#“great news everyone James Dean is pregnant

[deadsquidstudios]

Everyone I have an important announcement

My spider plant is pregnant

[breaniebree]

A Second Chance

For those who have been asking... this is my master list once more:

ASC Chapter Titles as If They Were Friends Episodes

Part One: Harry’s First Year With His Dads (Chapters 1-49)

1. The One Where They Were Dead 2. The One Where the Rat Is Out of the Bag  3. The One Where James and Lily Die  4. The One Where Moony and Padfoot Make Up  5. The One Where Harry Meets Padfoot  6. The One Where Sirius Kidnaps Harry  7. The One Where Sirius Punches Vernon Dursley  8. The One Where Harry Meets Remus  9. The One Where Sirius and Harry Make Grilled Cheese  10. The One With Thea  11. The One Where Harry Asks What a Kiss Is  12. The One With the Library Card  13. The One Where They Remember the Past  14. The One With the Tonkses’  15. The One With Harry’s First Nightmare  16. The One With Professor Moony  17. The One With The Puppy  18. The One With the Second Best Day Ever  19. The One Where Harry Meets An Excellent Secret Keeper and Her Brother  20. The One Where Sirius Learns What He Missed in Azkaban  21. The One With the Brownies 22. The One With the Date  23. The One With the Weasleys  24. The One With the Bad Dreams  25. The One Where Sirius Learns the Key to Moony's Secret Pranking Success  26. The One With Operation Prank the Piss Out of Harry Potter  27. The One With the Wolfsbane Fight  28. The One Where the Marauders Discover A Wolf  29. The One With the Spanking  30. The One With the House Rules and Where Sirius and Ted Build a Treehouse 31. The One With the Wolf  32. The One Where Remus Tells Sirius To Deal with the Blacks  33. The One Where Harry Asks About Boobies  34. The One With the Locket  35. The One With Blackbird  36. The One With the Birthday Orgasms  37. The One With the Three Brothers  38. The One With Godric’s Hollow  39. The One Where Sirius Speaks French 40. The One With the First Christmas  41. The One With the Pensieve  42. The One With the Memories Part I  43. The One With the Memories Part II  44. The One When Padfoot and Prongs Become Blood Brothers  45. The One Where Harry Has A Sleepover  46. The One With the Tickle War  47. The One With the Viscount of Falmouth  48. The One With Roni  49. The One With the Birthday Planning 

Part Two: Harry Growing Up With A Family, Ages 7-11 (Chapters 50-61)

50. The One With the Best Birthday Ever  51. The One Where Padfoot and Moony Know Nothing About Sick Kids  52. The One Where Remus Slaps Sirius  53. The One With the Giant Cheese Fort 54. The One With Operation Get Lily Evans to Fall in Love With Prongs  55. The One Where Remus Thinks He’s a Very Bad Man  56. The One Where Harry Asks About Sex  57. The One Where Tonks Turns 17  58. The One Where Remus Feels Like He’s Robbing the Cradle  59. The One Where Remus Learns He Has A Mate  60. The One Where Sirius Shags the Realtor 61. The One With the Letter 

Part Three: First Year (Chapters 62-73)

62. The One Where Harry Gets Hedwig  63. The One Where Harry Understands the Fear of Voldemort  64. The One With The Sorting  65. The One Where Sirius Was Almost Bitten By a Panther… And Totally Didn’t Pee His Pants  66. The One With the Youngest Seeker In Over a Century 67. The One With the Three-Headed Dog  68. The One With Zee  69. The One With Sheer Dumb Luck  70. The One Where Sirius Lets Zee Drive His Bike  71. The One Where the Weasley Boys Come Over for Christmas  72. The One Where Minnie Tells Sirius To Get A Job  73. The One Where No One Listens So Harry Has to Do Everything and His Friends Follow Him So He Doesn't Die 

Part Four: Second Year (Chapters 74-105)

74. The One Where the Whole School Knows  75. The One Where Harry is Jealous  76. The One Where Sirius Eats Crow  77. The One Where Zee Meets Minnie  78. The One With the Proud Enough to Cry Letter 79. The One Where They Realize Their New Professor is a Moron  80. The One Where Remus Gets His Shit Together  81. The One Where Harry Meets His Fanboy  82. The One Where Binns Doesn’t Put His Class to Sleep For Almost Ten Whole Minutes 83. The One Where Sirius Finds Out  84. The One When Remus Punches Lockhart  85. The One With the Mad House Elf  86. The One With the Great Shoebox Capture  87. The One Where Sirius Tells Zee About the Marauders  88. The One Where Harry is Homesick  89. The One Where Sirius Says I Love You  90. The One With the Sex Talk 91. The One With Ted Walking in on Remus Fingering Tonks… And Remus Adds Another Finger  92. The One Where Draco Comes to Christmas  93. The One Where Sirius Actually Gets a Job  94. The One Where Sirius Asks About Cursed Scars  95. The One Where Remus Tells Tonks and She says ‘Duh!’  96. The One Where Fred Hears the Name Padfoot  97. The One With Peter’s Trial Part I  98. The One With Peter’s Trial Part II  99. The One Where Ginny Tells Harry She Has A Pen-Pal  100. The One With the Eyes As Green As a Fresh Pickled Toad  101. The One Where Tonks Is Under the Desk  102. The One Where Harry Writes in the Diary  103. The One Where It’s Not Follow the Butterflies  104. The One Where Sirius Is Sent Home Without An Explanation 105. The One Where Ginny is Scared Harry Will Never Speak To Her Again 

Part Five: Third Year (Chapters 106-143)

106. The One Where Sirius and Remus Demand Answers  107. The One With Prophecies and Horcruxes  108. The One Where Harry Learns to Drive  109. The One Where Bill and Charlie Talk About the Importance of Being A Good Big Brother 110. The One Where Sirius Realizes He Wants Zee Forever But Is Too Chicken To Say It 111. The One With Operation Fuck Up Voldemort’s Plans  112. The One Where Cissy Tattles on Abraxas  113. The One Where Harry Sees More Than He Should Between His Roommates  114. The One Where Colin Tells Ginny To Get Over It  115. The One Where Theo Comes Out  116. The One Where Sirius Tells Lucius If He Fucks Up He Will Kill Him  117. The One With the FUVP Pow-Wow  118. The One Where They Return to the Chamber of Secrets  119. The One Where Harry Finds Out  120. The One Where the Marauders Prank Snape 121. The One Where Draco and Theo Make Bad Detectives  122. The One With Nyx  123. The One Where Harry Throws a Tantrum  124. The One Where They Skive Off Class Because Harry Talks 125. The One Where Harry Asks Out Cho  126. The One With Harry’s First Date  127. The One Where Sirius, Remus, and Dumbledore Fuck Up  128. The One With Moody  129. The One Where Harry Gets Slapped  130. The One Where Sirius and Tonks Decide To Fuck With Snape  131. The One With Lily’s Ghost  132. The One With the Gaunt Property  133. The One With the Defence Club  134. The One With the Wizengamot  135. The One Where Harry Meets the Americans  136. The One Where They Forget to Tell Sirius  137. The One With the Insomniacs Club  138. The One Where Bellatrix Shows Up  139. The One With the Time Turner  140. The One With Umbitch's Creepy Song  141. The One With the Wolf in the Cage  142. The One Where Harry Shouts at Sirius and He Just Shouts Right Back  143. The One Where Both of Them Feel Like Shit 

Part Six: Fourth Year (Chapters 144-179)

144. The One With the Elder Wand  145. The One Where Sirius Tells Harry Not to Drink  146. The One Where Sirius Acts the Adult and Tells the Grangers  147. The One Where They Drink the Potion  148. The One Where Harry Can’t Change His Arm Back  149. The One Where Ginny Sees Harry Naked  150. The One When Harry Calls Remus a Bad Dog 151. The One Where Theo Goes to the Burrow  152. The One Where Harry Has a Fling  153. The One Where Sirius Panics Over Commitment  154. The One Where Zee Takes Harry Shopping  155. The One With the Quidditch World Cup  156. The One With Winky  157. The One With Babymort 158. The One Where Sirius Asks Zee to Move In  159. The One Where Snape Apologizes and Harry Thinks The World Ended  160. The One With the Pretty Boy, the Biggest Flirt, and the Flying House 161. The One Where Tonks Wants A Boob Job 162. The One Where Drama Queen Sirius Learns About Pens  163. The One Where Zee Just Wants A Damn Telephone But Sirius Can’t Stop Bitching 164. The One Where Girls Giggle and Ginny Looks Different 165. The One Where Harry Outflies a Dragon… Almost  166. The One Where Zee Tells The Paper to Back the Fuck Away from Her Son  167. The One Where Harry Thinks It’s the Formal Wear  168. The One Where Mr Weasley Thinks ‘Oh, Bloody Hell!' 169. The One Where Sirius Takes A Bath  170. The One Where Harry’s in Denial  171. The One Where Harry Thinks He Has Two Hostages  172. The One With the Love Potion  173. The One Where Zee Seduces Sirius in the Work Shed  174. The One With the Secret Swimming Pool  175. The One With the Bats From the Crotch 176. The One That Ends With ‘Oh Shit!’  177. The One Where Everyone Dies  178. The One With the Lullabye  179. The One Where Tonks Marks Remus 

