Conversations with RBG by Jeffrey Rosen

Author:Jeffrey Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

8

When a Dissent Sparked a Meme

Justice Ginsburg has long marveled at her transformation into a judicial celebrity. In a 1996 speech, she compared the change in her life to what Virginia Woolf describes in her novel Orlando, whose central character lives for centuries as a man and awakens one morning as a woman. “Looking at herself in the mirror, Orlando is not displeased,” Ginsburg said. “‘Same person,’ she says, ‘just another sex!’ But her life becomes distinctly different, the world treats her differently because she’s a woman, although in mind and spirit she’s the same person.” Ginsburg reported that, in her case, a private life had become a public one. “Now trivial things are noticed. In the same month, soon after the U.S. Senate confirmed my nomination to the Court, I made the Style page of the New York Times and the People magazine list of America’s Worst Dressed,” she said. “When the press reported that I read mail by flashlight during cinema previews, I received a half-dozen pocket lights from caring people across the country.”1

Still, this media attention in the 1990s was mild compared to the dramatic transformation in Ginsburg’s celebrity when she became, in the summer of 2013, an internet sensation and then an American icon. That July, Shana Knizhnik, a New York University law student, created the Tumblr blog Notorious R.B.G. Knizhnik had been inspired by Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion the previous month in Shelby County v. Holder, which she quoted on her newly created blog. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,”2 Ginsburg had written, objecting to the Court’s five-to-four decision to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of voting discrimination to get the federal government’s approval, or “preclearance,” before any changes to their voting rules could go into effect. Invoking the rapper Notorious B.I.G., Knizhnik said she had been moved to create the Tumblr blog because “Ginsburg defies stereotypes. People expect this meek, grandmotherly type. She is a grandmother, but she shows so much strength, and she is who she is without apology.”3 The Tumblr blog went viral, and Knizhnik went on to write a book, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with the journalist Irin Carmon, who explained that Ginsburg “allows women to imagine a different kind of power and to visualize a woman in power well past an age where she is usually invisible to society.”4

As Ginsburg’s celebrity grew, her dissenting opinions became increasingly fiery. “The Court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield,” she wrote in her dissent from the five-to-four Hobby Lobby decision that allowed employers to exempt themselves from regulations that conflicted with their religious beliefs. “Would the exemption … extend to employers with religiously grounded objections to blood transfusions (Jehovah’s Witnesses); antidepressants (Scientologists); medications derived from pigs, including anesthesia, intravenous fluids, and pills

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