at the time, and originality towards such an occasion and the events that lead to it fulfilling Isocrates’ criteria. In doing so, Obama creates a speech that displays a very powerful message about unity and positivity towards LGBTQ+, creating a productive push that was needed even a year after the legalization of gay marriage.

As said above, this speech was delivered towards the beginning of June, on the ninth of 2016. This comes not only during Pride month, but nearly a year after the legalization of gay marriage at the hands of the the Obergefell v. Hodges case on June 26, 2015. During this time of the eighth Pride reception, Obama takes this opportunity to reflect on the transformations that have come during his presidency and how Americans are all “treated more equally.” While reflecting on the past achievements that got America to that point, he takes the chance to reaffirm how such change takes perseverance to keep history from moving backwards. He finishes off his speech by referring to nearly a year before when the White House was lit with the Pride flag’s colors, and says that there’s still more work ahead because discrimination and opportunity need to be continuously fought for. 

To examine Obama’s speech, it’s important to understand what exactly the criteria for Isocrates’ definition of good rhetoric is. In response to the Sophists and Aristotle of his time, Isocrates created three specific rules that were required to be fulfilled. In a piece that he was pitting himself against the Sophists, he outlined that “... speeches cannot be good unless they reflect the circumstances (Kairos), propriety (to prepon), and originality...” (65). Such rules are quite simple to understand at a base level: speeches must be timely, be appropriate for its occurrence, and be original. These qualities that fit Isocrates’ criteria are what were examined for in Obama’s speech.

During his speech, Obama’s rhetoric fulfills the criteria of Kairos because he uses the month, the event that’s being held, and the near anniversary of gay marriage being legalized to portray the importance and power of the achievements that have occurred in the last year. In fact, the main point is made across early on when Obama says, “We live in an America that protects all of us with a hate crimes law that bears the name of Matthew Shepard. We live in an America where all of us are treated more equally, because visiting hours in the hospitals no longer depend on who you are and insurance companies can no longer turn somebody away simply because of who you love.” These two sentences encapsulates the entirety of the occasion that it was delivered during because they serve as standing achievements and a reminder of what it took to get to that moment. The Pride reception that this took place during was a culmination of Obama’s work; having started during the first year he took office, the legalizing of gay marriage came as a result of all the effort his administration put in as well as all the activism. As such, this occasion serves as a testament to that effort, the culmination of everything that was accomplished for and by LGBTQ+ members. The power behind Obama’s words mean so much more at an event during Pride month, especially only one year after the supreme court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. This culmination of events lining up makes this speech fit in a nearly perfect socket of timing, resulting in a speech that encapsulates Isocrates’ criteria of Kairos.

Obama’s rhetoric also nicely fills the criteria of appropriateness due to being given in a very decisive moment while addressing not only the past, but the difficulties that will still be faced going towards the future. His speech takes on many topics but at the very end he acknowledges the facts that many people still didn’t support gay marriage while still paragoning change, saying, “Despite our differences and our divisions, and the many complicated issues that we grapple with, real change is possible. Minds open. Hearts change. America shifts. And if the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that people who love their country can change it.” This line here is what truly puts the entire speech into perspective on it’s appropriateness in it’s time. In honesty, this speech was given during a time were gay marriage was still considered devise even a year after it’s legalization. However, Obama recognizes this and ran in stride towards accepting the reality of a better future. His actions are heralded as a greatly influential from the perspective of the LGBTQ+ community because his administration helped pave the way for making such a community “appropriate” in the eyes of many general Americans. With not even a year of gay marriage being legalized, Obama’s appropriateness during his speech is evident in his support of a movement that took decades of social movements to become a more accepted reality.

