by Jason Snell
‘The Glorious RBG’
New York magazine’s Irin Carmon, co-author of the book Notorious R.B.G., on the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
Two visionary lawyers, the leftist feminist Dorothy Kenyon and the queer Black theorist Pauli Murray, had long argued that gender discrimination violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which had previously only applied to race. The Supreme Court had never agreed. It hadn’t budged much from its ruling a century earlier barring a woman from practicing law because, per one justice, “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” In her second brief to the Supreme Court, 1973’s Frontiero v. Richardson, Ginsburg would coolly observe that “the method of communication between the Creator and the jurist is never disclosed.”
What a remarkable person and a remarkable life.