In keeping with Frank Rizzo’s dictum that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, should we expect the “conservative wing” of the U.S. Supreme Court now to grow by one?
WASHINGTON — Justice Stephen Breyer was robbed last week by a machete-wielding intruder at his vacation home in the West Indies, a Supreme Court spokeswoman said Monday.
The 73-year-old Breyer, wife Joanna and guests were confronted by the robber around 9 p.m. EST Thursday in the home Breyer owns on the Caribbean island of Nevis, spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said. The intruder took about $1,000 in cash and no one was hurt, Arberg said.
She said the robbery was reported to local authorities, but she did not know if an arrest has been made. The U.S. Marshals Service is assisting local authorities and the Supreme Court Police with the investigation, Marshals Service spokesman Jeff Carter said.
I was just joking with the “conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.” I find that sort of argument (such as, “If someone in your family were gay, you’d change your mind…”) to be grossly offensive. I respect the justice too much to believe that his discernment in matters of the law is that shallow.
For that matter, I don’t really believe in the whole “left wing and right wing of the Court” thing. I believe everyone we have on the Supreme Court today gives careful consideration, based upon the law, to his or her decisions, rather than deliberately skewing things along the absurd lines that define politics today.
That said, where does Justice Breyer get off off-shoring his vacation home? How about that, huh?
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Looks like we were thisclose to having Obama make a SCOTUS appointment in an election year. Wow.
Maybe he paid for it with hundreds of thousands in political contributions to his wife for lobbying political causes he just happened to forget about … oh, wait, that was another Justice
How about your derision that people may learn by experience? Why is it grossly offensive if someone can learn from personal experience?
You went from being Baptist to Catholic. I don’t want to get into it; I am simply surprised at your statement.
Whether I agree with someone’s evolution or not; I always try to give them credit for being thoughtful and open to progression – whether I see it that way or not.
“…where does Justice Breyer get off off-shoring his vacation home? How about that, huh?”
Just another typical lawyer, huh? Bet he carries a concealed handgun, too!
It has gotten to be a sort of political scarlet letter to change your mind about an issue. And that’s a shame. Consideration of new facts and information should be the hallmark of an effective politician.
Sorry for my impatience last evening. Somehow I ended up in a debate then about the Keystone XL pipeline with a friend on the West Coast. The comment about a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged totally reminded me of the absolute myopia of people who both rail against the pipeline as a stand-in for inaction in more warm and fuzzy pie-in-the-sky energy source development and those in Congress who would try to ram the pipeline through just to score points on the President.
Sometimes, one wants to just play Robinson Carusoe in the South Pacific.
I get why the Justice would seek out a place on Nevis.
Mark, I don’t know if I should answer your earlier comment or not, given your later one.
But to avoid confusion, I will simply say that what I meant was that it’s insulting to assume people change their opinions about social and political issues based on self-interest (as in, “Oh, if it affects ME, then I have a different opinion.”). I just didn’t put it very clearly.
I realize that not everyone looks at things the way I do.
There was a time, though, when I did not understand that.
In 1976, I was pretty excited about Jimmy Carter’s candidacy. I saw him as what the country needed after Watergate, etc. One day close to the election, I had a conversation with another editor in the newsroom. She said she favored Ford. That didn’t bother me; I liked Ford, too — I just preferred Carter.
What floored me, flabbergasted me, shocked me, was that she said the REASON she supported Ford was that she and her husband had sat down and looked at the candidates’ proposals, and had computed (who knows how, given the variables) that if Carter were elected, their taxes would go up by $1,000 a year.
My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it, because of the following:
— I couldn’t believe that ANYONE would actually make a decision based on who should lead the free world based on their personal finances. (I really couldn’t; I was that innocent.)
— I thought that if there WERE such greedy jerks in the world, you would not find them among the ranks of newspaper journalists, who had deliberately chosen careers that would guarantee them lower salaries than their peers from college.
— If there WERE a journalist whose priorities were so seriously out of whack, surely, surely, she’d never admit it to another journalist.
But I was wrong on all counts.
@Brad
Have you really lived your life basing your decisions on what is best for everyone else? If so, you are in the minority.
Doug, yes I have, with regard to public policy. My conscience wouldn’t let me approach it otherwise.
When it comes to what sort of coffee I drink, personal interest is paramount.
By the way… and I hope this doesn’t send us down another rathole… the fact that I approach everything from an overview, greater-good angle is why I differ with a lot of my friends here on emotional cultural issues.
