Bader Ginsburg ‘highly critical of taking a knee’

RUTH BADER GINSBURG, the late Supreme Court justice and liberal luminary, was highly critical of those taking the knee for the US national anthem, accusing them of showing “contempt”, it has emerged.

The comments by Ginsburg, who died last year aged 87, were made in 2016 and never previously published because Katie Couric, a US TV journalist, decided to bury them. In her own new tell-all memoir Couric admits that she was a “big RBG fan” and acted in order to “protect” the justice.

According to Couric’s book Going There, Ginsburg told her that refusing to stand for the anthem – a gesture that became synonomous with the Black Lives Matter movement – was “terrible”.

Ginsburg said it showed “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life … which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from …” She added: “I think it’s a terrible thing to do, but I wouldn’t lock a person up for doing it. I would point out how ridiculous it seems to me to do such an act.”

Couric said she felt Ginsburg, who was 83 at the time, might not have fully grasped what she was being asked.

The written interview Couric ultimately published, for Yahoo! News, had Ginsburg referring to those not standing for the anthem as “dumb and disrespectful”, but did not include the harsher comments. In her memoir Couric said she “lost a lot of sleep” deciding whether or not to publish the remarks at the time.

She said the Supreme Court’s chief of public affairs contacted her after the interview to suggest that Ginsburg had “misspoken”.

Couric’s revelation set off a firestorm of criticism from Republicans. Meghan Mccain, daughter of the late John Mccain, said: “You can’t complain about distrust in the media when one of the most famous interviewers admits to rigging interviews to make liberals look good.”