Glenna's Blog

Philip Roth symbolizes a black man’s penis with a crow “whose lustrous blackness beneath her hand was warm and sleek like nothing she had ever fondled.”

At first my friend and I were ambivalent about the main characters’ by-the-book hipsterism (eg the girl’s favorite Beatle was Ringo; the guy sought relationship advice from his pre-teen sister; all conversation revolved around music or books). There should be some other type of characters, one of us said, to give us a clue whether the hipsters were supposed to seem shallow or whether the director just only knew how to portray cliches.

A minute later we watched the hipsters attend the wedding of a middle aged black person. On a scale of 1 to 10, I think you can guess how soulful it was.

Also there was an “Asian family” with cute girls and dorky boys:

Scalia holds a coherent judicial philosophy which depends on both historical knowledge and rhetoric skills. But a lot of Americans see him as a mere politician, railing against gay marriage and abortion while paying lip service to racial equality. Why do they insist on caricaturing him? It’s not because they’re unsophisticated. It’s because Scalia’s judicial philosophy—the one thing that makes him better than Sarah Palin—obviously forces him to oppose Brown v. Board, but he refuses to admit it.

Since Scalia won’t explain himself, I will explain him.

Scalia thinks that rule of law is more important than integrated schools. That’s okay; every serious judge in America probably believes that rule of law is more important than integrated schools. If it weren’t for rule of law—the fact that courts help people after they’ve been treated unfairly—the only people with any power at all would be cops, drug kingpins, and Jared Kushner. Rule of thugs.

For most judges, rule of law and integrated schools don’t conflict because standing up for minorities seems to them like the opposite of thug rule. But this approach doesn’t strike Scalia as lawful at all. He thinks that when judges allow affirmative action and strike down unequal marriage laws they over-enfranchise minorities. Favoring certain people = rule of thugs. Super-powered courts are just as bad as powerless courts. Except in Scalia’s vision of lawlessness, educated black people, Ellen Degeneres, and Portia de Rossi rule the streets.

In order to resist favoring minorities, Scalia judges equality cases according to how he thinks the 19th century framers of the Equal Protection clause would want him to. Historians have shown that the framers did not intend to integrate public schools. So if Scalia is serious about his philosophy—and he’d better be, because it’s the only thing that morally justifies the dozens of anti-minority opinions he’s written—then that means he should believe Brown v. Board was wrongly decided.

Presumably Scalia won’t admit that because he thinks he’ll sound like a bigot. But everyone already knows he’s a bigot. Now he sounds stupid, too.

Conservatives are calling Sotomayor racist because she said there’s a difference between white people and brown people. If you think she’s bad then you’ll die when you read this!

As a 17 year old Chief Justice John Roberts argued against letting girls into his school:

The presence of the opposite sex in the classroom will be confining rather than catholicizing. … I would prefer to discuss Shakespeare’s double entendre and the latus rectum of conic sections without a [b]londe giggling and blushing behind me.

As a grown up Roberts wrote:

Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good.

No giggling, ladies!

Alluding to 19th century anti-Irish discrimination, a Time blogger headlines his story about Obama’s supreme court options: “White Men Need Not Apply.”

Astute. Up till now I hadn’t noticed the parallels between US supreme court justices and inner city cobblers’ assistants. The two job markets actually have a lot in common.

• Candidates for both positions often have no other job prospects so they can’t feed their families. Entire communities end up going hungry. When the white boy community starves off it’ll be even more disruptive than when Irish kids of both sexes did, because in 20 years there won’t be anyone for white girls to marry.
• Just like unemployed Irish people became alcoholics, hopeless white male Stanford law professors are going to become sex addicts.
• Discrimination at the top of a profession deters people from the entire field. Already men make up barely more than half of law students, even though they are nearly 50% of the general population. If this keeps up then white men, like Irish people before them, will give up on corporate law and corruptly enter neighborhood politics instead.

If you want, you can see everyone who fought marriage equality in California on a map. The Times suggests this is bad because it has led to harrassment in the form of “confrontational e-mail messages.”

But confrontation was happening anyway. At least this will minimize errors.

Before the lists were public, people (including the mainstream media) kept blaming the African-American community for prop 8. Statisticians later showed that income and education were better predictors of how people voted on prop 8 than race (ie, both the Poor Community and the Dumb Community were more homophobic than the Black Community). Still, nasty things were said about black people in general at protests and smug things were said in newspapers.

Ditto for Mormons, but who cares?

Now that the actual jerks are exposed, anti-prop 8 protesters can focus their anger on them instead of on entire groups. More precision means less stereotyping means less chance of a race war.