For instance, many people favor same-sex unions being defined as “marriage” because of what particular individuals want. I look at it from the perspective of society as a whole — what is the motive of the society at large for creating such an institution?
There ARE arguments for why it’s in the society’s interest to do so, but I seldom hear such arguments made. It’s generally about how particular individuals feel about it, based on their wants and needs. And that tends not to change my mind.
Which, of course, makes me seem to very many nice people like a cold, uncaring jerk.
But if you’re going to make a profound qualitative change in a core societal institution, I need to hear the broader argument as to why it’s in society’s interest to do so.
Can you list the negative impacts to society that would come from allowing gay marriage? If X% of the people would benefit, wouldn’t Y% (where Y > X) have to be negatively impacted in order to oppose it?
Ratholes can be fun. Especially if you’re a rat.
How about this? Its better to promote strong marriages , with all the legal structures and implicit protections it provides to foster couples remaining together? Stronger couples of any kind promote societal cohesion.
You’re getting close to where I was going.
But be more specific.
Society has an interest in creating the institution of marriage between men and women, for reasons including but not limited to:
— the fact that the expectation is extremely high that such relationships produce offspring, and some means of binding men to their mates so that they will take responsibility is desirable. Otherwise, you have all these kids running around loose and being a burden on society.
— social stability. What is one of the things that men have fought and killed over the most through human history? Women. (If you study the origins of warfare in primitive societies, you see that as the casus belli quite a bit.) If you can erect social barriers (however imperfect) to unlimited competition for mates, you prevent a lot of violence and discord, allowing for social order.
— Public health. Monogamy limits the transmission of disease.
The third reason is just as compelling with homosexual relationships as with heterosexual. There may also be something LIKE No. 2, although it would be couched differently (I just don’t know enough to know whether competition for homosexual partners is nearly as destructive to societal order as the way straight men tend to act over their reproductive partners). No. 1 is not an issue in homosexual relationships.
So a case can be made. Probably many ways, but that’s one. I always hesitate to suggest it, because then people say, “You hateful homophobe! You only care about stopping AIDS, which you see as only a disease of gay men!”
No, as I pointed out, public health is also a factor in why we should have marriage between men and women. I suspect that without marriage, we probably would have seen outbreaks of STDs every bit as horrific as AIDS break out among the hetero population, many times by now.
We saw, for instance, what happened in the late 70s and early 80s with herpes among the hetero population, as the “sexual revolution” undermined marriage and traditional taboos.
This is what I was disagreeing with fundimentally. I overreacted to the language which struck me as closed mneeds in the post.
I agree with Tim’s example. That was what I was getting at. There ought to be room for the viewpoint that the structure of civilization be accommodating of the collective individual views of the many. This is still a long way from an individual reacting to only their own specific and of-the-moment needs. That is abhorrent myopia. But I think we have learned that the absolutist viewpoint of ancient history was already loosing credibility by the Age of Enlightenment. And That was a very long time ago.
“– the fact that the expectation is extremely high that such relationships produce offspring, and some means of binding men to their mates so that they will take responsibility is desirable. Otherwise, you have all these kids running around loose and being a burden on society.”
Many many hetero marriages are not producing offspring, intentionally. Also, If you want to provide a pathway for more adoptions, why not promote marriages that have to adopt to have kids? In any event, many people marry late in life with no expectation of having children. Sexually speaking, they may as well be same sex, since no seed can be passed the old-fashioned way.
“– social stability. What is one of the things that men have fought and killed over the most through human history? Women. If you can erect social barriers (however imperfect) to unlimited competition for mates, you prevent a lot of violence and discord, allowing for social order.”
Frankly, I can barely parse this argument. Some sort of odd vaguely social darwinian schema that you couldn’t back up with the first fact. Somehow men are brutes and are tamed by having a good woman. We certainly see how well women are treated in such traditional societies. But here in America, fact is, most likely person you are going to harm, hurt, murder or rape is your wife, statistically speaking. As for removing likely mates from the gene pool, do you really think that the guy who plays for the other team wants the woman?
“No, as I pointed out, public health is also a factor in why we should have marriage between men and women. I suspect that without marriage, we probably would have seen outbreaks of STDs every bit as horrific as AIDS break out among the hetero population, many times by now.”
Another argument from opposite world.