Part Seven: Fifth Year (Chapters 180-222)

180. The One Where Remus Proposes  181. The One Where Lucius Gets Arrested  182. The One Where Remus Proposes Again and Harry Dies  183. The One With the Coconut Smell 184. The One Where Tonks Isn’t Pregnant 185. The One Where Dean Realizes He Fancies Seamus  186. The One With Baby, I Love You  187. The One Where Theo Meets Voldemort  188. The One Where Harry Calls Ginny His and Then Denies It  189. The One Where Everyone Breaks Out of Azkaban  190. The One With the War Council 191. The One Where Harry is Dumped  192. The One Where They Discuss The Size of Remus’ Package  193. The One Where Harry Learns About the Potters  194. The One Where Harry Finds the Tower Room  195. The One Where Zee’s in France  196. The One Where Harry Gets Constantly Interrupted  197. The One Where the Glacier Finally Melts  198. The One Where Harry Finally Asks  199. The One Where Sirius Cuddles and Zee Buys A Motorbike  200. The One Where Everyone Is Worried About Theo  201. The One With the Frying Pan  202. The One With the Fluke  203. The One Where Minnie Walks In  204. The One Where Remus Finds A Present Under the Tree  205. The One With Bellarosa and the Snake  206. The One Where Everyone Gets Motorbikes  207. The One Where Padfoot Suggests Pranking Umbitch to Fred and George  208. The One With the Great Escape from Umbitch  209. The One With Prince Finley and the Switching of Teacups  210. The One Where Theo is Courted and Dean Admits He's in Love  211. The One Where Hinny Says I Love You and the Fluke Continues  212. The One Where Sirius Picks Out A Star  213. The One With the Cathedral Star 214. The One Where Sirius Answers the Phone 215. The One Where George Gets the Girl  216. The One Where They Compare Proposals  217. The One Where Sirius Has the Man-Flu and Gives it to Zee  218. The One Where Ginny and Theo Are Kidnapped and Remus Hears Heartbeats  219. The One With the Thing After Learning the Thing  220. The One Where Everyone is in Shock 221. The One Where Zee Confirms  222. The One With the Will 

Part Eight: Sixth Year (Chapters 223-Present)

223. The One Where Remus Finally Lets Go  224. The One Where Hermione is Blind But Her Mum Isn’t 225. The One Where the Dragon’s in Trouble and George Snogs the New Bat 226. The One Where Ginny Tames Ebony and Theo Goes to Tara  227. The One With the Sovereign Chalice and Zee’s Dream  228. The One With the Party  229. The One Where Ginny Claims Her Man  230. The One Where Harry Has a Really Great Birthday  231. The One Where Harry Asks Remus For Sex Advice  232. The One With the Surfing  233. The One Where Harry Buys a Pgymy Puff  234. The One With the Naughty Dream  235. The One Where Harry’s Afraid of Grandpa  236. The One With the Race  237. The One Where Ron and Hermione Almost Fluke  238. The One Where Bill Gets a Headache  239. The One With Compass and Bad Puns  240. The One Where Harry Uses Parseltongue For Something New  241. The One Where Slughorn Is An Armchair  242. The One Where Its All Fluff  243. The One Where Draco Calls Blaise A Stupid Son of a Bitch  244. The One With the Patronus and the Lingerie  245. The One With Advanced Potion Making and World War One  246. The One With Luna’s Question  247. The One With All the Smut and Where Ron and Hermione Fluke Again 248. The One Where Minnie Freaks Out on Walburga  249. The One With the Fruit Basket  250. The One Where Percy Gets a Date and Remus Skives Off Work  251. The One With the Iron Blade  252. The One Where the Fairytale Ends  253. The One With the Golden Dagger  254. The One With Charlie’s Surprise  255. The One With The Bet  256. The One Where They Celebrate Christmas Without Sirius  257. The One With the Tantrum About Heels  258. The One Where Lucius Fucks Up  259. The One Where Tonks Plays Bad Auror  260. The One With the Goblin Potato 261. The One Where Fred is Scarred for Life  262. The One Where We Hear From Althea 263. The One Where Harry Is Told He Owes Theo A Fruit Basket 264. The One Where Neville Plants A Tree

[ginevraweasiey]

the thomas-finnigans

after the war...

dean is still paranoid. seamus is still angry. that day at the castle, the remnants of their childhood still withering away around them, seamus takes dean’s hand and he squeezes so tightly that dean knows it will bruise when seamus finally lets go. they had been through so much, so many secrets, so many hours hiding from everyone, and it was all over. the war and the running and the hiding was done, so dean takes seamus by the face and he kisses him with everything he has in him.

five years they had spent, so in love that sometimes it hurt. they were thirteen when they first became boyfriends, fifteen when they ended things, seventeen when it started back up again. through it all, through seamus’s anger in fifth year, through dean’s relationship with ginny weasley, they had been in love. 

they go home together, to dean’s mother house, after the battle. and they sleep in dean’s old bedroom with the muggle football posters and the pictures that don’t move and it’s so perfect even if the bed is small. but, dean looks over his shoulder too much and, sometimes, his little brother drops a toy and dean apparates away to some forest far away. he’s not accustomed to not being in hiding or to loud noises not being snatchers there to take him.

seamus is so, so angry at the world. he’s so angry that this boy he loves so much is always so scared. he raises his voice a lot and he trembles with anger when he reads about death eaters in the daily prophet. dean has to calm him down and make him take deep breaths so that he doesn’t work himself into a frenzy.

it’s perfect, sure, but it’s so hard. to be so young and so in love and trying so hard to recover and piece themselves back together. seamus gets them a flat in london, near diagon alley, and dean cries when they get there. seamus cries, too, only because he’s so happy that dean is happy and that they’re at home with each other. they spend nights just letting everything go, punching holes in the walls and then repairing them and crying and screaming and laughing and snogging.

life goes on, as it does, and seamus’s fury becomes a diluted anger that sits heavy in his chest but that he learns to ignore. dean starts to forget to check behind doors and he opens the windows on warm mornings without fear of hearing the familiar ‘crack!’ of snatchers appearing. 

dean asks seamus to marry him over breakfast in 2002 and seamus tells him not to be selfish and to give him a nice, dramatic proposal. so, that night, they get dressed up and go to the leaky cauldron and dean asks again. seamus says yes and, even if they get some stares from a few people at booths, most of the bar is cheering and seamus is so happy and dean is crying again. 

they can’t get married, not legally under the ministry, not until 2010. but, they have a nice ceremony anyway and all of their friends are there. neville is both dean and seamus’s best man. ginny is pregnant with her first and laughing and happy for dean and harry tells seamus that he didn’t know they were together until after the war and they’re all laughing together. they dance to dean’s favorite muggle music and every single person at the wedding forgets completely about the war, just for one night.

seamus asks about children soon after the wedding and dean’s heart aches. he’d love to be a father, love to give a child what he had never gotten from his own dad. and seamus’s dad wasn’t the best, either, and dean knows they’d be great fathers, but he doesn’t know where to start.

seamus enlists the help of the smartest witch he knows, who happens to have pull at the ministry and who happens to be called hermione granger. hermione takes them to st. mungo’s, which apparently has a program for adoption that dean and seamus hadn’t even known existed. it’s a long and difficult couple of months, convincing the hospital and the ministry that they could be fathers together.

jack neville thomas-finnigan is a few months old when they finally take him home. neville holds him for the first time and he cries and dean and seamus both have this smile on their faces. 

jack, of course, looks nothing like them, but dean says jack’s got his eyes and seamus is convinced that their noses are identical. it’s a running joke that lasts until jack is well into adulthood. their son is a ball of energy, always bouncing off the walls and getting into trouble with dean’s paints and cameras and seamus’s products from weasley’s wizard wheezes. 

seamus works with george at the shop, developing all sorts of fireworks and jokes, with his affinity for fire. he smells like smoke all the time but it’s sort of endearing in a weird way. dean does professional photography and art and jack is raised being completely loved by two equally brilliant fathers.

they go through the same process again about two years after they take jack home. it’s much easier the second time around, only because the ministry is beginning to become more lenient with these types of things. ruby cecilia thomas-finnigan is exactly as, if not more, energetic and wild as her older brother.

their terrors children never know fear. they never know the type of anger that still dwells on seamus like a looming ghost that haunts forever. they don’t know emptiness or injustice or a love that they must keep secret. dean and seamus make sure of that. jack goes to hogwarts and wreaks havoc with james potter and fred weasley. ruby follows in his footsteps and letters are sent home practically begging her fathers to please get her into line.

