So depressing

Dahlia Lithwick and Hanna Rosin have this interesting piece in Slate about women candidates for the Supreme Court, and how women in positions of power are often unmarried for a variety of reasons, and the whiff of scandal and ugliness that surrounds them as a result.

Eeek!

And it's not even Halloween!

I have seen fandom, and it is this.

thefourthvine points to these fantastically awesome poems constructed entirely out of SGA Storyfinders requests.

It's even better than The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.

But think of the white men who are barred from consideration for the Supreme Court. Ever.

Ginsburg: The court needs another woman

Three years after Justice Sandra Day O'Connor left the Supreme Court, the impact of having only one woman on the nation's highest bench has become particularly clear to that woman — Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Her status as the court's lone woman was especially poignant during a recent case involving a 13-year-old girl who had been strip-searched by Arizona school officials looking for drugs. During oral arguments, some other justices minimized the girl's lasting humiliation, but Ginsburg stood out in her concern for the teenager.

"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."

Since O'Connor's departure in 2006, oral arguments and the justices' behind-the-scenes discussions on how disputes should be resolved have had a different tone. In the strip-search case and others this term, Ginsburg has revealed a woman's point of view that was strikingly at odds with those of many of her colleagues.

Ginsburg dominated oral arguments in an important case involving alleged discrimination related to pregnancy leaves. She was openly frustrated that some of her male colleagues, in her view, might not have understood the discrimination women face on the job.

Ginsburg, 76, a former women's rights advocate whom President Clinton named to the high court in 1993, recalled that as a young, female lawyer her voice often was ignored by male peers. "I don't know how many meetings I attended in the '60s and the '70s, where I would say something, and I thought it was a pretty good idea. … Then somebody else would say exactly what I said. Then people would become alert to it, respond to it."

Even after 16 years as a justice, she said, that still sometimes occurs. "It can happen even in the conferences in the court. When I will say something — and I don't think I'm a confused speaker — and it isn't until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point."

[regarding the strip search case]

She later told USA TODAY, "Maybe a 13-year-old boy in a locker room doesn't have that same feeling about his body. But a girl who's just at the age where she is developing, whether she has developed a lot … or … has not developed at all (might be) embarrassed about that."

Dahlia Lithwick previously offered a sharp commentary on the strip search case, demonstrating how (male) Supreme Court justices displayed an inability to understand what an intimate invasion this was for a 13-year-old girl.

(And please don't get me started on the incredibly abusive history of strip searching women in this country, which continues to this day, and as far as I'm concerned is often taken to the level of legally sanctioned sexual assault.)

Also, check this out:

The likelihood of a judge deciding in favor of the party alleging discrimination decreases by about 10 percentage points when the judge is a male. Likewise, we find that men are significantly more likely to rule in favor of the rights litigant when a woman serves on the panel. Both effects are so persistent and consistent that they may come as a surprise even to those scholars who have long posited the existence of gendered judging.

It is a horror that the Supreme Court is deciding gender discrimination issues (and racial discrimination issues) with so few women and people of color on the Court. However well-meaning the white men on the Court may be, they do not have direct experience and their thinking will necessarily be distorted as a result.