In last week's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court again broke new ground and has taken an action that will be debated for years to come.
It finally used the word "huh?" in an opinion.
This of course was deployed in dissent by Justice Scalia, who just the day before had introduced "jiggery-pokery" and "pure applesauce" (the terms, not the concepts) to the Court's jurisprudence. See "The Argle-Bargle Over This Jiggery-Pokery Is Pure Applesauce" (June 25). While "huh" had appeared in 11 Supreme Court decisions before Friday, in each case that was only because the opinion contained or attached a partial transcript in which someone else had said "huh," "uh-huh," or utterances to that effect. (One of those cases was FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, in which the someone was George Carlin. He said a lot of other things in that transcript that the Court has yet to officially adopt.) Justice Scalia's use of "huh?" last week was the first time a justice has used it in an opinion.
It appears in the paragraph that starts, on page 7 of Scalia's dissent, by saying that the majority's opinion "is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic." It seems a little rude to go after the majority opinion's style as opposed to its reasoning, which is always fair game. (Note that I, by contrast, have chosen to say nothing about its style.) But this does make for entertaining reading.
The "huh?" appears on the next page, as part of a series of rebuttals to statements by the majority that Scalia finds especially perplexing:
Rights, we are told, can “rise . . . from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.” (Huh? How can a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives [whatever that means] define [whatever that means] an urgent liberty [never mind], give birth to a right?)
Emphasis added.
Setting aside whether that sentence is pretentious—something about which, again, I am saying nothing—it does seem to deserve the huh, at least in isolation. The sentence just before that one says this: "The right to marry is fundamental as a matter of history and tradition, but rights come not from ancient sources alone." So in context, it's clear at least that the majority is saying something like "rights may evolve over time." Fair enough. But here's some advice if you want to argue in a future case that a right has evolved: don't get up and say you should win because we now have "a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era." The response will be "huh?" or words to that effect.
This paragraph is the bulk of section II of Scalia's opinion, and it's full of gems despite—or maybe because of—the fact that it's completely unnecessary. His main point, like that of Justice Roberts (whose opinion he joined), is that a change like this should be left up to the voters, or maybe a constitutional convention, not handed down by "nine unelected lawyers." But he makes that point perfectly well in the first part of his opinion, so Section II (if not the whole dissent) is just venting.
And it's a fair point, though that's not to say it deserved five votes in this case. But partly because he is venting, the opinion is full of gems both good and bad.
"I write separately to call attention to this Court's threat to American democracy."
Huh? Again, the anti-democratic point is a fair one, but to call this a "threat to American democracy" when the courts have let the executive branch do whatever it wants since 9/11 is laughable. (I'm laughing right now. Really.) Also, as many others have noted, Scalia has been just fine with nine unelected lawyers (five, actually) making a variety of other decisions that he happened to favor.
"If ... I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag."
The use of "head in a bag" is another Supreme Court first. (It does appear in one state supreme court decision, but in a very different context.)
"Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms?"
Um ... all of us? Granted, those specific words aren't in the Constitution, but neither is "expression," which Scalia has no trouble agreeing is a "freedom." We could certainly argue about what "intimacy" and "spirituality" mean, but it is a little creepy for a justice to ridicule the idea that anybody ever thought we had those freedoms at all.
"What say? What possible 'essence' does substantive due process 'capture' in an 'accurate and comprehensive way'?"
"What say?" is yet another Supreme Court first. It does show up in several earlier opinions, but only as an antiquated way of asking what somebody thinks. See, e.g., Creath's Adm'r v. Sims, 46 U.S. 192 (1847) ("What say the authorities in relation to a proceeding of this character?"); see also Aragorn, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) ("What say you? What say you? What say you?!"). But it's never been used this way.