The rhetoric of Obama’s speech also shows originality by referencing all the achievements and events that made such an event like the eighth Pride reception possible. Obama takes the opportunity of such a momentous occasion to craft a speech that takes and builds upon all the monumental achievements that it took to get to where America was at the time. He takes many of the stories that it required to get to that moment when he said, “ And that’s always been our story -- not just in Selma or Seneca Falls, but in Compton’s Café and the Stonewall Inn.  It’s the story of brave Americans who were willing to risk everything –- not just their own liberty or dignity, but also doing it on behalf of the dignity and liberty of generations to come. “ As said above, this was the crowning moment that made all the pain and suffering people of the LGBTQ+ community had gone through to make their dreams a reality. His speech helped show the challenges that it took, but showed the reason why so many fought for it: hope for the future. By referencing such events like those in Selma or Seneca Falls, he helps create a narrative around community, encapsulating specific situations that occurred, but also nodding to all the events he doesn’t say and all the stories never told. As such, his speech helps create a narrative that firmly plants it in an America that is willing to stand its ground and fight for all it’s people, especially those in the LGBTQ+ community.

Overall, I believe that the entirety of Obama’s speech adheres to a strong understanding of the ethics surrounding a topic that, at the time, was still largely in flux on support from the opposing party. However, he does an excellent job by weaving the achievements and the hardships of those that battled for years to make gay marriage legal into his speech without directly stating many specifics. In doing so, his speech is displayed as a positive and productive work that helps unite people of the LGBTQ+ community, and those outside of it, under one umbrella of America. However, many from the opposing walk of social life may consider this speech to not fulfill the requirement of appropriateness due to a few reasons, such as person or religious beliefs. Yet, as was shown, this group of people was, and still is today, in the minority fir barring supporting to such a community that simply wants to be accepted as human beings. As such, this speech did much to help cement the “appropriateness” of the LGBTQ+ community by making the achievements set in concrete to build a stronger foundation for all Americans.

In summary, Obama’s speech at the Pride reception is a shining example of good rhetoric under Isocrates’ criteria. He capitalizes on the timing of multiple events for Kairos, and creates a narrative that helps show the appropriateness and originality in the feats that it took to get America to such a point. In doing so, it helped provide a strong groundwork for Isocrates’ ideas on what good rhetoric is, and shows that it is achievable even today.

Works Cited

Socrates I: Against the Sophists. Translated by David Mirhady, Yun Lee Too. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Obama, Barrack. “Remarks by the President at LGBT Pride Reception.” Office of the Press Secretary, 09 June 2016, White House, D.C.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/09/remarks-president-lgbt-pride-reception

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wceEYhDvPdk

[msclaritea]

We have got a SERIOUS PROBLEM in this country with ultra Conservative Catholicism. It seems the only way for them to successfully attend to their faith is to aggressively push their beliefs on the entire American populace. This ONE couple has been doing more damage to protections of LGBTQ, Abortion, Voting, etc...

Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network and Roger Severino, a senior health and human services official, have worked to reshape social policy and the courts they need to uphold it.

WASHINGTON — Last July, Carrie Severino, a leader among social conservatives dedicated to filling the courts with like-minded judges, appeared on a prominent Catholic television station to slam a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that turned back the most recent effort to weaken abortion rights. During the on-air exchange between Mrs. Severino and an anti-abortion activist, Dorinda Bordlee, Ms. Bordlee made a plea: To “get to our ultimate goal,” she said, “we are going to, in the end, need one more justice. ”Three months later Mrs. Severino, the president of the Judicial Crisis Network, and her equally conservative husband, Roger Severino, who heads the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office for Civil Rights, are right where they have hoped to be. The looming confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court could usher in a new era of socially conservative jurisprudence — on abortion, health care, gay and transgender rights, and other issues long embraced by the Severinos. And Washington’s conservative power couple could rightfully claim more than a modicum of credit.

 “Professionally we’re hitting on all cylinders, and we’re accomplishing many of our lives’ ambitions,” Mr. Severino said in an interview. Mrs. and Mr. Severino — she is 43 and he is 45 — live a quiet life in a Virginia suburb of Washington with their six children ranging in age from a toddler to a teenager. They met at Harvard Law School and were married in 2004, shortly after they graduated. 

