Clinging to RBG

It was liberals’ night out Saturday in Little Rock.

The Arkansas Cinema Society provided a free preview at the nearly full Ron Robinson Theater of On the Basis of Sex. That’s the film dramatization of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brave heroic work against gender discrimination as a young lawyer beginning in the early 1970s.

The audience celebrated Ginsburg’s understated spunk even as most of its members surely kept in mind the two malignant nodules recently removed from a lobe of the long-ailing justice’s lung—based on discoveries from images taken during treatment for Ginsburg’s recent fall.

That is to say that Ginsburg admirers find themselves celebrating her life anew at the very time they confront a cloud by which the hideous male chauvinist Donald Trump might, by tragic affront, get the authority to dare to name her replacement on the Supreme Court.

He is, after all, a second-place president. And the U.S. Senate, which would confirm his nominee, has a Republican majority although the 47 Democratic members got more popular votes than the 53 Republicans because Republican senators hail from states where not very many people live.

As people tend to bunch together in blue states, the archaic electoral college will ensure that elk and moose and bears of red states wrest political power from American human beings.

The new movie, a based-on-fact dramatization, pales against the CNN documentary released last year and called RBG.

The documentary told Ginsburg’s life story in the context of her late-inlife rise to “notorious” status—heroic, really, among liberal millennials, especially young women, who loved her stinging dissents from the oppressively emerging male conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

These millennial women and others came to adore Ginsburg more thoroughly as they studied her life and style—a Harvard Law Review member while raising a child and caring for her ill husband; first in her graduating law school class at Columbia; denied employment at the major law firms in the late ’50s simply because she was female; and a resourceful and quietly determined young law school professor who sought out cases to assail gender discrimination and wound up arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court and winning cases that changed the legal landscape for women.

But it was Ginsburg’s dissent as a Supreme Court justice in 2014 in the

Hobby Lobby case—well beyond the period covered in the dramatic film shown Saturday—that made her an octogenarian icon even as her work early in her private career warranted such acclaim.

In the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court ruled by 5-to-4 that the company, as a “closely held” corporation, could be excused from abiding by a law—the Affordable Care Act— that violated the religious principles of its owners.

The conservative and moderate men of the court said Hobby Lobby, by its religious rights, could opt out of covering women’s contraceptive health in its employee group health plan.

Ginsburg wrote a 35-page dissent expressing lamentation and alarm that (1) the ruling discriminated per usual against women, and that (2), for the first time ever, the court had said a corporation doing business in the public square could impose its owners’ personal religious beliefs on employees who didn’t necessarily share those beliefs and conceivably could be inconvenienced or harmed by them.

In other words, an employee’s religious freedom was ceded to her employer’s. And that’s simply wrong. It’s a gross extolling of the corporation over the individual in clear violation of where our Constitution targeted rights. It’s a similar disgrace to Citizens United, which said rich corporations had the “free speech” to influence our elections without monetary regulation.

Until that case, Ginsburg wrote, the law was that “your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.” She said the

Hobby Lobby ruling meant companies could now set about punching employee noses freely.

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer signed her dissent. Alas, that was one signature too few.

No one in Saturday night’s audience could be certain of Justice Ginsburg’s state of health. Two likelihoods exist.

One is that she is gravely ill, the lung malignancy representing her third cancer, and the fall and its injuries indicating the ravages and cruel decline of age.

But there is the other likelihood. As the documentary shows, Ginsburg is uncommonly tough, devoted to her fitness workouts with a trainer. Thus, speculation rings true enough that she is recovering adequately from the lung surgery, which, as the thinking goes, was a lifesaver in that the fortuitous fall led to the imaging tests that found the nodules early.

Saturday night’s audience no doubt will cling to the latter likelihood.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@ arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.