A central piece of the rhetoric about taking the Confederate flag down from state property and official state symbols is that “it belongs in a museum.” Actually it doesn’t belong in a museum either unless it is properly contextualized and interpreted, unless you don’t want any people of color to come to the museum. Aleia Brown has a good piece explaining this:
What might such an exhibit look like? It would need to tell the history behind the flag. It is a symbol of white supremacy, and museums should acknowledge it as such. The designer for the second national flag of the Confederacy described it as a representation of the fight to “maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race.” The exhibit should also acknowledge the role the flag played in South Carolina’s past. The flag that’s captured national attention this week came to Columbia in 1962, as a reaction to black people fighting for and winning rights during the civil rights era.
Effective museum interpretation would not stop there. It would address the reoccurring questions surrounding this symbol. Why do people find the flag offensive? Why are other people so attached to the flag? Why do some people who embrace the fullness of Southern pride, including the Confederate flag, not see themselves as racists?
Furthermore, a complete interpretation of the Confederate flag would need to make clear that black people have always resisted white supremacy and fought for the demise of institutional racism. The late historian Vincent Harding put forth this idea, characterizing black people as committed to their freedom and unwilling to accept oppression. There has always been a cadre of black people willing to die for their freedom in America, and this too is germane to museum interpretation of the Confederate flag. In addition to being a sacred space, the AME church in Charleston was also home to the storied congregation to which the revolutionary Denmark Vesey had belonged. His church was burned after Vesey was accused of plotting an uprising in which enslaved people would revolt against slave masters.
This doesn’t mean you can’t have controversial pieces in museums. I’ve seen KKK material in several museums, including fully uniformed figures in the Colorado and Ohio state history museums. But those are contextualized, or in the case of Ohio was part of an exhibit that was specifically about the most controversial pieces they had in their collection.
But this often is not the case. As Brown discusses, lot of history museums do not deal with race well at all. Most people on history museum governing boards are conservatives. There’s a lot of downward pressure against anything “controversial” which inevitably means “would make white conservative patrons uncomfortable.” Does anyone believe that the South Carolina state history museum would tell the story of the Confederate flag in an appropriate way? I surely don’t.
So let’s either keep the Confederate flag out of museums or, hopefully, pressure museums to tell stories of white supremacy carefully to emphasize what those objects actually represented.
I wish I could speak honestly
About the beauty that I see
That others who see beauty too
Could openly discuss the view
That those who don’t enjoy the taste
Would pass on, and they wouldn’t waste
Their time and words to curse and scold,
To lock us up until we’re old
For daring to do nothing more
Than see
And smile
And love
And live
And harm none
And feel the joys
And the pleasures
And the fire
And the magic
That this wonderful world
And the future
Has in store.
Here’s the orbital period of our solar system’s 8 major planets (how long it takes each to travel around the sun). Their size is to scale and their speed is accurate relative to Earth’s. The repetition of each GIF is proportional to their orbital period. Mercury takes less than 3 months to zoom around Sol, Neptune takes nearly 165 years.
fuck this gifset do you know how long i sat here waiting for fucking neptune to drag its lazy ass into the frame
Let us take a moment to remember Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, aka “Princess TNT” - German royalty/punk icon of the 80s. After her husband Johannes (an openly bisexual libertine who scandalized much of Europe with his pranks and sex-positive lifestyle) died, she was left a young uneducated mother of three - with mountains of debt.
She got her act together right quick, learned to invest, and turned things around. She traded on her “punk princess” image, turning her castle into a tourist destination (and source of income). Now middle-aged, she’s become a successful businesswoman and put her wilder days behind her. But the world may never forget “Princess TNT.”
(and on a last note, her birth name is actually, and I’m not making this up: Mariae Gloria Ferdinanda Gerda Charlotte Teutonia Franziska Magarethe Frederike Simone Johanna Joachima Josefine Wilhelmine Huberta Countess of Schönburg in Glauchau and Waldenburg)
His remarks at first seemed to me just a drop in the bucket of millions of similar ones made every day about women in the workplace, often by decent men who would be horrified to be regarded as misogynists. For me they confirmed an age old stereotype of women as trouble, so old that it goes back to Adam and Eve. But they were the drop that finally caused the bucket to flow over. They became a catalyst for a deep-seated bitterness to pour out of people, not only women, who simply felt that enough was enough. This was an outpouring waiting to happen. It needed just that little drop.