Though they are conservative Catholics, they say their efforts are rooted in law, not theology. But on Catholic and conservative media, they are ubiquitous champions of social conservative causes, the public faces of an interlocking web of groups and individuals in and out of government advancing social conservatism. In an interview Mrs. Severino rattled off the names of judges and justices her organization helped confirm, and said the “common goal” in pressing for the confirmation of President Trump’s nominees was “to have someone who approaches the law looking to the text and original meaning of the Constitution.” “One of the goals of originalism,” she said, “is to take your personal beliefs, be they religious or ideological, out of the judicial interpretive process.

”Mr. Severino told a Catholic TV reporter he was “privileged and honored to be a part of what President Trump has set in motion — he set in motion a reinvigorated defense of religious freedom,” adding, “My legacy will be what we have done to respect conscience and religious freedom at H.H.S. — and hopefully, beyond. 

”To critics, their influence has become dangerous. “Roger and Carrie are lovely people,” said Tom Carter, who worked with Mr. Severino on religious liberty causes. “You’d want them as your neighbors. You just don’t want them controlling the courts.” Mrs. Severino clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, whom she described recently as “the only member of the court who’s actually spoken directly, saying that he thinks that Roe and its progeny were wrongly decided,” referring to Roe v. Wade, the landmark case establishing a constitutional right to abortion. During the contentious confirmation hearings for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Mrs. Severino logged more than 100 media appearances on his behalf. Judicial Crisis Network is linked to the Federalist Society and a web of anonymously funded groups that together laid the ideological, financial and communications groundwork for Mr. Trump’s effort to fill some 200 judgeships and a third Supreme Court seat with conservative jurists. Judicial Crisis expects to spend at least $10 million to support Judge Barrett with ads and media interviews by Mrs. Severino.

“She’s fantastic,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, the lobbying and grass-roots arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said of Mrs. Severino. “Her leadership really puts lead on the target for where support is needed in these fierce judicial confirmation battles.” Liberals have their own network focused on the judiciary, of course, that includes Demand Justice, the National Women’s Law Center and Alliance for Justice. Even before this week’s hearings began, Mrs. Severino sought to blunt questions about Judge Barrett’s faith and public stance against abortion. “The Democrats and their liberal allies think Judge Barrett is ‘too Christian’ or ‘the wrong kind of Christian’ to be a good judge. That is rank bigotry,” she tweeted. In its ads, her network has worked to disqualify concerns about Judge Barrett’s faith while simultaneously emphasizing it. One ad juxtaposes Judge Barrett’s image with John F. Kennedy’s, with a voice-over of his warning to those who attacked his Catholicism. Mrs. Severino applied the same contradiction to herself. “I don’t really want to comment on my religious beliefs,” she said in the interview. “I don’t think it is relevant.” Mr. Severino described the couple as “serious Catholics,” and himself as “proudly pro-life.” “Having a strong marriage and a strong faith life mean that we’re both dedicated to doing the right thing for the right reasons,” he said. “My motivation is to defend human dignity, and that is informed by my faith,” he added. Mrs. Severino has helped craft court challenges to the Affordable Care Act and other key conservative fights, which are intertwined with her push for judicial confirmations. Judicial Crisis Network has been one of the largest single donors to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which has led legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act. Last month, 22 Republican state attorneys general issued an open letter urging the Senate to confirm Judge Barrett. 

Mr. Severino worked at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit law firm that represented Hobby Lobby in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a 2014 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance covering contraception under the Affordable Care Act violated religious freedom. In 2007, Mr. Severino helped write the Becket Fund’s amicus brief supporting California’s ban on same-sex marriage. In and out of government, Mr. Severino has pressed to roll back civil rights protections for gay and transgender Americans. 

Before joining the Trump administration, Roger Severino led the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation. “Roger and I had many long talks about same-sex marriage, with him trying to convert me,” said Mr. Carter, who was a co-worker at the Becket Fund. “I saw it as a human rights issue in line with the Loving case,” referring to Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court eliminated laws banning interracial marriage. “But he was adamant that L.G.B.T. was not the same as race,” Mr. Carter said. Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Severino led the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, where he opined against the Obama administration’s expansion of civil rights protections for sex to include gender identity. 

