That’s because they support same-sex marriage, and the Supreme Court is hearing arguments today and tomorrow regarding the constitutionality of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

Here are some links to help you stay informed:

SCOTUSblog, whose subject material you can probably surmise from its name, has a couple posts summarizing and analyzing the arguments here and here.

Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker‘s primary jurisprudence writer, offers his thoughts here.

Slate‘s William Saletan enumerates the increasingly desperate conservative arguments against gay marriage, while the Atlantic‘s Garance Franke-Ruta chronicles the history of the movement that led to this case.

Mother Jones has both a timeline of gay-marriage legislation and a collection of Justice Antonin Scalia’s homophobic remarks.

You can hear audio of the actual arguments and read a transcript here.

And, of course, no roundup would be complete without the Onion‘s take.

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UT says they’d have rejected her no matter her race; regardless, her suit might lead the Supreme Court to forbid the practice. She’s asking for a change in the rules we play by, and she wants the rules changed in favor of white people.

This reminds me of Occupy. Conservatives claimed to hate government rules, but embraced bans on collective bargaining or tax breaks for leveraged buy-outs or treating corporations as legally people. The rules benefit somebody, always. America’s rules, both written and unspoken, benefit white people. We call this privilege. To complain, like Fisher, is to stand on a ladder and demand a level playing field. Privilege is not butlers and nannys. It manifests in little things at the heart of the American dream. It might be about the luxury of earnestness.

I’m not cool. I fight ferociously for what I want, but rarely elegantly. As a white male, I’ve had the privilege of believing that my efforts will pay off. “You can be anything you want if you work hard enough,” a kid like me learns, and it doesn’t feel like a lie.

Not all people have that luxury. America is far from a true meritocracy. For many Americans, the odds of success are so long, the obstacles so numerous, and the guidance so weak that hard work only guarantees sweat. Wanting it more is not enough. Anyone who’s hunted for a job knows a full day’s work can yield exhaustion and little else. Privilege is enjoying a position from which hard work and discipline are all that stand between you and your goals. In America, people of color, women, the disabled, and other marginalized groups face tougher obstacles to success than do white men. Duh.

Privilege is easier to explain these days, when “Get a job” is stockbroker for “let them eat cake.” I met a college-educated white girl who sells appliances retail. “Not everyone can afford to work there,” she said, and at first I didn’t understand. She lives with her parents, lawyers. She explained that her appliance chain hires an enormous number of part-time workers. “They trade one full-time worker with benefits for four part-time high school kids,” she said. Living with her parents allows her to afford the job. As work becomes scarcer, entry-level jobs travel higher up the chain of advantages.

The old saying is that racial minorities are last hired and first fired. 15.8 percent of black people are unemployed, and that’s just the official count of work-seekers, which count excludes “natural unemployment,” those who have quit mustering enough hope to march their resumes down to Kinko’s. They expect rejection for a reason: a recent study mailed out job applications, changing only the names. They found that resumes with white-sounding names (Emily and Greg) received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews than identical resumes with black sounding names (Lakisha and Jamal).

It extends beyond hiring managers. Countrywide Financial Corporation recently settled with the Justice Department for charging, in the words of the New York Times, “higher fees to more than 200,000 minority borrowers than to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk.”

***

Racism costs money. It’s not just the 50 percent lower chance of a resume callback. Blacks and Latinos get quoted more expensive prices for homes, cars, and other investments. A recent Pew Study shows that whites own 20 percent more wealth than African Americans, and 18 percent more than most Latinos. Meanwhile, a home owned by a black family is worth 35 percent less than a similar white home, for obvious reasons; if racists avoid a black neighborhood, fewer buyers compete for the house at a given price. Note: school district funding is tied to property tax.

Meanwhile, whiteness gets discounts that white people consider normal. Whiteness also means job introductions. A shophand at my old oil job liked to say, “Everybody here is swinging from a dick,” meaning we all owed our employment to someone higher up, and likely a male. Job whispers travel an old boy’s network, which network absorbs white guys more easily.

Allison Bland’s essay, “Free the Network” describes the awkwardness of grafting oneself to that network over one excruciating weekend at a startup pitch conference. What’s striking is her sympathy for her white co-workers. “A white male explained a technical concept to me in the language of basketball, because I was ‘so tall,’” she writes. “… Our discomfort was completely mutual.”

