Good Riddance

Chief Justice William Rehnquist died the other day, and now the news, particularly that joke station Fox News is making it out like another Pope kicked the bucket. All I can say about his passing is good fucking riddance.

Where do I begin with this dead asshole; let’s start with the way I became aware of who he was and what he was all about. In my senior year of high school, sitting in one of those portable classrooms with little heat, and not too much interest, our History teacher talked about the Supreme Court, then gave all of us the assignment of profiling one case heard by the high court. As a young woman who was in the throws of watching at least a half dozen of her friends deal with pregnancy, I chose (what a shock) Roe v. Wade. For those of you who aren’t up on your Roe, get with the fucking program already! Rehnquist was one of the two justices who wrote dissenting opinions.

Before you get all accusatory on me like I some kind of flaming libby, let me say, that I find it comforting when someone on the Supreme Court writes a dissenting opinion on every case, because that means that they are truly representing the opinions of all people of this country, even the misguided, wrong people. My problem was not with Rehnquist’s writing of a dissent, it was the fact that he said a woman’s right to choose was unconstitutional. Wasn’t the constitution written to give people of this land the freedom to choose?

Rehnquist also happens to have a sticky history of views that are inherently racist, anti-Semitic, and there have been many instances where he was all too willing to loosen his lip against the rights of blacks and Mexicans to vote. He also enjoyed making Jew jokes, which is not a problem if you’re Jewish, but when you are at an Ivy League school in the 1940s taunting your Jewish classmates who are being treated like second class citizens, then it’s a problem.

Despite all of this, the mainstream media is content with calling him a great man. What did he do to earn this? He kissed corporate ass like crazy, and always managed to rule in favor of the money rather than the people he was appointed to interpret the constitution for. He was nothing more than an upper class, good ol’ boy that benefited from a system designed to keep the white, rich, male establishment on top while the rest of us attempt to eek out an honest living and keep our family afloat.

At the end of filing this report for History class, I had a far different perspective of the “great” Chief Justice than my Republican parents. Rehnquist was so willing to shut down a woman’s right to choose, yet I wondered if he had ever really spent time with a young woman who was desperately struggling with her options. At the time I was writing my paper, five of my friends from the Podunk, farm town I grew up in, were pregnant. All of them struggled desperately through sleepless nights and river of tears with possible solutions to their pregnancy issue. For the record, because I know neo-cons believe that women are basically whores who have the same cavalier attitude about getting rid of a pregnancy as they do about having casual sex, only one of my friends had an abortion. Two of my friends kept their babies, and were relegated to living in poverty for the next five to seven years, and the other two gave their children up for adoption. Adoption may be championed by the Right Wing, but it leaves an uneasy feeling with the mother who gave her child up. For the rest of her life anytime she comes across a child with the same hair and eye color that is about the age of the child she gave up, she will get a nagging feeling in her gut. I wonder if Rehnquist was aware of this, or if he even cared.

He’s dead now, which leaves a vacancy for the worst president in American history to fill. I believe that prior to the enormous fuck up the administration committed in responding to Hurricane Katrina, Bush would have been gung ho to nominate a neo-Rehnquist, now that he’s been taken down a notch, Dubya is trying to push is nominee John Roberts as a centurist. FYI to my readers: he’s not. When you dig deep, he’s a neo-con with the same tight-assed haircut. His wife, Jane, is a Nazi when it comes to a woman’s right to choose, and doesn’t believe in abortion in any case, whether a mother’s life is in danger, rape, incest…nothing. I bet she has never sat next to a scared, teenage girl who was trying to figure out how to support a child on a Wendy’s income, while wondering if her parents were going to kill her.

I know it will never be possible to get a Supreme Court nominee who is void of a left or right affiliation, but this country deserves a justice that is willing and has a reputation of side-stepping their own beliefs to make the most honest ruling based solely on the constitution. Had Rehnquist done this, he would have deserved all of the Fox News praise, and would have been excluded from my “Good Riddance Asshole” list.