At the Health and Human Services Department, Mr. Severino created a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division described in the Catholic press as “charged with enforcing the federal laws that already exist to protect doctors, nurses, midwives and other health care workers who refuse to perform, accommodate or assist with certain procedures on religious or moral grounds,” chiefly abortions.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who has investigated the interlocking activities of the Judicial Crisis Network, the Federalist Society and the Trump administration, railed during Judge Barrett’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday about the “dark money” influence wielded by the groups. In an interview he described Mrs. Severino as a bird flitting from branch to branch in a tree representing “this larger scheme to have big anonymous donors capture the Supreme Court and big chunks of the federal judiciary.”Mrs. Severino insisted anonymity was not about secrecy; her donors, she said, could be subject to “harassment” if their names were made public. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, displayed posters showing the “dark money” influence wielded by conservative groups in judicial nominations. 

The Severinos appear to their critics to be moving in tandem, with Mr. Severino creating social conservative policy while Mrs. Severino builds a judicial system to uphold it. “I’m flattered that people think we’re that powerful,” Mr. Severino said. “We set up firewalls. Most of the time she learns what I do by reading it in the newspapers, and vice versa.” In 2018, the Health and Human Services Department sought to legally define gender under federal civil rights law as an immutable condition determined by the genitals that a person is born with, effectively defining transgender out of existence. In June, the department finalized a rule removing protections against discrimination on the basis of sex for transgender people seeking health care under the Affordable Care Act. Both rules have been challenged in court. 

Their opponents seethe at the Severinos’ doggedness. “Carrie and Roger Severino are interested in remaking the legal and regulatory landscape of this country in their image,” said Alphonso David, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest L.G.B.T.Q. civil rights organization. During his (..Kavanaugh's ) confirmation hearings, Mrs. Severino logged more than 100 media appearances on his behalf. Mrs. Severino said promotion of Judge Barrett’s nomination is being coordinated from a “war room” at Judicial Crisis that includes the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, Catholic Vote, America First Policies, the Club for Growth and Heritage Action.

  While Judge Barrett’s advocates attack any suggestion that her judicial views might be influenced by her Catholicism, they are also proud of the church’s impact on the courts. “Catholics actually, in a very unique way, have a very keen understanding of the crisis that we were having with the judiciary, but not just because of the abortion issue, but because Catholics understood that there’s something about following rules, and there’s something about humility, which are important in human life,” Leonard Leo, the longtime head of the Federalist Society, said in an interview for a presidential history archive. Judicial Crisis Network was born in 2005, under the name Judicial Confirmation Network. The organization worked alongside Mr. Leo, who took a leave from the Federalist Society to organize conservative campaigns supporting two Supreme Court nominees, John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr., according to an investigation of the Federalist Society network in The Washington Post. The Judicial Confirmation Network became the Judicial Crisis Network during the Obama administration. Mrs. Severino took the helm in 2010.

See also:

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631988923214725120/billionaire-oligarchs-and-anonymous-megadonors

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631909603815407616/let-the-record-show-amy-coney-barrett-draws

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631905322545659904/charles-kochs-big-bet-on-barrett-for-almost-50

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631812122802798592/a-gun-rights-decision-provides-a-preview-of-the

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631795624001650688/barrett-was-member-of-anti-abortion-group-that

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/631701581050593280/it-instilled-such-problems-ex-member-of-amy

https://tendergingergirl.tumblr.com/post/630741503050973184/religious-group-scrubs-all-references-to-amy-coney

[wokeinmemphis-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

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Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[arcadeparade-blog1]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[redroses879-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[asanusta-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[pooki-chu-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

[sophistikatedblogger-blog]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the history-making jurist, feminist icon and national treasure, has died, aged 87.

