The Court's ruling - so widely appreciated, thank goodness, for the sheer and crass and wholly sui generis ideological adventurism that it is - carries us back to the magic of the infamous "3/5 Clause," in which slaves were counted as persons when it was to the South's advantage for this concession, and as non-persons when it was to the South's advantage to exempt them from protection or liberty. Now, the gross, putrefied fiction of the 19th Century, that Corporations have the legal standing of persons, reaches its repulsive nadir, in the convenience of human shelter under the 1st and 5th Amendments and the profanely inhuman endowments of Limited Liability, unconscionable tax breaks, and deregulation as non-persons when it suits them. If you had ensconced Jay Gould in the Executive and simply outlawed free elections explicitly, you could not have achieved a starker, more brutish redefinition of American society than by this one judicial gesture. And its author, Justice Kennedy, is the vote we are counting on to extend equal protection in matrimony to all.
There is no life long enough to measure the infinite infamy of this ruling, by the invisible hand of intimidation alone.
Yes, he has done, including Lawrence v. Texas, in which Scalia aggressively rebuked him for opening the logic of matrimonial equal protection, thus sucker-punching him against doing the right thing in the case now in District Court in San Francisco. The man is erratic and incoherent, so we shall have to hope that he can get Equal Protection right once more.
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself. - Jean Dubuffet
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. . . Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
-- His Holiness the Dalai Lama . . .
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The Slabber
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If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway.
~ Mother Theresa
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. A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run. -- Elbert Hubbard .
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.My call for a spiritual revolution is thus not a call for a religious revolution. Nor is it a reference to a way of life that is somehow other-worldly, still less to something magical or mysterious. Rather, it is a call for a radical re-orientation away from our habitual preoccupation with self towards concern for the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others' interests alongside our own.
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama
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Great men are they who see that the spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. . . Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters. -- José de Sousa Saramago
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Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold. -- William Shakespeare
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Fighting Against Neglect
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Our problems, both those we experience externally such as wars, crime and violence and those we experience internally as emotional and psychological suffering will not be solved until we address this underlying neglect of our inner dimension. That is why the great movements of the last hundred years and more--democracy, liberalism, socialism, and Communism--have all failed to deliver the universal benefits they were supposed to provide, despite many wonderful ideas. A revolution is called for, certainly, but not a political, an economic, or a technical revolution. We have had enough experience of these during the past century to know that a purely external approach will not suffice. What I propose is a spiritual revolution.
In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.
Bingo.
ReplyDeleteThe Court's ruling - so widely appreciated, thank goodness, for the sheer and crass and wholly sui generis ideological adventurism that it is - carries us back to the magic of the infamous "3/5 Clause," in which slaves were counted as persons when it was to the South's advantage for this concession, and as non-persons when it was to the South's advantage to exempt them from protection or liberty. Now, the gross, putrefied fiction of the 19th Century, that Corporations have the legal standing of persons, reaches its repulsive nadir, in the convenience of human shelter under the 1st and 5th Amendments and the profanely inhuman endowments of Limited Liability, unconscionable tax breaks, and deregulation as non-persons when it suits them. If you had ensconced Jay Gould in the Executive and simply outlawed free elections explicitly, you could not have achieved a starker, more brutish redefinition of American society than by this one judicial gesture. And its author, Justice Kennedy, is the vote we are counting on to extend equal protection in matrimony to all.
ReplyDeleteThere is no life long enough to measure the infinite infamy of this ruling, by the invisible hand of intimidation alone.
And its author, Justice Kennedy, is the vote we are counting on to extend equal protection in matrimony to all.
ReplyDeleteThat is true, but as odd as it may be Justice Kennedy has already penned two eloquent opinions supporting the rights of gay Americans.
Yes, he has done, including Lawrence v. Texas, in which Scalia aggressively rebuked him for opening the logic of matrimonial equal protection, thus sucker-punching him against doing the right thing in the case now in District Court in San Francisco. The man is erratic and incoherent, so we shall have to hope that he can get Equal Protection right once more.
ReplyDelete