Busy busy busy. But just enough time for one complaint. Isaac Chotiner says the following re: the tone of the questioning by the 8 male Justices (well, seven since Thomas never says anything) in the recent strip search case:
Bazelon is implying–as did many others at the time–that joking about something means you do not take it seriously. This is a very limited way of looking at how human beings behave. There are plenty of reasons to abstain from making a joke–it is not funny, it is hurtful, etc.–but the seriousness of the subject is not automatically one of them. In other words, just because Justice Breyer makes light of his experiences in gym class, it does not follow that he has little sympathy for Savana Redding. The Court’s admirable ruling proves this clearly.
I don’t think anyone thinks the seriousness of the subject makes it impossible to make a joke about the situation. The many folks who expressed legitimate complaints weren’t focused on ‘seriousness’ in the abstract – they were focused on it in the context of deliberation by the highest Court in the land. The power imbalance already implied by that situation makes it enormously inappropriate to joke and laugh about that sort of thing. It’s an incredibly obvious means of minimizing and dismissing a legitimate perspective.
That they came to the right decision is great. That they took the detour through juvenile masculinity remains a problem. The former is clearly more important, but the latter isn’t insigificant.
Chotiner’s point seems to be that the eventual outcome is all we can concern ourselves with. But, for me, the attitude that influential folks take in their public deliberation signals something about the broader question. And if anyone in the world should be attuned to that, it ought to be Supreme Court Justices.