A white networker might endure one awkward racial interaction a week, but depending on company, a non-white person can grin politely and forgive a dozen racial slips and tightened purse grips a day.

***

Part of whiteness is that when people size you up, they see a person before they see a white person. Your humanity is less invisible. Peggy McIntosh’s list of white privileges is a classic summary of the stresses this phenomenon eliminates. If I lose a promotion, I don’t have to wonder if my whiteness befuddled someone’s judgment. In our culture, whiteness is the absence of race.

Obese, latino, disabled, gay. The more layers of difference a person carries, the longer we take to see the human underneath. What we are can outspeak who we are. Perhaps because of this shortcut to personhood, whiteness means a little extra forgiveness at every step. Modern racism works by applying rules more strictly to those who project a degree of otherness. (Ask your local homeless dude how many jaywalking tickets he has.)

When a teenage Hunter S. Thompson was caught with a friend who had stolen a wallet, his small town offered him the chance to join the military rather than enter prison for accessory to robbery. I believe that this second chance, military service instead of criminal record, still exists for certain young men in America.

Likewise, when an undercover cop caught me drunk at a high school dance, I served a two-week suspension, not an indelible criminal charge. A recent study of race in education suggests it could have been worse. Besides the part about “mechanical restraints, like being strapped down,” the most disturbing part of the article was, “referrals to law enforcement, an area of increasing concern to civil rights advocates who see the emergence of a school-to-prison pipeline.”

Modern racism functions not by applying malice, but withholding forgiveness. We write so many rules that compliance is impossible, then enforce them selectively.

In New York, police friskings are a regular part of life for some kids, as Nicholas Pert describes in his article, Young, Black, and Frisked by the NYPD. The rules permit these searches against all of us. If you don’t kiss the concrete every so often, it’s because you carry some kind of free pass. In fact, the NYPD’s statistics show that they’ve frisked more black males than live in New York—that’s consistent with middle school students claiming to have been frisked many times each, or an informal survey of eight black college students who collectively were frisked 92 times.

The first twenty minutes of This American Life episode # 362 is a hilarious account of an NYPD police stop, for those intrigued by the dynamic. (The cops notice a black guy biking home with his white stepson.) Of course, Trayvon Martin’s case suggests worse dangers to suspicious skin.

Police harassment is more than an inconvenience. On any given day, 1 in 8 African Americans stagnate in the US prison system, especially for drug offenses. However, as Michelle Alexander explains, whites use and sell drugs at equal rates. Whatever its intent, the war on drugs has very successfully funneled African-Americans into prison. (For more on the prison system, I suggest Mother Jones’s suite of articles.)

NYCLU

***

White privilege isn’t the only form of privilege in America. The brilliant Sady Doyle wrote “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon,” which begins with her thoughts on sexism: acknowledging one form of inequality should open your eyes to other inequalities. (I like Doyle because she wants us all to be square-jawed adults and doesn’t think it’s too much to ask.) In her essay on class she writes,

If you were like my father, or my first boyfriend — you spoke racism, angrily, and you spoke most virulently about Affirmative Action “stealing” educations, or immigrants “stealing” jobs…. You saw the advancement of people of color as a hostile force, taking away money you already didn’t have enough of.

As a white guy, it’s hard to see racism because you’re busting your ass, too. By senior year of high school I stayed up later than my parents and woke at 5:50am for school, and I still went to my safety school. Privilege doesn’t make things easy. It just makes them possible. Consider my competition. Wesley Yang notes in his essay Paper Tigers, “The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission.”

 ***

Racism, then, manifests in a series of little tolls and pitfalls, obstructions to the American dream. Often, it costs money, and poverty entangles people in its own insidious snare of red tape. Poverty’s small indignities are murderous in aggregate. They are daily, small skin taxes of time and willpower.

Jesus said to judge things by the fruits of their labors. By this measure, our system is racist. No law explicitly requires minorities to serve longer prison sentences than white people, or that home-sellers should demand a little extra from minority customers, or that employers should reject black applicants so persistently. But the current system bears a strange fruit. Racism persists without ever mentioning race.

Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writes, “The beauty of this new ideology is that it aids in the maintenance of white privilege without fanfare, without naming those who it subjects and those who it rewards. It allows a president to state such things as, ‘I strongly support diversity of all kinds, including racial diversity in higher education,’ yet, at the same time, to characterize the University of Michigan’s affirmation action program as ‘flawed’ and ‘discriminatory’ against whites. Thus whites enunciate positions that safeguard their racial interests without sounding ‘racist.’”

It’s a mirror of Wall Street economic rhetoric. The current system siphons money to the already powerful (whether they see themselves a powerful or not). Then it characterizes any change to that siphon as unfair. Guys making $100,000 a year cry like victims. Once the system is entrenched, they need only block change, and the siphon keeps sucking.

Our system siphons opportunity to whites. No doubt Ms. Fisher believes herself a product of an enlightened age, and holds little ill will towards people of color. She no longer needs to. Our institutions have divvied up the hard work of subjugation, extracting a minimal fee of racism. They need just enough indifference that we do not demand change.

On an individual scale, racism befuddles one’s ability to recognize humans. On a societal scale, racism preserves inequality while excusing its beneficiaries from committing small acts of inhumanity themselves. We can protect our privilege in the privacy of the voting booth, and smile at our neighbors on the way out, self-satisfied, and proud to succeed by our hard work alone.

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Fisher claims that her whiteness was held against her, leading to the rejection of her college application. According to UT, Fisher wouldn’t have been admitted, regardless of her race, a point reiterated by Dionne:

“In blaming affirmative action for that denial letter, you have failed to mention that you graduated number 82 in a class of 674 with a 3.59 grade point average on a 4.0 scale, which alienated you from the automatic admissions bunch. You conveniently omit that you scored an 1180 on your SAT, which is way below UT’s average, so that automatically diminished your chances of being accepted.”

(Via Jezebel)

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The Supreme Court handed down a number of decisions today, but not the big one on the Affordable Care Act. That will come Thursday, and you can expect the internet equivalent of projectile vomiting from a lot of people when that comes down, no matter how it’s decided. I won’t even hazard a guess on this thing. Seriously, it could be 9 different decisions, with Scalia’s being a tracing of his hand with the middle finger raised and it wouldn’t surprise me at this point.

Arizona’s immigration law basically went down today, no matter what Governor Brewer says about the heart of the bill remaining. When you lose 3 of the 4 counts and the Court gives you a nudge toward a way that the fourth can be overturned, you pretty much lost. That didn’t stop Justice Scalia from throwing a hissy fit in his dissent.

The Supreme Court doubled down on its much vilified Citizens United decision of two years ago by issuing a 5-4 unsigned opinion. Charles Pierce summed up the two decisions this way:

It was an interesting day for our old friend, the 10th Amendment, which reads, if I recall correctly, “Congress shall make no law that disturbs the local rednecks.” Jan Brewer, the duly elected crackpot governor of Arizona, praised the Supreme Court for continuing to allow brown people in her state to be rousted for their papers by calling it “a victory… for the 10th Amendment.” Of course, at the same time, the Court also exercised the little-known second paragraph of the 10th Amendment, which reads, if I recall correctly, “The various States shall make no law that inconveniences the rich guys who buy us dinner,” by blowing up a campaign-finance law in Montana that had stood for 100 years. So, if you’re keeping score at home, “states rights” now mean that your gardener can be asked to produce his papers on his way to your house, and a billionaire from Colorado can buy your governor. I hope that clears things up.

The Supreme Court also ruled today that it’s cruel and unusual punishment to impose a mandatory sentence of life in prison without benefit of parole on juveniles. It’s a very narrow ruling, as juveniles can still be sentenced in such a way–it just can’t be a mandatory sentence. Even so, it was a 5-4 decision, which means 4 Justices didn’t see a problem with not allowing judges or juries to decide whether youth or extenuating circumstances would merit a lighter sentence.

And now we wait for Thursday.

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In theoretical terms, the ruling has a lot in common with reader-response criticism, which was pioneered by Stanley Fish and others in the 1960s and 70s in reaction to the New Critics and others who held that the meaning of a text was to be found primarily within the text itself. Reader-response critics shifted the focus away from the text as a sacrosanct repository of meaning (whether fiction, poetry, drama, etc.), and even its author, to suggest that meaning is created in a hard-to-define, super-charged zone of interaction between text and reader, and, even more radically, that the reader in fact activates the meaning of the text. In the Entertainment Merchants case, Justice Scalia’s arguments turn out to embody a kind of libertarian strain of reader-response theory. “All literature is interactive,” he writes, countering those who find special danger in violent video games because of their interactivity. He cites judge and legal theorist Richard Posner: “Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.”

