(And I will get back to this…)
I was tuned out for a while as Sonia Sotomayor got nominated and the political potboiling began. The theatre of how it all gets politicized seemed even worse than usual. But then a week ago I bought a copy of The Brethren, by Bob Woodward, for a quarter at the Claremont Library. The first time I read it, was right around the time I was to start working for Nina Totenberg at National Public Radio. This time, what stuck out was the negotiation among the justices. (Warren Burger tried to get his clerks to zip their lips in the clerk lunch room, so that information wouldn’t get out, a tactic that proved unpopular in the least.)
So it made me even more interested when I stumbled upon a Joan Biskupic article from last month in which Biskupic talks with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Specifically, the article started with a discussion about Safford United School District v. Redding in which a 13 year old girl had to pull out her panties and pull up her bra as school staffers searched her, investigating whether she had brought prescription medication to school against rules.
At oral argument, some other judges…oh, let’s just mention Antonin Scalia…minimized the girl’s humiliation. (“I’m trying to work out why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym, they do fairly frequently How bad is this, underclothes?”)
As Ginsburg told Biskupic:
“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” she told USA TODAY later when asked about her colleagues’ comments during the arguments. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”
It’s such a simple point, such a small one, and Biskupic is smart to lead with it. Thousands of tiny experiences mark us over a lifetime; in this we are snowflakes, each different from the next. But the woman I am understands a teenage girl’s abject humiliation here, not because I was ever strip searched, but because it was in those maddening years I became aware of my body. That awareness so often comes from an external force, but it doesn’t require a strip search to produce embarrassment. That could already exist before a strip search.
That simple point of Ginsburg’s argues compellingly for the presence of another woman on the court.