What is the bitterness about? Injustice, plain and simple. And it coincides with my own anxieties as chair of the Diversity committee. The bitterness is sustained by the strong feeling that women have not had a fair chance to succeed in science. This is a serious problem in science in general, but it is also a problem for the Royal Society. It is a fact that only 105 out of 1569 Fellows are women (6.7%). It is a fact that only 22 out of 106 of the awards and medals given by the Society over the last 5 years were given to women and that over those five years only 22% of the successful candidates on the Royal Society’s University Research Fellows and Sir Henry Dale Fellows were women.
They have a responsibility to respond to biased remarks by their representatives.
As the case of Tim Hunt has shown, prejudice is unacceptable even if meant in jest. The Royal Society as an institution quickly dissociated itself from his remarks. It was necessary to affirm the truth of its genuine wish to do away with the obstacles that stand in the way of women’s careers in science. To do nothing would send a signal that it is acceptable to trivialise women’s achievement in science. Institutions can do things that individuals can’t. As individuals, whether we are Fellows of the Royal Society or anyone else, we are all capable of saying things that are inappropriate and foolish. Without being aware of it, we favour our ingroup, and are ready to disrespect outgroups, often in rather subtle ways. We are human and we are fallible. Institutions try to transcend this weakness, even if they don’t always succeed.
That’s the thing — I’m seeing a lot of people saying his remarks were OK, because he meant them as a joke, and there’s been an amazing amount of bizarre finger-pointing at lines remembered after the fact that indicate he wasn’t being serious. It doesn’t matter. It was a bad joke, and he flubbed it completely. The Korea Federation of Women’s Science and Technology Associations thought it was tasteless and required an apology, which Hunt gave, so all this floundering about and trying to find an excuse in humor is irrelevant.
The comments at the Royal Society are just as bad. There is the perennial “witch hunt” accusation, and my favorite example of hysterical hyperbole so far:
I don’t think that institutionalising presumed guilt, of a mere thought crime (unconscious bias), sets a very enlightened example at all. We also learn that the Tim Hunt story is more complex and nuanced than many people wish to acknowledge. Nor do Maoist style re-education schemes set a very enlightened example – based on public humiliation-confession-brainwashing. “Nulls in verba” – my bottom !
Thought crime! Complex and nuanced! (No, it wasn’t: he peddled tired stereotypes for a cheap laugh). Maoist style re-education schemes! Brainwashing!
The Royal Society: a radical hotbed of Maoists. Right. It’s always so affirming when the nutters rage against you so intemperately.
So there's this hilarious wrecky outbreak happening across our nation's bakeries, but it requires a little explanation before you can truly appreciate how funny it is.
Here's the deal:
See that? That's an edible image sheet. These sheets are supposed to work like individual stickers: you cut them up and only use the numbers & phrases you need.
Instead, bakers just keep plastering the entire sheet on a cake.
At first I figured it HAD to be intentional. Maybe they give you an edible marker with the cake, so you circle the right numbers?
Then I saw this:
You've gotta wonder: what does the baker THINK is happening here?
Or how about this one:
That's right; the baker cut up the sheet so it would all (kind of) fit.
Love the random "th" sticking out of the bottom.
I think most people are too confused to understand what's wrong with these cakes, but enough of you are still sending them in. So, I've just been collecting them:
Biding my time...
Waiting for the right moment to finally ask:
Seriously, bakers?
SERIOUSLY??
Thanks to Heather W., Angela F., Heather C., Ashley M., Emily F., Melissa L., & Heather D. for the big pile of sheet... cakes.