This is why the part of the world where the AIDS crisis is rampant is the part of the world where homosexuality is the most highly stigmatized and illegalized, probably least practiced (due to the fear ingrained). Heterosexuality is almost enforced. but yeah, I can see how the threat of gay marriage has devastated Africa.
You seem to think that the 70s invented STD’s. People have been sticking their things into anyplace they could for all of recorded history, and catching something as a result.
Oh, come now. Everyone knows that sex was invented in 1962.
And not to go on and on — again — about this, but…
Every time I have this conversation and posit my belief that the issue of offspring underlies the existence of something like marriage since hunter-gatherer times, someone says, “What about childless couples?”
To which I say, if all couples were childless — and without the reproductive imperative that evolution imposes on us — nothing like marriage would ever have been invented. There’d be no reason for it, for all these laws and customs and restrictions and taboos. If it were just about two people who like each other living together, then they’d just live together, without all the ritual. The stakes would be so low.
Really, if it were just about friendship, what would be the motive of promising never to have another friend like this one again? Seriously.
Also, sorry if you think I’m some awful Neanderthal for thinking men need to be bound to women for the good of the offspring, but everything I’ve ever heard about research into our species’ evolutionary strategies suggests that this is the case. Human young are so dependent for so long that the presence of both parents, committed to care of the child until adulthood, is key to the offspring’s surviving and thriving.
So why do we permit parents of young children to divorce?
Why do we not take children of unwed parents away and feed them into the adoption-industrial complex?
Nobody celebrates abortion, but plenty yearn for divorce – and cheer for it in others. That is a societal issue that isn’t addressed anymore. To the detriment of the young, all our future generations.
“but everything I’ve ever heard about research into our species’ evolutionary strategies suggests that this is the case.”
Maybe you need to read a little more, or eliminate such absolutist statements.
Given your hesitancy in relying upon scientific research, I don’t think that is your strongest argument.
Evolutionary Biology tells us that the Great Apes are our closest relatives. Of those, Bonobos are multi-sexual displaying almost no boundaries between males and females or kin relationships, except mother/son. Chimpanzees are cannibalistic baby chimp killers whose social interactions most resemble group marriages, Gorrilla’s keep large harems, and Orangatans are only mildly sexually committed, and lead very solitary lives, with the males barely involved in the raising of young. I don’t really know much about Gibbons, but will do a little digging.
So, those are our closest dearest relatives. Not a single one has anything close to Ward and June Cleaver. Or the Simpsons. But then, in most of human history, neither did we.
If you want to go into human evolution, let’s do, please. Of course, here you get into what you consider the most vague, least reliable kind of research, the kind you consider equal to conjecture.
As previously discussed, Adam and Eve, in the book of Genesis, was most often actually Adam and Eve and Eve and Eve’s slaves, and Eve’s slaves probably could not marry an Adam. Eve relationships mainly cemented tribal ties and hereditary rights.
You are basing your construct on something that is a relatively recent product of cultural evolution.
Tim, Ward Cleaver was a Gibbon. If you had taken the time to study Gibbons as you should, you would know that…
Somehow I suspect Katherine will be able to correct or perfect this, but the patriarch of the Simpson clan would be of the species Homer Stultorum
I don’t see how any one of those 3 arguements suffer if marriage is limited to being between a man and a woman. Marriage would still mean the same promises before God (or the JP of your choice). The sex(es) of the persons involved does not change the promised.
Brad,
Fear not, though. You are safe.
In 2008, a directive from the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy directed Catholic dioceses to prevent the LDS Church from “microfilming and digitizing information” contained in Catholic sacramental registers so that those whose names were contained therein would not be subjected to vicarious Mormon baptism, even though the Vatican had previously declared that Mormon baptism was invalid.
Don’t mess with Rome, baby!
Did you miss the part where they splashed JPII? My second post? He wasn’t on top of this whole thing. Maybe Benedict can reel him back into the fold.
How did we get on that subject here? Did you mean to post it over HERE?
Somehow I am posting in the wrong thread. Feel free to put in the fun one about post-death baptism.
Good discussion Brad.
As someone that’s been very happily married for 15 years, whose parents have been married 42 years, and whose grandparents were married 63 years, I agree with you.
I like Rick Santorum’s take on marriage.
1) Get an education first, then get married.
2) Get married before you have children.
3) I’d add one, have a reasonably stable income before you get married.
It’s sometimes difficult, but it’s a lot harder to do it the other way.