A Love Letter to Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Ruth Bader Ginsberg and I were born the same year. 1933. It was a good year for music (Willie Nelson, James Brown . . ,) the arts (Tim Conway, Carol Burnett . . ,) literature (David McCullough, Reynolds Price . . .)  Unfortunately, our birth year is about the only thing I have in common with the Notorious RBG. I would happily have given her six or eight of however many remaining months I have, if life only worked that way.

Since life doesn’t work that way, here is a post-mortem thank-you note.

Thank you for opening doors for women’s education. I spent some happy weekends at the Virginia Military Institute in the early 1950s, when I could visit for dates but could not have even gotten an application for admission. Your persuasive argument in  United States v. Virginia’s 7-1 ruling (1996) changed all that. In the words of historian Richard Morris, “VMI’s story continued as our comprehension of ‘We the People’ expanded.” We the female people are grateful.

Thanks also to you (and Marty!) for demonstrating how real romance and marriage can thrive and endure. It took a lot of pioneering to get past the unwritten rule that running the home and family were strictly woman’s work, even if she also worked fulltime outside the home. I don’t recall my husband ever changing a diaper in the upbringing years of three children. And doing all the cooking? Sheesh. But that seems almost quaint to recall now.

We lost the 2014 battle with Hobby Lobby, but thanks for your blistering dissent. You spoke for women everywhere, and not a few reasonable men, in writing that “the court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faiths.” You noted, accurately, that the contraception coverage requirement in the Affordable Care Act was vital to women’s health and reproductive freedom. And heaven knows women’s health and reproductive freedom will suffer your loss.

Thanks for always standing up for people with disabilities (1990 and other times.)

The environment thanks you for decisions like the one, in 2000, in favor of Friends of the Earth.

We – that is, We the People – lost again with the Bush v Gore mess in 2000, in which you so eloquently dissented, observing that the “conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court’s own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States.” We lost once more with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, which you noted in your dissent that throwing out preclearance “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

So here we are, facing another presidential elections, shredded umbrellas raised, in the most bizarre of times, on our own.

We sure could use you now, Notorious RBG, but thanks for showing us how to fight the good fight.

This essay first appeared on Medium.com