May 2022 - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Post-Roe worse than pre-Roe?

Employing the logic of Plessy v. Ferguson

Being old enough to remember the pre-Roe v. Wade days, it was a time when people with means were able to get a safe abortion by going somewhere else. Some people went as far as Sweden if memory serves.

Others would utilize back-alley ‘practitioners” who utilized “alternative” methodologies, which would often leave women infected, permanently incapable of bearing children, or occasionally dead.

In a post-Roe country, it will be a time when people with the means will be able to get a safe abortion by going somewhere else. I saw on the news that a clinic in Mississippi was working on a way to get people to New Mexico to receive services.

From the LA Times: “Defiant California leaders stood ready… to protect residents and non-residents alike from any federal rollbacks of abortion rights, though they could face significant challenges in expanding the state’s capacity to serve as a haven for those arriving from outside its borders.”

And those who choose to flaunt the state laws in Texas and Oklahoma? The populace has been deputized and monetarily incentivized to report alleged perpetrators. (What happened to the right to privacy?)

Check out these maps from Axios and the New York Times, though I’ve noticed these maps vary a bit, especially regarding Pennsylvania.

Being the masochist that I am, I actually read Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. OK, not the last 30 pages, which cataloged all the historical opposition laws to abortion in the states and pre-state territories. One could research similar opposition to contraception, interracial marriage, same-gender marriage, and other rights that were once considered controversial.

Tribe response

Here are some responses that resonate with me.

The new Supreme Court’s iron fist by Laurence H. Tribe, who, not incidentally, is cited in the opinion on page 46.

“If the right of a woman to decide whether to have a baby — a right that arises from the simple idea that everyone owns their own bodies — won’t qualify, then neither will most of the rights you have long assumed are yours. And not a word of the draft would prevent women who have abortions, or who miscarry in circumstances the state deems suspect, from being imprisoned as criminals.

“And this might not be a two-sided coin: A court capable of doing what the Alito opinion would do is equally capable of saying that a nationwide abortion ban would represent a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power to treat abortions as commerce and accordingly ban them all, while a nationwide attempt to codify Roe and Casey to protect the liberty of women would be a constitutional overreach…”

Tribe trashes Alto’s “tortured” reasoning. “Indeed, the most relevant text, the Ninth Amendment, instructs that the failure of the Constitution to ‘enumerate’ a right cannot be taken to ‘deny or disparage’ its existence.”

Also, check out the Boston Globe piece, The Supreme Court is coming after democracy itself by Adrian Walker.

The Atlantic

In The Atlantic, Alito’s Plan to Repeal the 20th Century by Adam Serwer. If the conservative justice’s draft opinion is adopted by the Court, key advances of the past hundred years could be rolled back.

“Alito’s writing reflects the current tone of right-wing discourse: grandiose and contemptuous, disingenuous and self-contradictory, with the necessary undertone of self-pity as justification…

“Alito claims to be sweeping away one of the great unjust Supreme Court precedents, such as… Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation. But in truth, Alito is employing the logic of Plessy, allowing the states to violate the individual rights of their residents in any way their legislatures deem ‘reasonable,’ as the opinion in Plessy put it.

“Aside from rights specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution, Alito argues, only those rights “deeply rooted in the nation’s history in tradition” deserve its protections. This is as arbitrary as it is lawless. Alito is saying there is no freedom from state coercion that conservatives cannot strip away if conservatives find that freedom personally distasteful…

“This is total gaslighting; he knows as well as anyone that these other rights are like Roe, rooted in the right to privacy. If Roe is imperiled because it is unenumerated and not ‘rooted in our history and tradition,’ then these other rights are also subject to challenge,’ Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, said of Alito’s disclaimer. ‘Conservative lawyers are going to eat this up like catnip, and of course, they are going to challenge these other precedents.'”

Delegitimized

I know I’m having a difficult time accepting the legitimacy of this Supreme Court because of the chicanery of its composition manipulated by Senate Republicans. When Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, they said Obama couldn’t select Merrick Garland to replace him because of “precedent” involving picking a justice in the President’s final term in office.

Yet the Senate ran over such “precedent” when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020 and Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in near-record time.

Speaking of the upper chamber, Susan Collins (R-ME) is shocked, SHOCKED that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, who suggested to her that Roe was “settled law” during their confirmation hearings would lie to her.

Interesting times. Ugh.

Sunday Stealing: Firsts

Twilight Zone

I’m been feeling blog unfocused. Maybe it’s after hitting my 17th anniversary of blogging, doing it every day another year felt a bit daunting.

I’ve missed doing ABC Wednesday, which I participated in for over a decade. It helped create my weekly blogging structure. So I’m going to do a bit of Sunday Stealing, which I’ve done as early as 2011 and as recently as 2021.

I may do it every week if the prompt strikes my fancy. Perhaps I’ll even do it on a Sunday!

This week are things that are firsts.