(seamus pretends to be angry but dean knows that they both find this entirely too funny)

(leave it to my daughter to accidentally set fire to the potions professor, says seamus. dean wishes he’d have set fire to the potions professor when he was in school, but he figures hermione beat him to the punch.)

and when the ministry of magic finally gets their heads out of their arses and realizes that love is love is love is love and allows for same-sex marriage for wizards, dean and seamus hold another wedding. their children and their friends are there and they dance again and laugh again and neville is best man but so is jack and ruby is the maid of honor. 

sometimes, dean flinches when he hears apparation. and seamus still trembles a little when he reads news of death eaters in azkaban or sees lucius malfoy in public. but it is an incredible feeling for them both to look at their son and their daughter and know that they are not afraid. they are the products of a love that has been in felt in dean and seamus’s bones since they were thirteen. it’s an absolutely remarkable fact and an absolutely remarkable life.

“after the war...” masterlist

[hhgossip]

HIDDEN HILLS WEEKLY ISSUE #2

In this issue of Hidden Hills Weekly, we are talking about the outrageous lives of our celebrities in the gated community! We talk about polyamorous lovers to concerts in your every own kitchen!

ISABELLE AMOR’S ADDING ON TO HER POLY LIFESTYLE?

For the past week, Isabelle Amor, 28 has been in New York filming her newest show, “Only Murders In The Building.” She has been seen up and down the busy streets, filming scenes and having fun on set but fans have noticed that the singer/actress is having too much fun with her co-star. The pair have been seen getting quite cozy with one another when the cameras cut. They have been seen with big smiles and sparkles in their eyes. It comes as quite a shock as Isabelle is in an unconfirmed relationship with country music stars Annika Baddie, 25, and Cameron Nelson, 26. You did read that right, Isabelle is dating Both Annika and Cameron. They are living a polyamorous lifestyle where three people are all seeing each other. 

Fans are wondering if Isabelle’s co-star is going to be added to her relationship with the country stars. Fans took it far enough to compare the relationship and pictures of Isabelle with her ex-boyfriends and current lovers to her new beau. Those pictures include her famous love story with James Hemmings, 27, with who they share one child together. Mateo Hemmings, 3. One fan stated on Twitter that - “Jelle is way more hotter than this! What is this?!” Along with the tweet was a shared picture of Belle with her co-star. While other fans tweeted that Belle looked happier with her two other loves. “Belle looks GLOWING with Ani and Cam! LET HER BE HAPPY!” Says another fan.

What do Annika and Cameron think about Isabelle potentially looking for another lover? What do you all think? Let us know!

WALLEN FATHERED A CHILD IN SECRET WITH MACKENZIE?

On February 26, 2021, the multi-talented actress Mackenzie Locklear, 23, told the world via Instagram that she had given birth on February 15th to a baby boy named Phoenix Finn Locklear. The actress went silent on all types of social media after the Sweetheart Dance we held on the 12th of this month until her huge announcement. We haven’t heard much about her birth but everyone is wondering who the father is. Mackenzie never said out in any interviews who the father of her son is but many people are assuming it’s Wallen Ward, 28, country singer. People are only assuming this as Mackenzie has been seen at many of Ward’s concerts in the past. She is either in the sound booth or she is backstage with everyone else. Wallen is currently married to Madeline King, 22, the youngest of the King Siblings. 

We have reached out to all parties but we got nothing but got declined to speak from Locklear’s team, but we heard nothing back from King & Ward’s team just yet. But we will keep you all updated on the matter when we get the word!

ODESSA’S NIGHTMARE!

On the day of February 18th, 2021, we got reports of Daniel Kaylan, 29, had left his household with his daughter, Heather without notifying her mother and his fiancée, Odessa Fitzpatrick, 27. We were told that the police were called on the scene as Odessa had no idea where her daughter had gone to and assumed she had gone missing. It wasn’t clear where Daniel had gone with Heather but one thing that was clear is the fact that Odessa was not having any of it when Daniel revealed that he was the one who took Heather and left. 

The couple just welcomed their third child, a son, into the world on the 14th of this month. Who they have not released the name yet. They also share another son, Wyatt, who is the oldest of the Kaylan Clan. 

Rumors had spread that Odessa had indeed got the police involved once she could not find Heather anywhere and Daniel had to come home to talk them himself to explain what had really gone down. We know for sure, this is something he will never do again and might spend the rest of the year in the dog house for this one! 

LOVE TRIANGLE IS STILL ON THE RISE!

Is 5 Seconds Of Summer’s guitarist still in love with a former groupie? The answer is unclear to many but also very clear to those around them! Spencer Stone, 25, used to sleep around constantly with Lanie Sinclair, 22, back when the band was touring for their album Sounds Good Feels Good. They currently share two children together, Lyric, 4, and Mercury, 2 months. Everything was going well between the two as co-parents before Spencer moved in with his girlfriend, Francesca “Frankie” Hart, 25. The house was already sold but Lanie ended up staying the night with Spencer the weekend before the big move and rumors have it that they have done more than just kiss that night. Sources had said that Sinclair left early in the morning with their daughter and her daughter, Lucina, 9 months, who she shares with her current boyfriend, Theodore “Theo” Dean, 26. Lanie was currently pregnant when she stayed the night.

Rumors only fueled even more as Lanie went off with Theo to Paris for nearly a month after giving birth to her son with Spencer. Theo was fresh out of an engagement with Nicole Hampton, 24, and Lanie was dealing with Spencer’s flip-flopping feelings for her. Sources had said in Aspen that Stone had made Sinclair cry more than once. Reports claim to overhear a fight between Spencer and Frankie as he admitted kissing Lanie. Witnesses say that Hart claimed to feel like she had been cheated on since Spencer agreed to father another baby with Lanie without talking to her about it first. This caused a huge rift between Hart and Stone in Las Vegas where Frankie walked out on him during blackout dinner. 

During the Sweetheart Dance, many eyewitnesses had said that the whole night Spencer couldn’t tear his eyes away from his ex-groupie while she danced with her former turned current boyfriend Theo. What will Frankie think about all of this? What does Theo think about all of this as well?

SCOTTIE’S FREE CONCERT!

The Model/Youtuber Scottie Blake, 27, made headlining news when she went live on Instagram the other night and totally forgotten about it! It went from attempting to make pasta for dinner into a full-on action concert for thousands of people unknowing to her. Many of her fans were delighted to see Scottie enjoying herself as she danced around her kitchen and sang her heart out to her favorite songs. They blasted through her speakers and we do not blame her for forgetting about being live! When you have great music taste like Scottie, it’s common to forget what you were doing and just want to have some fun. 

One fan wrote on Twitter, “LOOK AT HOW CUTE SCOTTIE IS!” With many heart emojis and a screenshot from the live. 

Although trolls were making fun of the model, many of Scottie’s fans were quick to defend her and one started out. “As if you don’t do this when you’re alone lmao bye” 

One thing is for sure, Scottie Blake, we need that album, and secondly, keep on dancing and never stop!

NICOLE HAMPTON IS TURNING TO A WRITER!

The rumors might be true! They might be false! But we do hope it’s true! Nicole Hampton, 24, had said it herself that she planned on writing a book called - “boy mom shit - you’ll be grey before thirty.” She then goes on to explain why she decided to write a book on parenting. It was because of her oldest son, Zeus, 6, who she shares with Derek King, 27. He was attempting to talk to his youngest brother, Asher, 4, who she shares with Brody Roberts, 30, to jump off his bed onto his skateboard so that he could ‘surf’ down the stairs. Luckily, Mama Hampton was quick to put that idea out of their heads and put their safety into their minds. Who knows what could have happened if she didn’t catch them in time!

As we are all parents in Hidden Hills, it would be so nice to hear what other parents have to go through. All children are wild, fun, and beautiful. They may drive us all up the wall but we do love them with all of our hearts! So, Nicole, we would love and buy your book! Give us a call when it’s about to be released! Don’t be shy now!

BRODY IS MOVING ON?!

Yes, you heard it here first! Brody Roberts says that he is ready to move on with his life and find that special someone! Our close sources say that he has come to terms with his ex-girlfriend, Nicole Hampton, 24 is moving on with her life and he is ready to do the same. As we stated in a previous story, the couple shares a son together, Asher, 5. The producer and director have been keeping a low profile recently but want to change that and step out more. We have to say that we’re excited to see Brody out and about again! 

People close to the director stated that he wanted to connect with someone and meet that special someone in an authentic way and is adamantly opposed to dating apps. We get it, we don’t want to be catfished in this household. We were told that he has been asking around for ideas of places to meet people and even may have asked a few people to join him on that adventure. We do not know who at this time but once we get more details, we will share them with you all!

[drsilverfish]

Game of the Gods - 15x08 Our Father Who Aren’t in Heaven

Hey fellow-travellers,

Well done to everyone who speculated Rowena would be the new Queen of Hell!

I’ve just watched the ep. I’m late catching up (and as usual, haven’t jumped into your posts yet, to avoid spoilers) because, here in the UK, we had a very bad, not good, general election result this morning and I’ve been completely sucker punched by it all day.  

