Ruth, you beautiful creature, you spin history with your delicate fingers, telling men to step off our pieced-together capes that sputter us toward a future state – where we live and love and struggle together, perhaps not in agreement, but not saying never. Where we endeavor to learn each other like lessons, tear down walls, and temper aggression. Girls everywhere swoon over you, our fantasy grandmother who comes to our rescue.
Texas argues that H.B.2’s restrictions are constitutional because they protect the health of women who experience complications from abortions. In truth, complications from an abortion are both rare and rarely dangerous. Many medical procedures, including childbirth, are far more dangerous to patients, yet are not subject to ambulatory surgical-center or hospital admitting-privileges requirements. Given those realities, it is beyond rational belief that H.B.2 could genuinely protect the health of women, and certain that the law would simply make it more difficult for them to obtain abortions. When a State severely limits access to safe and legal procedures, women in desperate circumstances may resort to unlicensed rogue practitioners, [for lack of an alternative], at great risk to their health and safety. So long as this Court adheres to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers laws like H.B.2 that do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion, cannot survive judicial inspection.
After learning that a newly discovered species of praying mantis had been named after her, Justice Ginsburg said she wasn’t the first to suddenly become an insect.
“Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find himself changed into a big black bug,” she said Thursday, recalling “Metamorphosis,” the 1915 novella by Franz Kafka. “Praying mantis, female too, is ever so much more attractive.”
For the first time, scientists have used the genitals of female praying mantises to formally distinguish one species from another. And using this novel technique, they’ve identified a previously unknown creature: Ilomantis ginsburgae. The lovely new mantis is named in honor of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, for her efforts toward achieving gender equality and her love of the jabot – otherwise known as that ruffly neck thing.
Tucker may well have received the death penalty not because of the comparative egregiousness of his crime, but because of an arbitrary feature of his case, namely, geography… I would grant certiorari in this case to confront the first question presented, i.e., whether imposition of the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
— Justice Stephen Breyer, joined only by RBG, dissenting from the denial of a Supreme Court hearing to Tucker v. Louisiana.