First Job: Newspaper delivery of the Evening and Sunday Press (Binghamton, NY) or library page (Binghamton Public Library)

First Favorite Politician: CLean Gene McCarthy

First Record/CD: Beatles VI (US album from Capitol Record Club

First Sport Played: kickball in the backyard, softball at school

First Concert: lots of local concerts that I don’t specifically recall. Seals and Crofts my first year of college

First Foreign Country Visited: Canada (Niagara Falls, ON)

First Favorite TV Show: Twilight Zone

First Favorite Actor: Bill Bixby of My Favorite Martian

First Favorite Actress: Annette Funicello of the Mickey Mouse Club

First Girlfriend/Boyfriend: probably Martha

First Encounter with a Famous Person: Nelson Rockefeller (briefly), or Rod Serling

First House/Condo Owned: my current one

First Film Seen: 101 Dalmatians

First Favorite Radio Station: WEWNE, Endicott, NY

First Book I Remember Reading: Play The Game, a sports anthology book from the 1930s that I STILL OWN, and in fact, is in the room I’m sitting in

Rote memorization

87 years ago…

I’ve been musing on rote memorization. One reason is a column in the Boston Globe, The blessing of ‘rote’ memory by Jeff Jacoby. The subtitle: “Memorization for its own sake has long been unfashionable. It shouldn’t be.”

Jacoby notes: “There was a time when memorization was a standard feature of American schooling. In 1927, New York City’s board of education directed grade school teachers to teach poetry to pupils, with particular emphasis on the use of rhythm, diction, and imagery.”

Of course, “it isn’t only literature that can be memorized. The elements of the periodic table, the names and locations of the 50 states, the 46 US presidents, the first 100 digits of pi, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, all the best picture Oscar winners — the list is literally endless…

“Everyone memorizes some things — the multiplication tables, their Social Security number, song lyrics, the Wi-Fi password, family members’ birthdays — but memorization for its own sake has long since gone out of favor.” I was not specifically aware of that trend.

Lowest form?

“Writing in The American Scholar more than 40 years ago, the late Clara Claiborne Park, a professor of English at Williams College, commented on the disdain with which professional educators dismissed learning material by heart as mere ‘rote memory.’ She quoted one college president who sneeringly called memorization ‘the lowest form of human intellectual activity.'”

Jacoby pushes back. “But there is nothing ‘low’ about mastering a block of information so effectively that you can surface it at will… You don’t have to be a ‘Jeopardy!’ contestant to relish having instant recall of thick slices of knowledge. Memorization takes work, but there is joy in the accumulation of knowledge that requires no googling.”

I’ve actually gotten pushback in this blog about this in the past. Why remember it when you can just look it up? To which I’ve indicated the joy – yes, that’s the word – of knowing stuff.

The Word

When I used to attend a Friday Night Bible Club for several years, roughly from fourth through tenth grade, Pat, the woman running it, suggested that we should try to memorize Bible verses. To this day, I still remember Psalm 119:11, in the King James Version, of course. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.”

Memorization was also the recommendation at her church, Primitive Methodist in Johnson City, coincidentally very close to where my parents would move after I went to college. I remember one of the PM teens selected John 11:35, “Jesus wept.” It wasn’t explicitly stated, but I have long thought that this process was suggested in case the Communists took over the country and took all of our Bibles.

Music allowed me to cheat somewhat. Because I know the anthem God So Loved the World, I can cite John 3:17. “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”

A college friend of mine surprisingly got into a brief but intense Christian phase. They recommended that I memorize all of the books of the Bible, and I dutifully did so.

Now? Well, I can get through the Pentateuch, then Joshua Judges Ruth, which, not incidentally, is the title of a Lyle Lovett CD that I own. Then the twofer history books, which are in reverse alpha order: 1st and 2nd Samuel, Kings, Chronicles. The history section ends with EastNortheast; I mean Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and… a couple more. The five major prophets, then I totally fall apart over the 12 minor prophets. I’m better with the New Testament, but some of the epistles – where IS Philemon? -are a bit shaky.

Lousy memory

I did really well with math tables. I know the Social Security numbers of my wife and daughter. And I used to remember all the area codes, and the geography they represented when the codes had a zero or one in the middle. Also, I’m rather good with birthdays.

But rote memorization of words was/is tougher. I struggled with the Emancipation Proclamation, which is only two minutes long. I could never be a leading actor because I couldn’t absorb the lines. In high school, I was the Fire Chief in Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. I couldn’t remember some soliloquy, so someone put it on a scroll, which I took out and read, then flung towards the audience.

Yet I DO know the Presidents, which helped on JEOPARDY; the order of Beatles album releases (US AND UK), and most of the MLB players who hit more than 500 home runs.

The one thing I actively tried to instill into my child’s brain was the names of the states. Not exactly in alphabetical order, but the four A states, the three C states et al.

Recently, Kelly thanked his 7th grade English teacher for forcing his class to memorize a particular poem that he learned to hate, but since…

Sometimes it works out

The G.I. Bill Restoration Act

This is one of those Day In The Life posts I’m calling Sometimes it works out. It is about April 26, 2022, which started with Wordle in 3 (HEIST).