Anyhoo, Bucklemming did OK with this one. I mean, it doesn’t, perhaps, have quite all the intricate layers of some of our better writers, but hey, it’s got all the moving parts, including the return of Jungian Self and Shadow-Self metaphor in spades (and a healthy, hopeful integrated version at that, as Adam and Michael!Adam get along and share control of consciousness and the vessel). It also contains plenty of pregnant subtext between Dean and Cas, including <drumroll> a mooted return to Purgatory together where, remember, “It felt pure” (in subtext - between them) and Dean prayed to Cas every night. 

But, leaving those elements to one side for now, I thought I’d talk first about this shot of Cas, praying to Michael with a chessboard prominently in shot:

Which, in the context of the story, reminded me of this:

“In their dwellings at peace they played at tables

Of gold no lack did the gods then know” 

That’s a quote is from the Poetic Edda, a medieval manuscript containing Old Norse poems, which tells something of pagan Norse mythology. 

The quote is about a golden age of the Gods, which comes into being after Ragnarok, the terrible end of the world battle between the Gods and the Giants. In this “end times” battle (as you know) many Gods die and the world is destroyed. However, a new world is born out of the old one, and the surviving Gods are at peace, playing an old Germanic board game, a bit like chess, in Heaven in a new Golden Age. 

This cyclical narrative, where apocalypse leads to renewal, is also present in the Bible in the famous passage in Revelations 21:

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (King James Bible)

Chuck has declared, in 14x20 Moriah, “Welcome to the End!” (aka he has declared Ragnarok) and we see him with a chess board in 14x04 Atomic Monsters:

He is, of course, trying to manipulate his “favourite story”, Sam and Dean Winchester, like chess pieces on a board. However, Cas, as we’ve all observed, seems to be outside Chuck’s favoured misery dude-bro plot - a murder-suicide, in which one Winchester kills the other and then themselves. So, the image of Cas with the chessboard in 15x08 tells us that Cas, too (like Chuck) has power over the “chess board”, aka the Game of the Gods. 

Indeed, if my Edda quote proves fruitful, the narrative is telling us that, after this great battle with God (in which some of our heroes may die, at least temporarily) there will be a renewal. Perhaps this is the “Paradise” Jack promised Cas from the womb. 

I mentioned that there was a reference in 15x06 Golden Time to Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions (Dean, grief-eating cereal as a result of his break-up with Cas, refers to it as “breakfast of champions” at the start of the episode) in this post here:

https://drsilverfish.tumblr.com/post/189338866109/me-every-relevant-point-now-forever-onwards-for

Dean and Chuck, of course, we know are both Vonnegut fans, thanks to their exchange about Vonnegut in 4x18 The Monster at the End of this Book - very meta, as Chuck, like Vonnegut, likes to insert a character version of himself (Chuck Shurley) into his stories. 

Breakfast of Champions provides a guide for the possible renewal-after-Ragnarok ending of SPN, because in that novel, the writer is persuaded to let go of the control of his characters - to grant them freedom aka true free will.

 Vonnegut also wrote a short story, called “All the King’s Horses” (1951) about a deadly game of chess between a captured US Army Colonel and his guerilla-fighter leader captor (set during the Cold War). 

The captor, Pi Ying, orders that whenever the Colonel, Kelly, loses a chess piece, one of the men captured with him will be executed. That sounds a lot like Chuck, right? Playing a deadly game of chess with his Winchester Gospels’ protagonists and killing those they love for sport in the game, just as he threatens the lives of Jodie, Donna and Eileen in 15x08 (NB: notice he’s trying to erase the feminine from the narrative again!!!).

Eventually, the Colonel, in Vonnegut’s story, realises he can only win the chess game if he sacrifices one of his knights on the board, but these are being “played” by his sons (also captured with him). Just before Pi Ying kills Kelly’s kid, he is himself murdered by his guerilla-fighter girlfriend, who has been watching the cruel chess game along with him (she then kills herself). One of Pi Ying’s men takes over the game, but Kelly wins and so the remaining hostages are freed.

A deadly chess game, the (almost) sacrifice of a son... sounds like Castiel;s son Jack’s sacrifice by Chuck in 14x20 Moriah, right? And presages Jack’s re-entry into the “game”.

We have seen Cas pictured with chess boards before, notably in 8x08 Hunter Heroici:

And, given the numerical symmetry - 15x08/ 8x08 (which season 14 established as a definite “thing” - calling back previous episodes numerically, Ouroboros style) I think this call-back is deliberate. 

In Hunter Heroici, the psychokinetic resident of retirement home Sunset Fields, Fred Jones, is being manipulated, in his vulnerable state, by one of the doctors to use his powers to alter reality so the doc and his accomplice can pull off a series of thefts (e.g. creating cartoon holes for escape purposes).  

Someone powerful enough to alter reality? That becomes a metaphor for Chuck, in this call-back (which, also reminds us of Chip Harrington in 14x15 Peace of Mind). 

Cas eventually brings peace to Fred Jones, by mind-stripping him of his powers so he can’t hurt anyone else (at his request) and then staying with him to play music in his mind for a while in the retirement home. 

This episode, 8x08, is also right in the middle of the narrative in which Castiel himself is being manipulated by Naomi, and the Winchesters (at this point) don’t know it yet. More manipulation of reality by dubious powers of Heaven parallels!

All this ties in quite nicely with Donatello’s attempt to find a clue in the Demon Tablet to being able to lock up Chuck, and which AU!Michael, apparently, gives Team Free Will a spell for at the end of 15x08.

Castiel, master-tactician that he is (never forget the chess game he played with the angels using Biggersons restaurants in quantum super-position in 8x21 The Great Escapist) has a significant part to play in this final chess game with God himself. He’s a powerful player on the board, and a tactician with influence over the board, precisely because Chuck continually discounts him.

[the--blackdahlia]

Too Young to Fall in Love Chapter 51 (Dirt!Nikki x Reader)

Title: Too Young to Fall in Love 51

Summary: Nikki Sixx was a hard partying musician on the strip. He never expected to fall in love with anyone, until a girl knocked on his dressing room door looking for a ride home and took his breath away. Just like everything else Nikki did; the drugs, the money, the music; Nikki went hard with love. (Y/n) Bass never expected the bassist of Motley Crue to be the one to shake her calm and calculated life up. She had a plan. Graduate school, become an epic producer, and watch from behind the scenes as her brother’s band rose to fame. Nikki and (Y/n) were perfect for each other, too bad her brother, Tommy, didn’t think so.

Series warnings:  Smut (18+ Please), drug use, language, referenced miscarriage, drug overdose, mentioned attempted suicide, out of character moments for everyone in the band, the timeline might be a little screwy but it’s fanfiction! I know nothing of music production and my medical knowledge is really screwy, so it won’t be accurate.

A few months later

“Babe! I’m home!” Nikki called out as he came through the door. “Stopped at the bakery and got the cake! And those cupcakes you like!” It was quiet downstairs. “Babe?” He sat the baked goods on the island and headed into the house. He made his way to the nursery, where he could hear music playing. (Y/n) was decorating, wanting everything to look perfect.

“(Y/n).” Nikki said softly. She jumped and turned to look at him.

“You scared me!” She laughed. “So, what do you think?” They had went with softer, neutral tones, and the paint had just finished drying, so (Y/n) was putting up all the decorations. Cute little animals playing instruments.

“It’s perfect.” Nikki smiled and wrapped his arms around her, his hands resting on her bump. “Everything is amazing.” He kissed on her neck, holding her close. She moaned softly, then glanced at the time on the watch Nikki was wearing.

“Shit!” She called out. “Everyone’s going to be here in like an hour or two!” She pulled away from Nikki. “I need to get a shower and...and…”

“Babe, relax.” Nikki smiled. “I got the cake. Pizza is scheduled. You just go get a shower and calm down, okay.” He kissed her gently.

“What would I do without you?” (Y/n) asked, kissing him again.

“Be a lonely, but still a really hot, producer in New York.” He smiled at her. “Or be married to Bret Michaels.”

“Oh, don’t remind me of that.” (Y/n) shook her head. “Okay, I’m getting in the shower. Be out in a bit.” She headed towards the bathroom while Nikki went downstairs to get ready for their guests; Vince and Vanessa with Dean and Samantha, Tommy and his new girlfriend (Pamela had the boys this week), Athena and her new husband, and Mick going solo, as well as (Y/n)’s parents. Tonight was the gender reveal. Nikki and (Y/n) didn’t even know what they were having yet. The doctor had wrote it on a slip of paper and put it into an envelope, which (Y/n) took to the bakery to have a cake made. It was chocolate icing, but inside would either be pink or blue.

About an hour and a half later, the pizza arrived, along with Mick and (Y/n)’s parents. Mick helped Nikki get it all set up while (Y/n) finished getting ready. Vince, Vanessa, and the twins were next, followed by Athena and her husband James, and then there was Tommy, being fashionably late, but no girlfriend in sight.

“She, uh, didn’t want to come.” Tommy shrugged. He leaned over to Nikki. “I haven’t been dating. Don’t tell (Y/n). She worries about me after prison.”

“Well, I wonder why.” Nikki laughed. “It’s cool man. Your secret is safe with me.”