Ginsburg became only the second woman ever to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

She struggled against blatant sexism throughout her career as she climbed to the pinnacle of her profession.

A lifelong advocate of gender equality, she was fond of joking that there would be enough women on the nine-seat Supreme Court “when there are nine”.

She did not let up in her twilight years, remaining a scathing dissenter on a conservative-tilting bench, even while her periodic health scares left liberal America on edge.

Despite maintaining a modest public profile, like most top judges, Ginsburg inadvertently became not just a celebrity, but a pop-culture heroine.

She may have stood an impish 5ft, but Ginsburg will be remembered as a legal colossus.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

Modest beginnings

She was born to Jewish immigrant parents in the Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. Her mother, Celia Bader, died of cancer the day before Ginsburg left high school.

She attended Cornell University, where she met Martin “Marty” Ginsburg on a blind date, kindling a romance that spanned almost six decades until his death in 2010.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembered

“Meeting Marty was by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me,” Ginsburg once said, adding that the man who would become her husband “was the first boy I ever knew who cared that I had a brain”.

The couple married shortly after Ginsburg’s graduation in 1954 and they had a daughter, Jane, the following year. While she was pregnant, Ginsburg was demoted in her job at a social security office – discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experience led her to conceal her second pregnancy before she gave birth to her son, James, in 1965.

Image copyright Bettmann

Image caption Ginsburg in 1977

In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, out of a class of about 500, where the dean famously asked that his female students tell him how they could justify taking the place of a man at his school.

When Marty, also a Harvard Law alumnus, took a job as a tax lawyer in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School to complete her third and final year, becoming the first woman to work at both colleges’ law reviews.

‘Teacher’ to male justices

Despite finishing top of her class, Ginsburg did not receive a single job offer after graduation.

“Not a law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me,” she later said. “I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother.”

She wound up on a project studying civil procedure in Sweden before becoming a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first women and law classes.

Image copyright Alex Wong/Getty Images

“The women’s movement came alive at the end of the 60s,” she said to NPR. “There I was, a law school professor with time that I could devote to moving along this change.”

In 1971, Ginsburg made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court, when she filed the lead brief in Reed v Reed, which examined whether men could be automatically preferred over women as estate executors.

“In very recent years, a new appreciation of women’s place has been generated in the United States,” the brief states. “Activated by feminists of both sexes, courts and legislatures have begun to recognise the claim of women to full membership in the class ‘persons’ entitled to due process guarantees of life and liberty and the equal protection of the laws.”

The court agreed with Ginsburg, marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.

Image copyright Pool/Getty Images

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). That same year, Ginsburg became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

She was soon the ACLU’s general counsel, launching a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court, five of which she won.

She compared her role to that of a “kindergarten teacher”, explaining gender discrimination to the all-male justices.

Her approach was cautious and highly strategic. She favoured incrementalism, thinking it wise to dismantle sexist laws and policies one by one, rather than run the risk of asking the Supreme Court to outlaw all rules that treat men and women unequally.

Cognisant of her exclusively male audience on the court, Ginsburg’s clients were often men. In 1975, she argued the case of a young widower who was denied benefits after his wife died in childbirth.

Image copyright SOPA Images/Getty Images

“His case was the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone,” Ginsburg said.

She later said leading the legal side of the women’s movement during this period – decades before joining the Supreme Court – counts as her greatest professional work.

“I had the good fortune to be alive in the 1960s, then, and continuing through the 1970s,” she said. “For the first time in history it became possible to urge before the courts successfully that equal justice under law requires all arms of government to regard women as persons equal in stature to men.”

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as part of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to diversify federal courts.

Though Ginsburg was often portrayed as a liberal firebrand, her days on the appeals court were marked by moderation.

She earned a reputation as a centrist, voting with conservatives many times and against, for example, re-hearing the discrimination case of a sailor who said he had been discharged from the US Navy for being gay.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsberg with Senators Daniel Moynihan (left) and Joe Biden in 1993

She was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman ever confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Among Ginsburg’s most significant, early cases was United States v Virginia, which struck down the men-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute.