In his concurring opinion Justice Alito also explores the interactive dimension of video games (such as Mortal Kombat [1]) although, unlike Scalia, he finds that this quality fundamentally distinguishes video games—in potentially dangerous ways—from the interactivity of books and films. In language which is, paradoxically, a representation of violence in the same way that video game images are a representation of violence, Alito becomes, briefly, a horror writer depicting a gruesome murder, as he describes an avatar who

sees a realistic image of the victim and the scene of the killing in high definition and in three dimensions; who is forced to decide whether or not to kill the victim and decides to do so; who then pretends to grasp an axe, to raise it above the head of the victim, and then to bring it down; who hears the thud of the axe hitting her head and her cry of pain; who sees her split skull and feels the sensation of blood on his face and hands.

“Alito recounts all these disgusting video games,” Scalia writes, “in order to disgust us—but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression.” It’s an argument that is both simple and complicated, veering into semiotics: the relationship between the signifier (words or images that represent something) and the signified (the idea or concept to which the signifier refers) is really a matter of imagination. The “real” to which language refers is always a product of language itself, so that reality is cajoled, conjured, and brought into being by the very signs we use to describe it. Scalia flirts with these deconstructive ideas throughout the majority opinion, as when he suggests that “Alito’s argument highlights the precise danger posed by the California Act: that the ideas expressed by speech—whether it be violence, or gore, or racism—and not its object effects, may be the real reason for governmental proscription.”

All of which raises the question: what does it mean when the sort of reality that the justices legislate is not so much reality per se, but representations of reality, and is there even a difference? We are getting into metaphysical quicksand here. When Breyer writes that “extremely violent video games can harm children by rewarding them for being violently aggressive in play . . . thereby teaching them to be violently aggressive in life,” he suggests a distinction—as do the other justices—that the boundaries between virtual reality and reality are blurred and fluid, if even they exist at all. And is it the role of the State to regulate and police, the justices ask, the shifting thresholds between these two overlapping realities? Later in his dissent, Breyer cites studies suggesting that—in a body-technology connection reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome—the brain’s neural patterns actually change as a result of playing violent video games.

The dispute that language—or any form of representation—can in and of itself be “violent” is strangely similar to an interview exchange between authors Ben Marcus and Brian Evenson in StoryQuarterly in 1995:

Marcus: When writing is called “violent,” a fundamental semantical mistake is being made, unless the claim is that the writing is itself a violent agent. In some ways, a writer can be pleased to see language being accorded the power to destroy objects . . .

Evenson: To render a violent act in language is not at all the same as committing a violent act. The writing itself is not violent, but rather precise, measured, controlled, in the grip of certain arbitrary but self-consistent rules.

***

In an even murkier and more troubled sense, the anxiety not only about violent video games but about video games in general that weaves through the Court’s decision has more to do with realism than violence. And in this regard, the decision as a whole—the opinion, the concurring opinion, and the dissenting opinion—is a skeptical meditation on the fragility of “the real” in an era when reality itself seems on the verge of being replicated in unprecedented ways. At times the decision—which is over 90 pages long—reads like a crazy hybrid of Marshall McLuhan, Julia Kristeva [2], and Wayne C. Booth, as the Justices struggle to theorize the meaning of violent video games in our culture. Tensions about realism and art—literature especially—are long standing, and periodically emerge as new art forms experiment with new ways of representing and re-creating reality. In his classic study The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt suggested that the novel as a new genre in the seventeenth century was indeed “novel” because, in large part, it re-created the feeling of real time for readers in ways that previous forms of literature did not. Watt wrote about “the effect upon characterisation of the novel’s insistence on the time process. The most obvious and extreme example of this is the stream of consciousness novel which purports to present a direct quotation of what occurs in the individual mind under the impact of the temporal flux; but the novel in general has interested itself much more than any other literary form in the development of characters in the course of time.”