“So, when do we find out what this little sucker is.” Vince asked (Y/n) as she walked past him.

“Once we cut the cake but this pizza smells really good.” She grabbed a few pieces and smiled down at the twins. “You both are just so cute!”

“Well, Dean keeps stealing Sammy’s bow all the time, and Sammy likes to bite.” Vanessa laughed. “Those two are going to be a handful. You think your brother and your husband are the terror twins? I think my little pumpkins here are.”

Conversation flowed throughout the evening, Tommy giving vague answers when asked about his girlfriend and Mick saying he was just fine being single. Vanessa and Vince alternated between feeding the twins and feeding themselves. (Y/n) smiled. This was her family. She never thought in a million years that the most notorious band in metal would be sitting together in her living room, waiting for a gender reveal while making small talk like they hadn’t just been doing coke off of naked strippers about ten years ago.

“Okay guys, are we ready?” (Y/n) asked, standing up. Nikki and (Y/n) made their way to the kitchen, everyone else in tow. The cake sat there, ready to be cut. Nikki handed (Y/n) the utensils.

“Be my guest.” Nikki told her, kissing her cheek. (Y/n) cook a deep breath and cut a piece, laying it out on a plate.

A pink cake.

“We’re having a girl!” (Y/n) gasped, hugging Nikki. “Oh my god!”

“We’re having a girl!” Nikki echoed, holding his wife close to him. He had never dreamed that he would be a dad to a little girl. She was going to be so loved and protected, because she had not only her three uncles in the room who wouldn’t hesitate to hurt anyone who hurt her, but a long list of musicians that Nikki and (Y/n) had befriended over the years.

Nikki and (Y/n) Sixx were having a girl.

****

“I don’t know anything about shopping for girls.” Tommy said. “At least, not baby girls. Big girls though, I can buy for.” Tommy said as they passed by Victoria Secret.

“Vanessa was in charge of getting everything for Sammy, so I’m at a loss.” Vince shrugged.

“I haven’t bought baby clothes since the 1970’s. And I’m pretty sure I was drunk then.” Mick added. Nikki sighed. He should’ve just invited Slash or something to join him on this mall trip. He wanted to start buying clothes for the yet unnamed baby. He might have been going overboard with buying baby stuff here recently. Most people assumed that the mother would be the one going crazy. But not in (Y/n) and Nikki’s case. Nikki wanted everything to be absolutely perfect.

“So, any names yet?” Tommy asked as he looked at a display in the window at a music store. A small poster was hanging in the window, with a picture of him at his kit that said “Tommy Lee Uses Vater”. “Dudes, check me out!”

“Good thing we’re not visiting a music store in the 1980’s. Sober Tommy pointing out every picture of himself would get real old, real fast.” Mick grumbled.

“I should’ve just left you losers at home.” Nikki sighed. They headed into the baby store, looking extremely out of place. Vince had recently died his hair a deep red, Tommy looked like he had been pulled from the hip-hop block on VH1, Mick looked like an old man shopping for his grandchild, and Nikki was in all black with tattoos.

“Can...can I help you?” A young girl greeted them.

“My wife and I are having our first child, a baby girl, and I might be going a tiny bit overboard.”

“Oh, congratulations, well we have a great selection of girl clothes over here,” she gushed and showed him all the latest clothes for baby girls.

Nikki and the guys all looked at all the ruffles and pink around them. “Do you think she’s be mad if I dyed some of this black?”

“I think there’s a store on the strip that has baby clothes,” Tommy told them.

“I guess we can try,” Nikki shook his head, “I’ll buy some of this just in case though. I don’t want her getting mad at me.”

“Man, she is so laid back about this. Compared to Nessa pregnant, she’s pretty chill.” Vince told him.

“And her favorite color is black.” Mick shrugged.

“True,” Nikki nodded. “Then let’s go Crue!”

****

“Look at this onesie!” Tommy called out. “It’s so cute!”

“Yeah, but her dad isn’t the drummer dumbass.” Vince said, smacking the back of his head. Everything in the store was rock based, and Nikki had already found a couple

“Can I get it custom?” He asked. “My uncle is the best drummer in the world type of thing?” Vince found matching t-shirts for the twins. He wasn’t sure if Vanessa would actually put them on the kids, but they were cute.

“Hey, aren’t you those guys from Motley Crue?” A guy asked.

“Uh, yeah.” Nikki said, looking over at him.

“Dude! You guys were so awesome! I got laid for the first time when Home Sweet Home was playing.” He high fived Tommy then headed about his shopping. The guys looked at each other with smiles on their faces.

“Oh man this looks good,” Nikki said as he grabbed a onesie. It was a Motley Crue onesie, black with pink trim and the band's name in pink.

“Get it. I dare you.” Tommy laughed.

“You don’t have to dare me,” he laughed, “I’m getting it”

“Baby Aphrodite is going to be the best dressed baby in all of LA.” Tommy laughed.

“Not naming my daughter after a Greek goddess. Especially not Aphrodite.” Nikki shook his head. “(Y/n) have a few ideas for names. But we’re not certain on anything until we meet her.”

“What? Are you thinking of something like Olive or something?” Vince asked with a laugh. Nikki stayed quiet. “Wait, really?”

“I said that we’ll know for sure when we see her.” Nikki told him again, grabbing another onesie. “But yes, Olive is on the list.”

“Olive Sixx.” Mick said as they bought the stuff and headed out.

“I didn’t say we had a great list. Just that we had a list.” Nikki pointed out. “It’s a work in progress but we still have some time.”

“Ok, dudes I’m starving let’s go eat.” Tommy smiled and clapped his hands together.

“When are you not starving?” Mick asked. Nikki pulled out the little onesie and smiled, running his fingers on the fabric. He was going to be a dad, and he knew he was going to be a better parent than his ever were.

****

“I feel so fat.” (Y/n) groaned as she sat on the couch with Vanessa, watching the twins on the floor. “My feet are swollen, my ankles are the size of an elephant, I’m either sad, horny, or hungry. There’s no in between.”

“Welcome to pregnancy,” Vanessa smiled. “But you look gorgeous. And I bet Nikki can’t get his hands off you.”

“He said that he’s already looking forward to more kids.” (Y/n) told her. “But I look awful. I don’t get where ya’ll are getting this gorgeous look from or whatever.”

Vanessa hugged her, “because you are drop dead gorgeous (Y/n) Sixx!” Vanessa looked to the twins and sighed as they crawled around the small space they made in the living room for them. “Nikki not able to get his hands off you should be proof of that.”

“How are you and Vince doing?” (Y/n) asked. “Last I heard, you were convincing him to get snipped.”

“Well, I’m good with just two. Plus he has his two other kids so four kids for him should be good enough,” Vanessa sighed. “I just don’t want to risk anything bad happening.”

“Nothing bads gonna happen.” (Y/n) rubbed her arms. “And, if you decide you want another set of twins later on, it can be reversed.” She teased Vanessa. She watched as Dean reached out and stole Sammy’s bow, making her cry and try to bite her brother. “Wow, you were right about that.”

“Terror twins! I told you.” Vanessa took the bow from Dean and fixed Sammy’s hair.

“The boys are going to drop a new album soon. I just hope the tour is after the baby comes.” (Y/n) sighed. “Could you imagine me being in labor and Nikki in Europe?”

“That would drive him crazy,” Vanessa laughed. “But aren’t you in charge of scheduling it? Since it’s the label you guys created?”

“He’s not letting me do anything.” (Y/n) sighed. “I think the miscarriage from the 80’s still haunts him. He wants me to take it easy. I’m going stir crazy.”

“Talk to him hun,” Vanessa smiled. “I mean I can understand where he’s coming from but you guys are past the miscarriage point.”

“I know we are, he knows we are, but he’s still scared.” (Y/n) told her. “He’ll still wake up in the middle of the night, pull me to him, and tell me he’s sorry. It’s been years Nessa.”

Before Vanessa could reply the guys came back with bags on their arms. Nikki walked up to (Y/n) and kissed her on her head.

“How are you feeling?” he put the bags down.

“I’m okay.” (Y/n) smiled. “Think I can do some work for the label soon?”

“As long as you don’t get stressed I think we’re ok?” he held on closely to her.

“Nessa! I got some shirts for the twins.” Vince said excitedly. One was blue, one was pink. Both said “I’m cute, mom’s hot, dad’s lucky”. “What do you think?”

Vanessa smiled at him, “I love them and you’re still getting snipped,” she gave him a pat on his cheek before handing Dean to him. “Your son loves to make his sister cry, and your daughter loves to bite.”

“Well, as long as it keeps the boys away, right my little man?” Vince asked, smiling at Dean. Dean gave Vince the biggest smile. Nikki pulled out the small camera (Y/n) had bought him when she found out she was pregnant and snapped a picture of him and Vince. The small camera came in handy when he was on the go.

“Someday we’ll have camera phones. That’s what the guy on TV said the other day. That soon, we’ll have really good cameras and computers in our pockets.” Tommy told them.

“Yeah, but nothing will beat the real thing.” Nikki laughed.

“So, when is the pregnancy photoshoot?” Vanessa asked. (Y/n) looked at Nikki. They hadn’t really thought of it, but (Y/n)’s mom had been bugging her about it so she could send pictures back to Greece. Nikki smiled at (Y/n) and rubbed her back.

“Well, maybe we could plan something out in the backyard with Jett and Ziggy.” He shrugged. “I know they’re just going to love their little sister.”

“But I look like a house.” (Y/n) groaned. “I don’t want anyone to see me like this. It’s bad enough you guys see me like this.”

“At least she’s not throwing stuff at him.” Vince mumbled under his breath.

Vanessa smacked him lightly, “honey, you look lovely! I can help you with hair and makeup.”

“But…” (Y/n) sighed.

“No. It’s going to be great!” Tommy told her. “As long as there are clothes on in the photoshoot, I’ll be happy.”

“Yeah, I was going to do a naked photoshoot to send to your aunts in Greece.” Nikki sighed. “Seriously, where did all the brains go?”

“My little sister stole them.” Tommy said, not sure if he was insulting himself or complimenting her.

“You could always save the naked ones for your private collection,” Vanessa smiled.

“Oh, I already have plenty of those.” Nikki teased.

“Gross!” Tommy called out. “I don’t need to think about that.”

****

(Y/n) sat on a bench, her hands resting on her belly while Nikki snapped the pictures. Ziggy and Jett had posed in a few, but a squirrel ran by and Nikki hadn’t been able to reel them back in. So (Y/n) was going solo for the rest of them.

“Are you sure you don’t want to be in them dad?” (Y/n) called out to Nikki. “I mean, it’s not just me that was involved in this!”

“I could set the timer,” Nikki said as he grabbed his tripod and began to line the shot. “Ok, so everything is set.” (Y/n) stood up so Nikki could run over and wrap his arms around her and place his hands on her belly. Once he got the time set, he did just that. (Y/n) leaned back against him as the camera went off.

“I bet you look very handsome in it.” (Y/n) said with a smile.

“You look better,” he muttered as he kissed her as the camera went off again. They took a handful more pictures before Nikki went to develop them. (Y/n) lounged outside.

“Your daddy and I love you very much sweetheart.” (Y/n) whispered to her belly. “We can’t wait to meet you.” She rubbed small circles and smiled. She had never thought she would be this happy. She looked at the house with loving eyes. Soon, they would have a family there.

****

“Vanessa, my belly feels tight.” (Y/n) told her a few months later. They were out and about for the day while the boys did interviews and made their rounds. “And little miss thing is all over the place. It’s like she’s breakdancing or something.”

“She might be getting ready to come out,” Vanessa gave her a smile.

“You think?” (Y/n) asked. “Nikki will be in a panic if I’m not with him when I go into labor. You know it as well as I do.” She laughed a little.

“Well she sin;t going to come out today, I hope,” Vanessa chuckled. “But it sounds like she’s getting herself in the position to come out.”

“Dramatic, just like your daddy,” (Y/n) sighed. “Gotta make sure you make a big entrance and put on a show, right?” She rubbed at her belly. She looked at he stroller the twins were in. “Nessa, you’ve got to see this. Get the camera from my purse.” She told her. The twins were fast asleep holding hands.

Vanessa grabbed the camera and smiled as she took the picture, "I need to get a copy of this."

"Of course." (Y/n) smiled but then groaned.

“(Y/n)? Are you ok?” Vanessa rushed to her. “Maybe I should call Nikki.”

"She’s mad about something." She rubbed her stomach. "I...maybe we should call. But he's on TV with the boys."

Vanessa pulled out her phone and called Nikki, “Damn it.” she cursed, “It’s going to voicemail.”

"Leave a message and I'll just go on." (Y/n) gasped. "Little lady your daddy will be upset if you come before he gets here."

Vanessa left Nikki a message as she led (Y/n) back to the car, “I’m taking you to the hospital.” she said. “I think they should check you out in case you are in labor.”

"Okay, not gonna argue." They got the twins in the car and headed towards the hospital.

****

"I heard a cell phone while we were on stage." Tommy checked his. "Wasn’t mine."

“It was mine,” Nikki sighed. “This is Vanessa’s number,” he put the phone to his ear. “She thinks (Y/n) is going into labor. I got to go.” NIkki rushed out of the studio before the guys could say a word.

“Didn’t we come with him?” Vince looked at the guys.

"Nikki wait!" Mick called out. "Your our ride!"

The guys all rushed after him and piled into the car. Nikki drove like a bat out of hell to get to the hospital. He tripped over himself as he ran to the nurses station gasping for air.

“Wife… in… labor…. Friend… brought… where?” he gasped.

"Nikki!" Vanessa called out. "She’s in being seen." Just then (y/n) came out.

"Guys?" (Y/n) asked.

Nikki rushed to her voice and went in side, “(Y/n) I’m here. Are you ok?” Nikki rushed to hold her hand. “Is little lady coming out?”

"No not yet. she just is being a dramatic little girl." (Y/n) smiled. "Are you ok?"

"I… you…baby…" he tried to catch his breath. "I got scared I was going to miss it."

"Guess she's running drills." (Y/n) laughed.

“Once I get you home I’m going to have to come up with something so I don’t miss the real thing,” he smiled.

"What if you're on stage or at another interview? It could be on the national news." (Y/n) laughed.

"Then everyone is going to know that little lady is here to rule the world," he caressed her cheek and kissed her.

“So you’re okay?” Tommy asked, sounding a little worried. (Y/n) smiled.

“Yes Tommy. Honestly, just tired right now.” (Y/n) told her brother.

“Little lady wanted to keep us on our toes,” Nikki chuckled a bit. “She’s good, and I about had a panic attack.”

“I’m sorry honey.” (Y/n) told him. “I’m ready to go take a nap. Do you have to go back anywhere?”

“Nope I think that was our last interview,” Nikki looked at the guys who gave him a thumbs up.

“Good. Now which cute guy wants to take me home.” (Y/n) laughed, giving Nikki a smirk.

“Hey,” Nikki pinched her nose playfully. “Only cute guy taking you home is this guy!”

“I said cute. Not extremely handsome.” She smiled and kissed him.

“Hey now. No kissing. Kissing leads to more babies once that one comes out.” Tommy laughed. “Go rest. Who knows when my niece is going to make her world debut.”

“Come on sweet girl,” Nikki smiled. “Let’s get you home.” He led her out to the car. Vanessa kissed Vince.

“How much did he freak out?” She asked, looking at him and the other guys.

“He almost left us at the TV station after the interview,” Vince shrugged and smiled. “How did the kids do with you guys?”

“(Y/n) has a picture she’s going to have Nikki print off for us. But the babies were asleep in their stroller holding hands.” Vanessa to him with a big smile.

“I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that little lady is going to make her appearance at the most inconvenient time.” Mick told them with a shrug.

“Now that's what I want to see,” Tommy said as they all watched Nikki help (Y/n) into the car. “I kind of want to see him freak out when it actually happens… remind me to get the camcorder ready though.”

“Oh, we won’t let him live that down.” Vince laughed.

“Wait, Nikki’s taking (Y/n) home. He was our ride.” Mick told Tommy. Mick and Tommy turned to look at Vince and Vanessa, giving them little pouts and puppy eyes.

“Come on you clowns,” Vanessa sighed. “But that means you’re on baby duty!”

“Hehe, she said duty.” Tommy laughed. Vince handed him Dean. “What’s that smell?”

“That’d be the duty.” Vince laughed.

“WHAT?” Tommy smelled Dean and put him at arm's length. “Dude that is not funny! He smells like one of Nikki’s old pairs of underwear from the Theater of Pain tour!”

“I don’t want to know how you know what the smells like.” Vanessa shook her head. “Give me my son, I’ll change him and you can walk home.” Tommy sighed and looked at Vince. He hadn’t really changed too many diapers, since Pamela did most of that.

“Come on drummer, I’ll show you how it’s done.” Mick grumbled, taking the diaper bag from Vanessa and leading him to the bathroom to help him change the baby.

Forever Tags: @anathewierdo​ @dekahg​ @marvel-af-imagines​ @feelmyroarrrr​ @nanie5​ @imboredsueme​ @gemini0410​ @aiaranradnay​ @babypink224221​ @mogarukes​ @xxwarhawk​ @sandlee44​ @shatteredabby​ @caswinchester2000​ @supernaturalwincestsblog​ @lauravic​ @mrsambroserollinsacklesmgk​ @teller258316​ @horrorpxnk​ @tommyleeownsme​ @marvelismylifffe​

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[bi-e-ne]

Monthly Reading List #June ’18

Hello there!

God, I’m late again... don’t know why everyone thinks german people are always on time. I’m definetely not :D

What shall I say... I love the weather right now. For those of you who don’t live in Germany or any part of West Europe: by now we have the best summer in years! It’s hot (at least 26°C, but often up to 30°C) and today was the first day with a little bit of rain (more like hopping into a short shower) in weeks. I love this weather and though I know that a lot of people don’t, please be kind. Actually, I’m a January girl and I know the disadvanteages of winter so I’m absolutely in love with summer and wouldn’t mind to spend my life somewhere where I can have it every day. So, that’s one of the reasons I’m so late with this list. I still don’t own a laptop and with the sun shining so warm I don’t want to spend my time downstairs (in the cold basement) to put this list together. Sorry, but I’m just telling the truth.