While Virginia “serves the state’s sons, it makes no provision whatever for her daughters. That is not equal protection”, Ginsburg wrote for the court’s majority. No law or policy should deny women “full citizenship stature – equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.”

Image copyright Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images

Image caption Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearing

During her time on the bench, Justice Ginsburg moved noticeably to the left. She served as a counterbalance to the court itself, which, with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by President Donald Trump, slanted in favour of conservative justices.

Her dissents were forceful – occasionally biting – and Ginsburg did not shy away from criticising her colleagues’ opinions.

In 2013, objecting to the court’s decision to strike down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, Ginsburg wrote: “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decision making.”

Image copyright Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Image caption The US Supreme Court justices pose for their official portrait in November 2018

In 2015, Ginsburg sided with the majority on two landmark cases – both massive victories for American progressives. She was one of six justices to uphold a crucial component of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. In the second, Obergefell v Hodges, she sided with the 5-4 majority, legalising same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

‘Best friend and biggest booster’

As Ginsburg’s legal career soared, her personal life was anchored by marriage to Marty.

Their relationship reflected a gender parity that was ahead of its time. The couple shared the childcare and housework, and Marty did virtually all of the cooking.

“I learned very early on in our marriage that Ruth was a fairly terrible cook and, for lack of interest, unlikely to improve,” he said in a 1996 speech.

Professionally, Marty was a relentless champion of his wife. Clinton officials said it was his tireless lobbying that brought Ginsburg’s name to the shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees in 1993.

He reportedly told a friend that the most important thing he did in his own life “is to enable Ruth to do what she has done”.

After her confirmation Ginsburg thanked Marty, “who has been, since our teenage years, my best friend and biggest booster”.

Image copyright Mark Reinstein/Getty Images

Image caption Marty Ginsburg holds the Bible for his wife as she is sworn in as Supreme Court Justice

In his final weeks, facing his own battle with cancer, Marty wrote a letter to his wife saying that other than parents and kids, “you are the only person I have loved in my life.

“I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell.”

He died in June 2010 after 56 years of marriage.

The next morning Ginsburg was on the bench at the Supreme Court to read an opinion on the final day of the term “because [Marty] would have wanted it”, she later told the New Yorker magazine.

‘I will live’

Ginsburg had five major run-ins with cancer herself.

Justice O’Connor, who had breast cancer in the 1980s, was said to have suggested that Ginsburg schedule chemotherapy for Fridays so she could use the weekend to recover for oral arguments.

Image copyright The Washington Post/Getty Images

It worked: Ginsburg only missed oral arguments twice because of illness.

Ginsburg said she also followed the advice of opera singer Marilyn Horne, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2005.

“She said, ‘I will live,'” Ginsburg recalled to NPR. “Not that, ‘I hope I live’, or, ‘I want to live’, but, ‘I will live.'”

Her longevity brought immense relief to liberal America, which fretted that another vacancy on the court would allow its conservative majority to become even more ascendant during the Trump era.

‘The Notorious RBG’

Toward the end of her life, Ginsburg became a national icon. Due in part to her withering dissents, a young law student created a Tumblr account dedicated to Ginsburg called Notorious RBG – a nod to the late rapper The Notorious BIG.

The account introduced Ginsburg to a new generation of young feminists and propelled her to that rarest of distinctions for a judge: cult figure.

The Notorious RBG was the subject of a documentary, an award-winning biopic and countless bestselling novels. She inspired Saturday Night Live skits and had her likeness plastered on mugs and T-shirts.

“It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the Notorious RBG,” she said. “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me.”

Image copyright Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Every aspect of her life was dissected and mythologised, from her workout routine to her love of hair scrunchies.

Asked by NPR in 2019 if she had any regrets given the challenges she had faced in life, Ginsburg’s supreme self-belief shone through.

“I do think I was born under a very bright star,” she replied.

Reporting by Holly Honderich and Jessica Lussenhop

The article was originally published here! Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies