Passover

      This danger lurking everywhere

      has created new complicities,

      new tenderness, new solidarities.

      Before, no one ever said a word;

      now we talk to one another. We

      all know exactly why we're there.

The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court sounds poised to portray again the posture of the good man who no longer pretends not to see injustice and yet who does nothing. He is ill positioned to adopt that pose, because he has accepted the ultimate post of obligation. In arguments before his Court this week he demanded of a lady arguing for justice, if her client did not already have enough friends, as if such a circumstance might absolve him of ignoring manifest injury.

      

Hervé Guibert

To the Friend Who

  Did Not Save My Life

1990

Linda Coverdale, translation

Macmillan, 1991©

Passing by the windows of The Times last evening

Alito, as is his wont, advances an impertinent relationship of the Court to society, in suggesting it is the business of the Court to evaluate "the effects" of freedom to marry, when experience with freedom to marry is already countable in Kennedy's thousands of years. Both Justices shock the conscience with their presumption that freedom to marry might mean different things based on distinctions of sexuality which are not permissible to draw and which cannot be said to exist, without discrimination. How circular shall their timidity get? Pretending not to know "the effects" of freedom is a very, very strange posture for a Justice of the United States Supreme Court to adopt, in the exercise of judicial responsibility. But now we hear, that the plain intolerability of discrimination is such a novel suggestion, coming at our esteemed Justices so fast as to argue for patience in their absorption of the idea. It may be, that their institution's record of entertaining complaints with this discrimination is slight, and until Lawrence v. Texas, shameful; but to argue that respondent's complaint in Perry is trendy is not merely insulting, it is to define the history of discrimination exactly as Scalia argues they should: as non-existent because this Court never heard of it. Who will rid us of such priests?

Adam Liptak

The New York Times

  Justices say time may be

  wrong for gay marriage case

Reader's Comment

March 26, 2013©

The New Yorker

Design motif

March 26, 2013©

Anticipating Easter

    I learned that whoever would root out

    Hate must celebrate the brave.

            I can swear by gods that the Dawn,
            On stallions stamping into the sun,
            Never looked down on a man
            Who shed such blazing light on men ..
























Bacchylides
Complete Poems
  Encomium for Hiero of Syracuse
5th Century BC
Robert Fagles, translation
Yale University Press, 1961©