But there is another reason for being late. It’s my new job. I’m working for almost 6 weeks now and I still like it! It’s not my dream job, I have to be this honest, but it’s not boring, I’m alsways busy and time flies so I never have this feeling of, damn it, you have to work for another two hours or something like that. So I’m trying to enjoy it, though I’m always exhausted when I come home, doesn’t matter, which shift I work.

But enough about me. I have to THANK every writer here on tumblr for always making my day with great fanfiction. I don’t know what I would do without you. I love the stories and you keep inspiring me for my own writing, so thank you, thank you, thank you! And for all the readers out there: just enjoy the following amazing stories like I did! Can’t wait to share the next list with you!

Avengers

James ‘Bucky’ Barnes

A Messed up Situation - Masterlist @supersoldierslover

Baby @ugh-supersoldiers

Dancing on your Own | Dancing On Your Own | Dance With Me Tonight | Dancing Away With My Heart | Save The Last Dance For Me @sarahp879

Fatal Attraction @bucketbarneslove

Fight Fire with Fire @disagreetoagree

He’s My Hero @docharleythegeekqueen

I Choose You @avengerofyourheart

Imagine coming home drunk with Bucky @imamotherfuckingstar-lord

Inked - Masterlist @jaamesbbarnes

Krasivaya-Chapter List @unicorns-and-fairy-dust-blog

Lattetude Part 1 | Part 2 @addictionmarvel

Let’s Play Pretend Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 @lenavonschweetz

Love Retreat - Masterlist @captainrogerss

Neon Signs @tropicalcap

Once upon a time in paris - Masterlist @hellomissmabel

Rehab Rewards Part 3 @teamcap4bucky

Romeo and Juliet Part 10 | tbc @spidersholland

Secrets @marvelous-heroimagines

Slayer Five | Six | tbc @star-spangled-man-with-a-plan

The Big, the Bad, and the Cute? @sad-af1121

The Further We Go @imamotherfuckingstar-lord

Through Sickness...Except Bucky’s... @teamcap4bucky

Touch Starved @star-spangled-man-with-a-plan

Whisper @redgillan

“You Have A What?” @cumonbucky

Steve Rogers

Choose Me Instead @readitandweepfics

Finally, A Good Time @4theluvofall

Imagine Steve catching you sneaking in after a night out @imamotherfuckingstar-lord

In the End @beccaheartschrisevans

Lost and Found @abovethesmokestacks

Marry Me @adam-cole-bay--bay

Sneakers & Coffee @imamotherfuckingstar-lord​

The Boy from Brooklyn - Masterlist @captain-rogers-beard

The You I Love The Best Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | tbc @star-trekkin-across-theuniverse

Stucky

Be with me @mywritingsblog

Clean & Sober - Masterlist @star-spangled-man-with-a-plan

Enhanced Senses @4theluvofall

Fill Me With Your Love @a-splash-of-stucky

Go get him, Tiger. @who-the-fucky-ducky-is-bucky

Homecoming @mywritingsblog

Invasion of Privacy @tropicalcap

I Think He Likes You | Needed @emilyevanston

Three Strikes & You’re Out - Masterpost @captain-rogers-beard

What did you say your name was? | Sequel @housewintershield

you look so perfect standing there @a-splash-of-stucky

Winterhawk

496. @winterhawkkisses

499. @winterhawkkisses

500. @winterhawkkisses

511. @winterhawkkisses

Okay... This Looks Bad @emilyevanston

Gifted

Frank Adler

On the Rocks - Masterlist @captain-rogers-beard

The Right Girl @captain-rogers-beard

Hawaii 5-0

Eia Au, Eia ‘Oe ~ Here I am, here you are Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 |tbc @amarabliss

Pete’s Dragon

Gavin

Moments in the Woods Part 1 | Part 2 | tbc @annathewitch

Star Trek

Birthday Confessions @nhasablog

James T. Kirk

“My parents asked about you.” @pinkamour1588

Leonard McCoy

Captain Oblivious @imamotherfuckingstar-lord

Doctor In Distress @bkwrm523

Five minute ficlet @star-trekkin-across-theuniverse

Five minute ficlet @star-trekkin-across-theuniverse

Just listen to my voice @4fandomsinonebrain

Mistletoe @dolamrothianlady

My little perfection @4fandomsinonebrain

Student Loans - Masterlist @imamotherfuckingstar-lord

Turbulence @kaitymccoy123

McKirk

Every time things get bad @bonesmctightass

“I hope it hurts to think of me.” @janeykath318

“I’m sorry.” @bonesmctightass

In Every Universe @janeykath318

“Kiss me everywhere it hurts.” @bonesmctightass

Ready or Not Part 3 @auduna-druitt

Slippery Business @starshiphufflebadger

Space Princesses and Coffee Dates Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | tbc @captainsbabysitter-blog

This is a bad idea @bonesmctightass

Supernatural

Dean Winchester

Imagine breaking up with Dean @imamotherfuckingstar-lord

Imagine Dean finding out you’re pregnant @imamotherfuckingstar-lord​

Second Chances @squirrel-moose-winchester

The Bronze

Lance Tucker

The Price of Gold - Masterlist @moonbeambucky

The Vampire Diaries

Kol

Beyond the Other Side @imamotherfuckingstar-lord

RPFs

Sebastian Stan

Imagine Sebastian being your butler @221bshrlockedThe B

[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.

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

[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

[breaniebree]

A Second Chance Chapter Titles

A lot of people have asked me why I didn’t come up with titles for the chapters in A Second Chance like I did, over fifteen years ago now, in my Beginning Series where each chapter was named.  My main reason was because I had written the first 12 chapters without titles.  Also, I find writing titles for stories or chapters very hard.  Coming up with titles is not easy and to me, two thousand times harder than writing.  Speaking with @seriouslysam8​, who loves Friends as much as I do, she made a comment about one of my chapters being “the one where such and such happens” and it got me thinking about how Friends names the episodes in that fashion.  

Procrastinating from writing, I ended up breaking down my story into titles in a similar fashion and I figured I’d share them.  Seriously Sam was very helpful in helping me out (she always has the coolest titles for her stories).  So, these are the unofficial chapter titles to A Second Chance if they were named like episodes of Friends.

For those who are interested in going back and re-reading certain aspects -- this is also helpful in finding what you’re looking for (I think).  😉❤️ And I gave you a little snippet about what I would call chapter 253.

The One Where They Were Dead

The One Where the Rat Is Out of the Bag 

The One Where James and Lily Die 

The One Where Moony and Padfoot Make Up 

The One Where Harry Meets Padfoot 

The One Where Sirius Kidnaps Harry 

The One Where Sirius Punches Vernon Dursley 

The One Where Harry Meets Remus 

The One Where Sirius and Harry Make Grilled Cheese 

The One With Thea 

The One Where Harry Asks What a Kiss Is 

The One With the Library Card 

The One Where They Remember the Past 

The One With the Tonkses’ 

The One With Harry’s First Nightmare 

The One With Professor Moony 

The One With The Puppy 

The One With the Second Best Day Ever 

The One Where Harry Meets An Excellent Secret Keeper and Her Brother 

The One Where Sirius Learns What He Missed in Azkaban 

The One With the Brownies

The One With the Date 

The One With the Weasleys 

The One With the Bad Dreams 

The One Where Sirius Learns the Key to Moony's Secret Pranking Success 

The One With Operation Prank the Piss Out of Harry Potter 

The One With the Wolfsbane Fight 

The One Where the Marauders Discover A Wolf 

The One With the Spanking 

The One With the House Rules and Where Sirius and Ted Are Manly and Build a Treehouse

The One With the Wolf 

The One Where Remus Tells Sirius To Deal with the Blacks 

The One Where Harry Asks About Boobies 

The One With the Locket 

The One With Blackbird 

The One With the Birthday Orgasms 

The One With the Three Brothers 

The One With Godric’s Hollow 

The One Where Sirius Speaks French

The One With the First Christmas 

The One With the Pensieve 

The One With the Memories Part I 

The One With the Memories Part II 

The One When Padfoot and Prongs Become Blood Brothers 

The One Where Harry Has A Sleepover 

The One With the Tickle War 

The One With the Viscount of Falmouth 

The One With Roni 

The One With the Birthday Planning

The One With the Best Birthday Ever  

The One Where Padfoot and Moony Know Nothing About Sick Kids  

The One Where Remus Slaps Sirius  

The One With the Giant Cheese Fort 

The One With Operation Get Lily Evans to Fall in Love With Prongs  

The One Where Remus Thinks He’s a Very Bad Man  

The One Where Harry Asks About Sex  

The One Where Tonks Turns 17  

The One Where Remus Feels Like He’s Robbing the Cradle  

The One Where Remus Learns He Has A Mate 

The One Where Sirius Shags the Realtor 

The One With the Letter 

The One Where Harry Gets Hedwig  

The One Where Harry Understands the Fear of Voldemort  

The One With The Sorting  

The One Where Sirius Was Almost Bitten By a Panther… And Totally Didn’t Pee His Pants  

