Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Why half of America panics when this woman gets sick

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The Washington Post

Earlier this week, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of the Supreme Court, was admitted to the hospital. Why did the news send many Americans in all its states?

On Wednesday evening, Judge Ginsburg fell into her US Supreme Court office and went to the hospital, where doctors discovered that she had fractured three ribs. The reaction of liberal media social media has been an instant mix of vows and horror barely repressed.

"#RuthBaderGinsburg DO NOT FORGET WE NEED YOU!" wrote one.

"By this I give all my ribs and all my organs to Ruth Bader Ginsburg," wrote Lauren Duca, columnist for Teen Vogue.

In the evening, TV host Jimmy Kimmel introduced "Ruth Bader Gins-bubble" to his program, claiming that the 85-year-old player had to be "protected at all costs" in the form of a replacing Ginsburg on stage, locked in a gigantic plastic bubble.

Although Ginsburg returned home on Friday, anxiety around the health of the older sitting judges will continue to be heard. If Ginsburg retired or became too ill to serve, President Donald Trump could cement the conservative majority of the court with the appointment of his third judge after Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Beyond that, worrying concern can be attributed to the fact that for the Liberals, Ginsburg has become a real icon. She is the subject of a new biopic on the basis of sex, a documentary and a bestselling book called Notorious RBG, which introduced her to a generation of millennial women. It is now possible to buy t-shirts and coffee mugs in the likeness of it.

On Halloween, dozens of Ginsburg figurines waving tiny gavels filled the social media:

"I think people of all ages are excited to see a woman in public life who has shown that even at age 85, she could be adamant in her commitment to equality and of justice, "said Irin Carmon, an author of Notorious RBG. "We do not have enough characters like her."

Famous for her diminutive stature, serious demeanor and long breaks – it is said that she does not tolerate gossip – how did Ruth Bader Ginsburg go from a famous jurist to a celebrity in her own right?

A salary reduction to be pregnant

Joan Ruth Bader was born in 1933 in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, daughter of Jewish immigrants. Joan Ruth's mother died of cancer while her daughter was only 17 years old.

After graduating from Cornell University in 1954, she married Marty Ginsburg and shortly thereafter, the couple had their first child. While Ginsburg was pregnant, she was demoted to her position in a social security office. Discrimination against pregnant women was still legal in the 1950s. The experiment led her to hide her second pregnancy years later.

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In 1956, she became one of nine women to enroll at Harvard Law School, where the dean forced her students to explain to her how they could justify taking the place of a man. in his school. She was then transferred to Columbia Law School in New York and became the first woman to work in the law journals of both schools.

Despite this, Ginsburg struggled to find work even though she had been at the top of her class.

"No law firm anywhere in New York City would employ me," she said once. "I have scratched for three reasons: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother."

Play the "Children's Garden Teacher" to all male judges

She became a professor at Rutgers Law School in 1963, where she taught some of the first classes of women and law and co-founded the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1973, she became General Counsel of the ACLU, which launched a prolific era of gender-based argumentation, six of which resulted in the Supreme Court of States. -United.

She pleaded on behalf of a female Air Force lieutenant who had been denied a housing allowance for her husband that her male colleagues had received for their wife. She also took men's cases. In 1975, she pleaded the case of a young widower who had been denied benefits after the death of his wife during a delivery.

"Her case is the perfect example of how gender-based discrimination hurts everyone," Ginsburg said years later, during his confirmation hearing.

She was successful in five of the six cases she debated in the Supreme Court, at a time when she felt it was her duty to explain sex discrimination to exclusively male judges, as "a female gardening teacher." # 39; children. "

It was also at that time that she fought on behalf of a female Air Force captain who became pregnant and who was told to abort the baby. or lose your job. Ginsburg hoped that the case would make reproductive rights a constitutionally protected right, but the air force changed policy and the case was classified.

The following year, Roe v Wade settled the issue of abortion and Ginsburg regretted that since the decision was based on the right to privacy instead of equal protection, she could do the subject of a lawsuit.

"The Court has ventured too far into the change that it has ordered and presented an incomplete rationale for its action," she said at a conference in 1984.

The second woman on the Supreme Court

In 1980, as part of President Jimmy Carter's efforts to diversify the country's federal courts, Ginsburg was appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It has gained a reputation as a centrist, voting many times with the Conservatives and against, for example, the case of discrimination of a sailor who reportedly said he was fired from the navy for being homosexual.

