It’s Marilyn vs. Justice Sam Alito
I was watching Vogue’s live feed as Kim Kardashian tried to walk the red carpet at the Met Gala in her skintight, flesh-tone dress, gallantly helped up the stairs by Pete Davidson. I flashed back to Marilyn Monroe on another May night in Gotham, doing similar mincing steps in a similar shimmering dress she was sewn into, when she suspired “Happy Birthday” to JFK.
Then Variety sent out a news bulletin that Kim was actually wearing Marilyn’s dress. I had last seen the crystal-strewn
souffle concoction back in 1999, at a Christie’s exhibit for an auction of Marilyn’s property.
The “nudest dress,” as the designer Jean Louis called it, was reverently displayed in a room by itself.
As I was contemplating the comeback of this sartorial symbol of American seduction, I got another news bulletin: The Supreme Court was going to yank away the right of women to control their own bodies.
The two simultaneous emails were a perfect distillation of America’s bizarre duality — our contradictory strains of sexuality and priggishness.
Justice Samuel Alito’s antediluvian draft opinion is the Puritans’ greatest victory since they expelled Roger Williams from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Alito is a familiar type in American literature: the holier-than-thou preacher, so overzealous in his attempts to rein in female sexuality that one suspects he must be hiding some dark yearnings.
That was certainly the case with Clarence Thomas. Thomas — married to the off-thewall right-wing activist Ginni — got on the court with the help of Republican senators who smeared Anita Hill as a pervy liar when they knew all along that Thomas was the pervy liar. The senators claimed Thomas could not possibly have been talking about porn in the office, as Hill said, even though they knew from his D.C. video store visits that he was indeed a connoisseur of porn.
Newt Gingrich pursued Bill Clinton like Javert, even as he was having an affair with a young political aide. And Ken Starr hounded Monica Lewinsky, producing a seven-volume report that read like a panting bodice-ripper, full of lurid passages about breasts, stains and genitalia.
The 1999 version of Donald Trump, when he was still a fan of the Clintons and boasting that he was “pro-choice in every respect,” was appalled. “Starr’s a freak,” he told me . “I bet he’s got something in his closet.” It was no surprise when Judi Hershman, who worked with Starr through that period, wrote that she had an affair with Rev. Ken Dimmesdale.
As Carl Hulse reported in “Confirmation Bias,” Trump soothed conservatives uneasy with his lax morality by promising to appoint justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.
Now pervy Matt Gaetz tweets, “How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are overeducated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no Bumble matches?” This is a man under investigation over whether he had sex with a 17-year-old and was a sex trafficker.
This past week’s stunning reversal on women’s rights is the apotheosis of the last 40 years, through Reagan, Schlafly, Meese, Rehnquist and Scalia, climaxing in Mitch McConnell, who made a Faustian bargain to support chuckleheaded Trump to get a conservative court. Because of McConnell’s machinations, Trump was able to name three anti-abortion conservatives to the court, all of whom prevaricated under oath before the Senate about their intentions on Roe.
The Founding Fathers would be less surprised that there’s a popular musical about Alexander Hamilton than they would be that the majority of the court is relying on a literal interpretation of a document conceived in the agrarian 1780s.
They would be devastated that the court is just another hack institution with partisan leaks. Alito helped open the door to dark money and helped gut the Voting Rights Act, but he wants to ban abortion largely because, he says, the Constitution doesn’t expressly allow it. The Constitution doesn’t mention an awful lot of things that the court involves itself with.
They are strict constructionists, strictly interested in constructing a society that comports with their rigid, religiously driven worldview. It is outrageous that five unelected, unaccountable and relatively unknown political operatives masquerading as impartial jurists can so profoundly alter our lives.