Strange Bedfellows of the Mind: Justice Kennedy

Justice Kennedy

Supreme Court Justice Kennedy has been on the wrong side of some of the most important decisions of the past decade.  In the case of Florence, which allowed strip searches of those arrested (not convicted mind you) whenever they are hauled off, against their will to jail. The man involved had an outstanding warrant in the police computer, which, it turned out was an error.  He was dragged to three different jails and stripped at each and all of this was okay with Justice Kennedy because, don't you know, people arrested on what sound like the most harmless offenses are sometimes  just the worst sort of person. And from that, every teen aged girl who rolls through a stop sign is now at risk from the probing fingers and security cameras of every local police station and jail.

He voted that money is speech in Citizens United.

He voted to condemn  a high school student who was offended because his principal required that he participate in a celebration of that crass commercial enterprise called the "Olympic movement" and protested by leaving school property and holding up a sign "Bong Hits for Jesus." 

Mr. Kennedy was born to privilege, the son of a wealthy and powerful California lawyer, a devout Irish Catholic, went to Stanford and Harvard Law and clerked for all the right people and was appointed to the Court by none other than Ronald Reagan.  He has shown little sympathy for the disadvantaged and great respect for the authorities.

And yet...In the Obergefell gay marriage decision he fastened on the crucial argument for change now:  When justice is delayed, that can mean justice denied.  Facing the withering disdain of Justices Roberts and Scalia who insisted any change in attitudes toward homosexuality should come through the slow process integral to state legislatures and referendum, Kennedy said no. That would mean a whole generation might grow up living with the stigma of illegitimacy as children of gay couples, and it would mean the gay couples would live their whole lives with the demeaning effects of being denied official status and with the practical disadvantages in terms of inheritance and access to loved ones during medical emergencies. Time, Kennedy argued is a perishable commodity.

This is really the same argument Andrew Marvell made to his coy mistress. If we had eternity, then delay would not be a problem, but the sands of time run fast and ineluctably, and they put pressure on life. 

That may be why the twenty somethings who worked the cancer wards at Sloan Kettering were so hypersexual, and the same for the interns and nurses in every part of the hospital where high mortality abounded. You see people dying every shift and you realize, life is not forever.  Two hundred years to adore each breast if we had centuries, but time's winged chariot do rush near. 

Looking at the guy, it's difficult to believe he would respond to the "Let us sport us while we may...like amorous birds of prey. Roll all our strength and  all our sweetness up into one ball/And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Through the iron gates of life."

This is a man who would blush to consider those lines. And yet, he seemed, for one, brief shining moment to hear the intimations of mortality and to act.