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Mark Reinstein

President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Supreme Court in 1993, after a lengthy search process in which some women's groups, according to the New Yorker, spoke privately against her as a result of her earlier remarks about Roe. But Clinton finally decided, making Ginsburg the second woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court.

"It's his interview that did," Clinton said in the 2018 documentary, RBG. "Literally within 15 minutes, I decided that I will call him."

During his confirmation hearing, Ginsburg proclaimed views strongly in favor of choice.

"It is essential for the equality of the woman with the man that she is the decision maker," she said at the hearing before Congress. "If you impose restrictions that prevent you from choosing, you disadvantage her because of her sex."

The fiery dissident

One of the most important first trials of the Supreme Court was the United States case against Virginia, which invalidated the men's admission policy of the Virginia Military Institute. In his speech for the majority, Ginsburg said that no law or policy should deny women "full citizenship status – equal opportunities to aspire, achieve, participate and contribute to society on the basis of their individual talents and abilities. "

"It was really the last step in her own career as a lawyer trying to get the Supreme Court to recognize gender classifications as a violation of the 14th Amendment Equality of Protection clause," says Paul Schiff Berman , a law professor at George Washington University and one of Ginsburg's law clerks in the late 90s.

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Over the decades, as the court has become more conservative, Ginsburg has been gradually shifted to the left and is now renowned for its fiery opponents.

In the Shelby County v Holder case, the court struck down a five-to-four vote on part of the voting rights law, thereby eliminating the federal government's prior checking in the event of a change in local election legislation, a provision designed to prevent the repression of voters.

In response to the majority's assertion that America had changed so much for the better that preclearance was no longer needed, Ginsburg said in his dissent that it was "as if you throw your umbrella under a rain storm because you do not get wet. "

From justice to the icon

Partly thanks to her flawless dissension, Shana Knizhnik, a young law student, created a Ginsburg Tumblr account called Notorious RBG – a reference to the late rapper The Notorious BIG. The story reintroduced Ginsburg into a new generation of young feminists and became so popular that Knizhnik and his co-author Carmon turned the blog into a book of the same name, which became a bestseller.

Notorious RBG helped propel Ginsburg to the rank of celebrity pop culture. Actress Kate McKinnon started playing at Ginsburg Saturday Night Live. It is said that justice itself distributes t-shirts in its image.

"I think Judge Ginsburg has really enjoyed it in recent years," said Berman, his former clerk. "For her, feeling as if her heritage could inspire a new generation of young women in particular, I think, is very exciting for her."

As part of its new relevance to pop culture, every aspect of Ginsburg's life has become a topic of fascination for the Internet – his workout routine, for example, was attempted by comedian Stephen Colbert. She has been touted as an icon of fashion, from her penchant for lace gloves to her elaborate jabots, to the collars she wears over her dresses. His famous "dissent necklace" was reproduced in miniature for necklaces.

Her marriage to her husband Marty is at the center of the new biopic, Based on Sex. Marty Ginsburg died in 2010 – during their 56 years of marriage, he became the biggest supporter of his wife, happy to play the second violin with his famous partner.

"Meeting Marty was by far the luckiest thing that happened to me," says Ginsburg in the RBG documentary.

Ginsburg is a woman famous for her stoicism, but she loves opera, a passion she shares with the late Conservative Judge Antonin Scalia, who, although his ideological counterpart, was a close friend before his passing in 2016.

"I'm totally carried away," she says about opera in the documentary. "It's like an electric current is going through me."

But justice is not immune to criticism or error. In the 2016 election, she called the current candidate Donald Trump "fake" and said she could not imagine a world with him as president.

"He says everything that's going on for the moment, he really has an ego," she told CNN.

She was later criticized by both right and left, who said her comments could undermine her impartiality and the court's authority. She finally apologized.

Why she refuses to retire

During President Barack Obama's two terms, some liberal experts wondered loudly that it was not time for Ginsburg to retire, with a democrat in place that could be relied on to install another justice. liberal. These calls were rejected by Ginsburg, with some irritation on his part.

"Many people have asked me," Well, when are you going to resign? "She said in an interview this year." As long as I can get the job done, I'll be there. "

Carmon is anxious to say that it is not the first time that Ginsburg has broken the ribs and that it has survived two battles against cancer and that it has received an endoprosthesis in her heart in 2014, but that she has never lacked debates.

"Each time she came back with so much determination and resilience," said Carmon. "She's been at this job for at least half a century and she's not done yet."