Teaching Sarah Palin, the Supreme Court Meme

Sarah Palin, in a recent interview, was asked what Supreme Court cases she thought were important. She was able to remember Roe v. Wade, and that was it. She couldn't name a single other case. (It was also revealed in the same interview that she could not name a single newspaper, period. Let's see, I look through the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Seattle PI on a daily basis.) We've been encouraging the netroots to teach Sarah Palin about the Supreme Court by naming your favorite case.

Everyone knows what my favorite case is: Griswold v. Connecticut. The court held "Connecticut law criminalizing the use of contraceptives violated the right to marital privacy."

Griswold is one of those pivot-law cases. It held that although there is no explicit "right to privacy" in the Constitution, several of the amendments are clear indicators that the writers assumed privacy from government intrusion within one's own body and property as a given. The case is almost universally loathed among right-wing commentators because it restrained the government from policing the private conduct of its citizens. Based on Griswold, we got Roe v. Wade, Eisenstat v. Baird which allowed unmarried people to buy contraceptives, and Lawrence v. Texas which legalized homosexual conduct in the privacy of one's own home.

Explaining the Seattle Chill

I was working on a story and trying to explain why the characters were reacting to each other the way they were and hit upon an interesting obvservation. Nathan has just been approached at the city’s “het” S&M club in a way that was somewhat surprising, and attempts to explain to himself his own reaction:

Seattle was frequently schizophrenic about its obligation to police its citizen’s morals, and might one day embrace an openly kinky and demonstrative space on safer sex play, and the next day go all-out to close the place down for maximum publicity. The city had four major newspapers, two dailies and two weeklies. As the weeklies pushed Seattle’s live-and-let-live, gay-friendly, kink-friendly politically correct individualism, the dailies responded by talking up suburb-ready, livable safe streets, “what will we teach our children” safer-sex politically correct collectivism.

No one knew what role anyone else played along the continuum represented by the four papers (nevermind the wild edginess of the anarchosocialist rags that littered the free boxes with names like Eat the State and Gay City), even in a place like Under the Stairs. Nathan suspected that most Seattleites didn’t know where they themselves fell on that spectrum at any given moment until they opened their mouths and voiced an opinion. Once voiced, they tended to hew to it with surprising stubbornness, even knowing that tomorrow they might feel different. As a result, Seattleites tended to be reserved, even chilly, when facing a stranger.

Probably not an original observation about my city, but I’ve never seen it quite worded that way, nor put quite so at the feet of Dan Savage and Jim Veseley.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Brain: Wednesday, scraping the bottom

Obama's latest serious gaffe.

Barack Obama was giving a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus a few days ago and made a comment about how he and Michelle would be celebrating their 15th anniversary together next week.

Michelle Obama's team later issued a one-word press release: "Sixteenth."

Barack Obama just got every married man's vote right there.

John McCain: Highly Unlikely

( “I've turned to Sarah Palin for advice many times in the past” )

Jimmy Carter,Jane Fonda, and Hollywood liberals

( Oh Noes! )

"George Bush was a laughingstock in the gray corridors of the UN."

( “Yesterday's Man” )

McCain at the Des Moines Register: Losing his cool.

( What the Hell is he doing there anyway? )