The One With the Youngest Seeker In Over a Century 

The One With the Three-Headed Dog  

The One With Zee 

 The One With Sheer Dumb Luck  

The One Where Sirius Lets Zee Drive His Bike  

The One Where the Weasley Boys Come Over for Christmas  

The One Where Minnie Tells Sirius To Get A Job  

The One Where No One Listens So Harry Has to Do Everything and His Friends Follow Him So He Doesn't Die

The One Where the Whole School Knows  

The One Where Harry is Jealous  

The One Where Sirius Eats Crow  

The One Where Zee Meets Minnie  

The One With the Proud Enough to Cry Letter 

The One Where They Realize Their New Professor is a Moron  

The One Where Remus Gets His Shit Together  

The One Where Harry Meets His Fanboy  

The One Where Binns Doesn’t Put His Class to Sleep For Almost Ten Whole Minutes 

The One Where Sirius Finds Out  

The One When Remus Punches Lockhart  

The One With the Mad House Elf  

The One With the Great Shoebox Capture  

The One Where Sirius Tells Zee About the Marauders  

The One Where Harry is Homesick  

The One Where Sirius Says I Love You  

The One With the Sex Talk 

The One With Ted Walking in on Remus Fingering Tonks… And Remus Adds Another Finger  

The One Where Draco Comes to Christmas  

The One Where Sirius Actually Gets a Job  

The One Where Sirius Asks About Cursed Scars  

The One Where Remus Tells Tonks and She says ‘Duh!’  

The One Where Fred Hears the Name Padfoot  

The One With Peter’s Trial Part I  

The One With Peter’s Trial Part II  

The One Where Ginny Tells Harry She Has A Pen-Pal  

The One With the Eyes As Green As a Fresh Pickled Toad  

The One Where Tonks Is Under the Desk  

The One Where Harry Writes in the Diary  

The One Where It’s Not Follow the Butterflies  

The One Where Sirius Is Sent Home Without An Explanation 

The One Where Ginny is Scared Harry Will Never Speak To Her Again

The One Where Sirius and Remus Demand Answers  

The One With Prophecies and Horcruxes  

The One Where Harry Learns to Drive  

The One Where Bill Gives the Lecture on Being A Big Brother  

The One Where Sirius Realizes He Wants Zee Forever But Is Too Chicken To Say It 

The One With Operation Fuck Up Voldemort’s Plans  

The One Where Cissy Tattles on Abraxas  

The One Where Harry Sees More Than He Should Between His Roommates  

The One Where Colin Tells Ginny To Get Over It  

The One Where Theo Comes Out  

The One Where Sirius Tells Lucius If He Fucks Up He Will Kill Him  

The One With the FUVP Pow-Wow  

The One Where They Return to the Chamber of Secrets  

The One Where Harry Finds Out  

The One Where the Marauders Prank Snape 

The One Where Draco and Theo Go Exploring and Get Caught  

The One With Nyx  

The One Where Harry Throws a Tantrum  

The One Where They Skive Off Class Because Harry Talks 

The One Where Harry Asks Out Cho  

The One With Harry’s First Date  

The One Where Sirius, Remus, and Dumbledore Fuck Up  

The One With Moody  

The One Where Harry Gets Slapped  

The One Where Sirius and Tonks Decide To Fuck With Snape  

The One With Lily’s Ghost  

The One With the Gaunt Property  

The One With the Defence Club  

The One With the Wizengamot  

The One Where Harry Meets the Americans  

The One Where They Forget to Tell Sirius  

The One With the Insomniacs Club 

The One Where Bellatrix Shows Up  

The One With the Time Turner  

The One With Umbitch's Creepy Song  

The One With the Wolf in the Cage  

The One Where Harry Shouts at Sirius and He Just Shouts Right Back

The One Where Both of Them Feel Like Shit

The One With the Elder Wand  

The One Where Sirius Tells Harry Not to Drink  

The One Where Sirius Acts the Adult and Tells the Grangers  

The One Where They Drink the Potion  

The One Where Harry Can’t Change His Arm Back 

The One Where Ginny Sees Harry Naked  

The One When Harry Calls Remus a Bad Dog 

The One Where Theo Goes to the Burrow  

The One Where Harry Has a Fling  

The One Where Sirius Panics Over Commitment  

The One Where Zee Takes Harry Shopping  

The One With the Quidditch World Cup  

The One With Winky  

The One With Babymort 

The One Where Sirius Asks Zee to Move In  

The One Where Snape Apologizes and Harry Thinks The World Ended

The One With the Pretty Boy, the Biggest Flirt, and the Flying House

The One Where Tonks Wants A Boob Job

The One Where Drama Queen Sirius Learns About Pens

The One Where Zee Just Wants A Damn Telephone But Sirius Can’t Stop Bitching

The One Where Girls Giggle and Ginny Looks Different

The One Where Harry Outflies a Dragon… Almost

The One Where Zee Tells The Paper to Back the Fuck Away from Her Son

The One Where Harry Thinks It’s the Formal Wear

The One Where Mr Weasley Thinks ‘Oh, Bloody Hell!'

The One Where Sirius Takes A Bath

The One Where Harry’s in Denial

The One Where Harry Thinks He Has Two Hostages

The One With the Love Potion

The One Where Zee Seduces Sirius in the Work Shed

The One With the Secret Swimming Pool

The One With the Bats From the Crotch

The One That Ends With ‘Oh Shit!’

The One Where Everyone Dies

The One With the Lullabye

The One Where Tonks Marks Remus

The One Where Remus Proposes

The One Where Lucius Gets Arrested

The One Where Remus Proposes Again and Harry Dies

The One With the Coconut Smell

The One Where Tonks Isn’t Pregnant

The One Where Dean Realizes He Fancies Seamus

The One With Baby, I Love You

The One Where Theo Meets Voldemort

The One Where Harry Calls Ginny His and Then Denies It

The One Where Everyone Breaks Out of Azkaban

The One With the War Council

The One Where Harry is Dumped

The One Where They Discuss The Size of Remus’ Package

The One Where Harry Learns About the Potters

The One Where Harry Finds the Tower Room

The One Where Zee’s in France 

The One Where Harry Gets Constantly Interrupted

The One Where the Glacier Finally Melts

The One Where Harry Finally Asks

The One Where Sirius Cuddles and Zee Buys A Motorbike

The One Where Everyone Is Worried About Theo

The One With the Frying Pan

The One With the Fluke

The One Where Minnie Walks In

The One Where Remus Finds A Present Under the Tree

The One With Bellarosa and the Snake

The One Where Everyone Gets Motorbikes

The One Where Padfoot Suggests Pranking Umbitch to Fred and George

The One With the Great Escape from Umbitch

The One With Prince Finley and the Switching of Teacups

The One Where Theo is Courted and Dean Admits He's in Love

The One Where Hinny Says I Love You and the Fluke Continues

The One Where Sirius Picks Out A Ring

The One With the Cathedral Star

The One Where Sirius Answers the Phone

The One Where George Gets the Girl

The One Where They Compare Proposals

The One Where Sirius Has the Man-Flu and Gives it to Zee

The One Where Ginny and Theo Are Kidnapped and Remus Hears Heartbeats

The One With the Thing After Learning the Thing

The One Where Everyone is in Shock

The One Where Zee Confirms

The One With the Will

The One Where Remus Finally Lets Go

The One Where Hermione is Blind But Her Mum Isn’t

The One Where the Dragon’s in Trouble and George Snogs the New Bat

The One Where Ginny Tames Ebony and Theo Goes to Tara

The One With the Sovereign Chalice and Zee’s Dream

The One With the Party

The One Where Ginny Claims Her Man

The One Where Harry Has a Really Great Birthday

The One Where Harry Asks Remus For Sex Advice

The One With the Surfing

The One Where Harry Buys a Pgymy Puff

The One With the Naughty Dream

The One Where Harry’s Afraid of Grandpa

The One With the Race

The One Where Ron and Hermione Almost Fluke

The One Where Bill Gets a Headache

The One With Compass and Bad Puns

The One Where Harry Uses Parseltongue For Something New

The One With Slughorn As An Armchair

The One Where Its All Fluff

The One Where Draco Calls Blaise A Stupid Son of a Bitch

The One With the Patronus and the Lingerie

The One With Advanced Potion Making and World War One

The One With Luna’s Question

The One With All the Smut and Where Ron and Hermione Fluke Again

The One Where Minnie Freaks Out on Walburga

The One With the Fruit Basket 

The One Where Percy Gets a Date and Remus Skives Off Work

The One With the Iron Blade

The One Where the Fairytale Ends  

The One With the Golden Dagger

[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

[crashinthefastlane-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

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Supreme Court Justice dies

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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”.

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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.

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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