*****
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got stopped outside the grocery store by 4 (count ‘em 4) teenaged girls in softball gear raising money for their trip to the state championships.
i am morally obligated to push cash into their blue and white decorated bucket because:
my niece went to the state softball championships in maryland, so there’s a good chance somebody did this for her.
girls + sports = duh.
the energy coming off these kids was palpable. so full of life, and hope, and enthusiasm.
i tend to make a lot of fun of the burbs, but now that we’ve been here for two and a half years, i’m finding myself drawn to these small acts of community. and not even in an ironic way.
i even feel a little sense of pride in the hand-made bracelet they gave me.
Over the last year, Belgian painter and sculpturor Stefaan De Croock aka Strook (previously) began working with repurposed wood panels, doors, and furniture to construct giant faces on the side of buildings. The recycled wood surfaces are cut into precise geometric shapes and pieced together like a tangram puzzle, leaving the original paint and textures untouched. His most recent piece, Elsewhere, was a collaboration with his 69-year-old dad for Mechelen Muurt. You can see more of Strook’s paintings, sculptures, and other artworks on his website. (via Colossal Submissions)
We are moving our shipping operation in July. So, for this week only, we are massively discounting old shirt designs! A bunch of awesome shirts are now only $5. Get them while you can!
Yesterday, Bristol Palin, the oldest daughter of former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whose teenage pregnancy was hidden for the first part of Palin's campaign, made an announcement on her blog that she is again pregnant. Under the headline "Big News," this is the entirety of the post:
(I'm announcing this news a lot sooner than I ever expected due to the constant trolls who have nothing better to talk about!!!)
I wanted you guys to be the first to know that I am pregnant.
Honestly, I've been trying my hardest to keep my chin up on this one.
At the end of the day there's nothing I can't do with God by my side, and I know I am fully capable of handling anything that is put in front of me with dignity and grace.
Life moves on no matter what. So no matter how you feel, you get up, get dressed, show up, and never give up.
When life gets tough, there is no other option but to get tougher.
I know this has been, and will be, a huge disappointment to my family, to my close friends, and to many of you.
But please respect Tripp's and my privacy during this time. I do not want any lectures and I do not want any sympathy.
My little family always has, and always will come first.
Tripp, this new baby, and I will all be fine, because God is merciful.
Because Palin is part of a politically active anti-choice family, and because she herself is anti-choice, and because she is Christian and unmarried, and because she is conservative and says shitty antifeminist things, there are a whole lot of people making a whole lot of jokes, and pointing out her hypocrisy, and reveling in the schadenfreude of it all.
I don't have a single joke to make, nor do I feel the tiniest bit of schadenfreude. I just feel really damn sad after reading that pregnancy announcement.
That doesn't mean I don't care that her politics are garbage. Frankly, the fact that she espouses anti-choice and sexually repressive beliefs is part of what makes me so goddamn sad reading this, because she's clearly internalized all the attendant shame around sex and choice inherent to those beliefs—and now she does not feel like she has any meaningful choice but also can't be happy that she's pregnant.
It's just "a huge disappointment" to people who love her and to total strangers who share her beliefs. She's just trying to keep her chin up, because life is tough. She doesn't want sympathy because she is pregnant. There is absolutely no joy in this announcement. It's shame and resignation. That ain't funny.
She couldn't even reveal this information, with which she's struggling and which she know will disappoint people, on her own time frame, because the people who make a pastime out of policing the Palin women's reproduction have forced her to disclose it before they do. That isn't funny, either.
None of this is funny. It's tragic.
The reason I advocate for comprehensive reproductive rights options and reproductive justice is because I don't want pregnant people to feel shame about unwanted pregnancies, and because I want them to have the choice to terminate unwanted pregnancies, without judgment. This is the exact opposite of that.
I don't wish a sad, disappointing pregnancy on Bristol Palin. What I wish is that she felt like she could get an abortion without shame, if being pregnant is not what she wants.
And I wish she could use this experience to understand why other women might want that option, even if she doesn't, and that it's okay.