My Bible guys have been meeting remotely since the start of the pandemic. Given the demographics – I’m the youngest of the group – I’m guessing that’s the way it’ll remain. One of the seven was traveling, one had an appointment. Another had trouble getting on ZOOM. Yet we persevere.

One of the readings was 1 Corinthians 15, which is a long chapter. Very familiar. No. 46 of Handel’s Messiah is Since by man came death, from verses 21 and 22. Then No. 47 through 51 show up in verses 51 to 57, starting with Behold, I shew you a mystery.

This led to a question, Who selected the libretto? I knew it wasn’t Handel but forgot it was Charles Jennens, “an English aristocrat who collaborated with Handel on several other oratorios.”

Lost money

While looking for my bus pass – which turned out to be in the wrong part of my wallet from its usual place – I found a stale-dated check for $18.71 on my dresser. If it had been a larger amount, I probably would have remembered to look for it. What it was doing on my dresser, as opposed to my wallet or my mail drawer, I don’t know.

The weird thing is that I can remember the amount without looking again because it is the second calendar year of the Franco-Prussian War, although the event actually lasted less than 12 months. Why I couldn’t use Mrs. O’Leary’s cow as a device… the mind does what it does.

The talk

The Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library have just restarted their weekly book review/book talk. A hole in the schedule developed and I volunteered to talk about The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, which I talked about at church adult ed ZOOM a year ago.

I was going to use the 17-minute video Segregated by Design, narrated by Rothstein, but I couldn’t get the sound to work; nor could three library techies.

So I vamped a bit before abandoning the possibility of the video, and talked about The G.I. Bill Restoration Act, “recently introduced in the House of Representatives. This legislation would give financial benefits to descendants and spouses of Black veterans who fought in WWII, but were excluded from aid outlined in the original G.I. Bill.”

This led to conversations about my father, who never lived in a house of his own until 1972, and made me wonder whether he had tried to utilize the original G.I. Bill. Over a million black World War II vets were denied from using it. This led to my sharing a story of my father’s experiences in Germany. I found I LIKED talking about my dad.

Oh, I left the book at the library, but I got it back the following week.

Social Security

I went to the Social Security office. My wife is working on financial stuff for my daughter’s college and needs how much I received from Social Security in 2020. The amount I got in automatic deposits I know, but the amount paid for Part B Medicare IDK. The 2021 breakdown is on the Social Security page, but not the year before.

After getting the info from the agent, I asked about money owed to my daughter for the three months between her 18th birthday and her high school graduation. The paperwork had been submitted in early February but rejected in March because she wasn’t in high school. Except that she WAS/IS. I had to appeal this before May 3.

The agent suggested that the agency hadn’t received the proper form from the high school, which I had put in the mail in February. But they looked on the computer for a few minutes. They said the info was indeed there but that the agency had not processed it for reasons unclear to me. I took the bus, only mildly confident that my daughter would get the payments in a timely manner.

There you go

That was a someone atypical Tuesday. Unrelated, as I wrote to someone, “If you forget things on a daily basis, you should try remembering them weakly.”

Ancestry’s ethnicity inheritance

Mom is surely Parent 1

Ancestry.com recently sent me something called an ethnicity inheritance.

This is very interesting to me. “Ancestry® developed a technology called SideView™ to sort this out using DNA matches. Because a match is usually related to you through only one parent, your matches can help us ‘organize’ the DNA you share with them.

“SideView™ technology powers your ethnicity inheritance—the portions of each region you inherited from each parent. This enables us to provide your ethnicity inheritance without testing your parents (though we don’t know which parent is which).”

I would not be going out on a limb to assume Parent 1 is my mother. Her European ancestry is about half and the vast majority of my Irish heritage. Whereas my father is less than one-third European.

This could, of course, get into great debates, long litigated, about “What is race?” In America, race is less biology – designations such as quadroons and octoroons notwithstanding – but sociology. My mother, though quite fair, identified as a black woman, as did her parents and grandparents. Her great-grandfather fought in the Civil War in the 26th New York Infantry (Colored).

Those folks from Munster, County Cork I’m related to are more likely related to the Yates, Williams, and Archer families, rather than the Walker, Patterson, and Cone tribes.

Like many people, my family was told that on my mother’s side, we were indigenous North American. well, maybe a ways back. But my father’s side showed no measurable connection.

Redux?

I might have told this story before, in which case I’m telling it again. My parents could not rent an apartment in Binghamton, NY in the 1950s because they were perceived as a mixed couple, engaged in [horrors] miscegenation! For reasons, they couldn’t buy a place either. My parents finally bought a home in Johnson City; I lent them part of the downpayment since my college costs, in those days, were pretty cheap and I had a Regents scholarship.

I’m hoping the ethnicity inheritance discovery will somehow help me in my genealogical journey.