For Justices Alito and Breyer (one of the two dissenters, the other being Justice Thomas), it is precisely the immersive, choice based, hyper-realistic, real-time nature of the games that poses an almost existential threat, as if reality itself were in danger of being replicated. It’s as if, during their exposure to the games during the course of the hearing, Alito and Breyer found themselves dropped into some sort of Philip K. Dick world, and it horrified them. “The means by which players control the action in video games,” according to Alito, “now bear a closer relationship to the means by which people control action in the real world.” Breyer goes even further, citing studies which suggest that “the closer a child’s behavior comes, not to watching, but to acting out horrific violence, the greater the potential psychological harm.”

In his frantic, supercharged book The Perfect Crime postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard (whose words drop and slot into your mind as if formed from heavy metals) wrote that

It is not then, the real which is the opposite of simulation—the real is merely a particular case of that simulation—but illusion. And there is no crisis of reality. Far from it. There will always be more reality, because it is produced and reproduced by simulation, and is itself merely a model of simulation. The proliferation of reality, its spreading like an animal species whose natural predators have been eliminated, is our true catastrophe.

And this shimmering, fragile fear, I think, is what haunts the logic of the Court’s ruling. Not the fear of video game violence per se, and not the typical and familiar fear of virtual reality, but rather the fear of another, second order of reality itself, arriving near the point when it will be indistinguishable from the first order of reality that we take for granted every day. “These games,” writes Alito, “feature visual imagery and sounds that are strikingly realistic, and in the near future video-game graphics may be virtually indistinguishable from actual video footage.” And in a footnote, he cites this passage from the book Infinite Reality: “Technological developments powering virtual worlds are accelerating, ensuring that virtual experiences will become more immersive by providing sensory information that makes people feel they are ‘inside’ virtual worlds.”

So while the Court’s decision is ostensibly about the constitutionality of a law that forbids the sale of violent video games to minors, it’s also—at a deeper and more Charlie Kaufman-esque metaphysical level—about the fragility of “the real” in a age when that very concept is under assault. There is something charming and humbling about these Justices, who range in age between 57 and 79, grappling not just legalistically but theoretically with the meaning of these video games, struggling to find precedent for the fast-evolving art form of storytelling and recognizing, with a certain grace and even humor, that, at least for now, the swift and sometimes disturbing passage of ideas through new mediums is too precious to restrict.

——————————–

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The Atlantic discusses the “sexual politics of nominating a Supreme Court Justice.”

“Why I’m Working As A Saigon Massage Girl.” This piece is really phenomenal. (via)

People are masturbating to their friend’s Facebook photos, which is creepy.

I came across a link to Chay Magazine, a web magazine devoted to “fostering discussion of sex and sexuality in Pakistani society.” It hasn’t been updated in awhile, but it’s fascinating.

In New York, the perils of being a nude performance artist.

Is marriage good for you? (via @amyletter)

Leymah Gbowee on ending sexual violence in the Congo.

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Lithwick quoted an earlier case in which former Chief Justice William Rehnquist said that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is “to confuse metaphor with reality,” and that the metaphor won a real battle before the Supreme Court. And it did, no question. My question for the Justices who made this opinion is this: where will corporate personhood stop? Will Coca-Cola get to vote soon? Can the corporation run for President? It’s over 35 years old and a natural-born citizen of the US, after all. And who would actually make the day-to-day decisions the President makes–the CEO of Coke? The shareholders? But we didn’t elect him or her, or them.

We can take it farther, of course. If a corporation breaks the law and is convicted, who goes to jail? If people incorporate themselves, will they get two votes–one for the person and one for the corporate person? If corporations are truly citizens, should they be counted in the census for the purpose of apportionment of Congressional representatives?

See, this is where the metaphor starts to have problems–when it clashes with the real world. Because even at their most effective, metaphors are only analogs, descriptions, comparisons. They’re necessary for communication, but they never do more than approximate the world they try to describe or inform, and when you try to subject them to the rigors of actual existence, they fall apart because they’re not real.

Which is not to say that the conservative Justices who wrote this decision haven’t thought out the consequences of their decision–I suspect they have thought them out very carefully, and decided they wanted to play the part of the Blue Fairy and bring Pinocchio to life. And like the Blue Fairy, they’ll be able to avoid the fallout of their decision for the most part–they are protected by money and privilege and age and the fact that they’re the least accountable political figures in the country. They can flit away and concern themselves with other matters, while the rest of us get to figure out what to do with the new kid who’s a hundred times our size and is a bully besides.

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