Requiem for a Lightweight: RIP RBG

by G. Murphy Donovan (October 2020)

Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 1996 (for Time Magazine), Shana Wilson, 2020

 

 

When will there be enough women on the [Supreme] Court? And my answer is when there are nine.— Ruth Bader Ginsberg

 

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say at the outset that I was never a big fan of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, primarily because she is a symptom of what’s gone wrong with American feminism.

       Somewhere between the 19th Amendment and Roe vs. Wade, feminism became a single-issue movement. Where you stand on abortion now determines where you sit in the girl’s club. Over time, it didn’t matter how you felt about other women’s issues. If you are not politically correct on abortion, you are left by the American Left.

       Exclusion in American feminism has more than a little history. In the late 19th Century, American feminism was closely affiliated with the black struggle for civil rights. By the early 20th Century, however, fewer and fewer black faces were seen midst white women virtue signaling in white regalia. At some point, the movement to secure the vote came to look like a distaff edition of the more notorious Ku Klux Klan—white on white.

       A right to vote was a noble and necessary advance. Would that we could say the same about the genocidal, racist, and misandry implications of “choice.”

       Smug virtue signaling, alas, is still with us today. Indeed, modern movement memes include pink pussy hats, congresswomen again marching in white, and white doilies and dickeys (aka detachable bosoms) on black robes on the Supreme Court bench.

       With Ruth Ginsberg, symbols always seemed to outweigh substance; oversized spectacles, clunky jewelry, aesthetic hair styling, and white hand-embroidery over her black robes. RBG’s affectations seemed to say “Look at me, I’m the nasty little woman in the boy’s club.”

       Ginsberg’s eccentric affinity for imagery sent ambiguous messages to aspiring feminists and young girls in general. 

       Jurisprudence is a bizarre fashion statement?

       Needless to say, as an iconic liberal, RBG always enjoyed genital immunity and uncritical media support, especially at PBS. Listening to Nina Totenberg interview Ruth Bader Ginsberg was like watching two hairless cats lick each other on a shag rug.

       Justice Ginsberg gave more thought to her media image than her judicial discretion or temperament. Prior to the last presidential election, RBG attacked candidate Donald Trump in a chambers interview: “He’s a faker . . . he really has an ego . . . I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president.”

       We don’t have to imagine anymore what the country looks like with Trump as President or imagine what the Supreme Court looks like without Ginsberg.

       Thank God.

       Hearing RBG complain about Trump’s ego was a little like hearing Tupac Shakur call Biggie Smalls a fat gangster. Speaking of subculture, the media and the street was quick to adopt Ginsberg as an icon. She reveled as the “notorious RBG,” an echo of Biggie Smalls, aka Notorious B.I.G., aka Christopher George Latore Wallace. Wallace was a drug dealer, gang banger, and a rapper who left Brooklyn in March, 1997, via a drive-by fusillade.

       With these and Ginsberg’s darker partisan instincts, you could argue she was a direct ideological descendant of Margaret Sanger. Speaking to Emily Bazelon of the NY Times, RBG once said:

        . . . there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

       Emily B. and RBG spent the last eight years trying to walk back that clear echo of Sanger and eugenics. Just as clearly, Ginsberg, like Sanger, underlined the logic chain between choice, abortion, and the culling of undesirable “populations.”

       Sanger, you may recall, is the celebrated founder of Planned Parenthood, now a nationwide chain of abortion mills, most in proximity to minority neighborhoods. A black woman in America today is four times more likely to have an abortion than a white woman. Over time, Planned Parenthood has augmented its finances by selling aborted fetal organs.

       Planned Parenthood gives an annual Margaret Sanger award to men and women who support “reproductive” rights. A sampler of recipients reads like a Who’s Who of the American left: Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, Bella Abzug, John D. Rockefeller, and, most ironically, Martin Luther King Jr. (in 1966), to name a just a few.

       Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision, 54 million babies have been aborted, mostly infants of color.

       MLK could be rolling in his grave.

       For those of you not familiar with the shadier side of contemporary liberal and/or Democrat Party ideology; Eugenics is the belief that weak, diseased, aged, imperfect, or undesirable humans should be culled in the interests of improving the race and population control. Eugenics flies under a number of flags today. Population control, “choice” and “death with dignity” are just three of the more popular euphemisms.

The Outlook

       Now that Ruth Bader Ginsberg is gone, America again faces another epic, if not toxic, toxic Supreme Court nomination battle. In 1993, the Senate cast 96 “yea” votes to confirm Ginsberg, a Bill Clinton nominee. Little of that magnanimity survives today.

       The woman of the moment is Amy Coney Barrett, apparently the ideological antithesis of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Barrett is a distinguished jurist, professor, Catholic mother of seven, and feisty Fighting Irish alumnus with traditional sentiments.

       Judge Amy might get a pass on Notre Dame, but she will be forgiven for little else.

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G. Murphy Donovan is an aging veteran of the Deep State, erstwhile Moynihan-Democrat, and lapsed Roman Catholic.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast