RIP, RBG

In the Jewish religion when someone dies it is customary to say, “May her memory be for a blessing.” When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, the Jewish Women’s Archive posted, “May her memory be for a revolution.”

Until I saw the film RBG, I had not realized how much Ruth Bader Ginsburg had contributed to the revolution in women’s rights even before she ascended to the Supreme Court. The cases she argued, whether the plaintiff was a man or a woman, were designed to overturn assumptions that women couldn’t administer estates because they were less familiar than men with the affairs of business,  that men were unlikely to be  dependent spouses, or that wives were secondary breadwinners. Twenty years after she argued her last case before the Supreme Court, she was able to see history made again as a Justice, when, in United States v. Virginia, the all-male admissions policy of a state-supported military college (Virginia Military Institute) was declared unconstitutional. While not denying differences among women and men, she said that differential treatment could not “create or perpetuate the legal, social and economic inferiority of women.”

The revolution is far from over. A New York Times article the day after she died described her approach to her early cases: “Ms. Ginsburg started from the premise that she needed to provide some basic education for an audience that was not so much hostile as uncomprehending.” We now have a government that comprehends but is openly hostile to equality for women. We have a president who objectifies and demeans women with impunity and is eager to limit reproductive freedom.

I am grieving the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a hero whose intelligence, rigor and integrity led to legal victories that changed my life. I am also angry that barely two hours after her death Senator Mitch McConnell announced that he would move quickly to fill her seat, notwithstanding the Republican refusal to act on Obama’s nominee in 2016 in order to wait for a new president. I was not surprised at the hypocrisy, but, although I probably shouldn’t have been, at the lack of common decency in the timing.  

Justice Ginsburg and Justice Anton Scalia, on opposite sides of the political spectrum, were good friends. They found common ground in their love of opera and agreed to disagree on matters of law. As I honor her legacy by recommitting myself to the revolution for women’s equality, I only wish I could emulate her example of transcending differences. But I’m not sure I can.