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The Craziest Lines in Every Dissenting Gay Marriage Opinion

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The Craziest Lines in Every Dissenting Gay Marriage Opinion

Each of the four Supreme Court justices who disagreed with today’s ruling in favor of legal same-sex marriage issued his own dissent. And each was fucking nuts in its own, special way. Here, the weirdest, craziest, and flat-out dumbest lines from each.

John Roberts

We begin with Chief Justice John Roberts, who—like most of his colleagues—stops short of condemning gay marriage itself, but argues that a Supreme Court decision was the incorrect method for implementing it nationwide. And also that we shouldn’t do anything the Aztecs didn’t do.

The majority expressly disclaims judicial “caution” and omits even a pretense of humility, openly relying on its desire to remake society according to its own “new insight” into the “nature of injustice.” Ante, at 11, 23. As a result, the Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?

As Choire Sicha asks at the Awl, who are we to turn out backs against human sacrifice, as enthusiastically practiced by the Aztecs? Or more to the point, since we’re talking about the sanctity of marriage—against keeping concubines like the Chongzhen Emperor, last ruler of the Ming Dynasty?

In Roberts’s argument that marriage has historically been defined as the union of one man and one woman, he also invokes the favorite rhetorical device of inarticulate groomsmen everywhere: The Webster’s Dictionary definition.

Of course, many did say it. In his first American dictionary, Noah Webster defined marriage as “the legal union of a man and woman for life,” which served the purposes of “preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, . . . promoting domestic felicity, and . . . securing the maintenance and education of children.”

The majority opinion on the same-sex marriage decision invoked the 14th Amendment, which prohibits states from denying a person’s “liberty...without due process of law.” To deny same-sex couples the right to marry is to deny them liberty, according to Justices Ginsberg, Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kennedy. But follow this line of thinking far enough and you might accidentally bring slavery back, says Roberts.

The need for restraint in administering the strong medicine of substantive due process is a lesson this Court has learned the hard way. The Court first applied substantive due process to strike down a statute in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857). There the Court invalidated the Missouri Compromise on the ground that legislation restricting the institution of slavery violated the implied rights of slaveholders. The Court relied on its own conception of liberty and property in doing so. It asserted that “an act of Congress which deprives a citizen of the United States of his liberty or property, merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States . . . could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.”

Later, Roberts touches on an old sawhorse of the bigoted religious right: If make gay marriage legal, why not polygamous marriage as well? Fortunately, he stopped short of bringing up bestiality, Ben Carson-style.

Indeed, from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world. If the majority is willing to take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one. It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.

Roberts and Scalia both fixate on the idea that five “lawyers”—“unelected lawyers,” Scalia adds biliously—should not impose their will on the entire nation. Roberts also harps on the idea that ours is a “government of laws, not of men.” If that’s true, who better to make legal decisions than the country’s foremost experts on the law?

Antonin Scalia

Scalia, reliably the most unhinged of the justices, did not disappoint for his part. First up: the assertion that because the nine justices are not a representative sample of the Real America, they are not qualified to rule on the issue of marriage. There’s not even anyone from the west! (California does not count.)

Not surprisingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section of America. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination.

There is also not, we might point out, an openly gay justice. But let’s make sure we get an Iowan on there first.

A few sentences later, Scalia refers to the decision as a “judicial Putsch”—Putsch, if you haven’t been inside a history classroom in a while, meaning an attempt to violently overthrow the government, and carrying a nearly inextricable association with the German Nazi Party’s failed “Beer Hall Pustch” of 1923.

In the most memorable section of his dissent, Scalia’s takes on the voice of an angry message board poster, block-quoting his enemies in a point-by-point takedown of their bad opinions on Yu-Gi-Oh!. He calls them pretentious; he talks about hippies; he offers one word rhetorical questions like “Really?” and “Huh?; he brackets “[whatever that means]” not twice but thrice.

The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so. Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent. “The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.” (Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie. Expression, sure enough, is a freedom, but anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say.) Rights, we are told, can “rise . . . from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.” (Huh? How can a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives [whatever that means] define [whatever that means] an urgent liberty [never mind], give birth to a right?)

Not to be outdone by his boss, Scalia closes his argument with a dictionary definition of his own—with a Biblical reference thrown in free of charge.

Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall.

Clarence Thomas

After a long meditation on the meaning of the word “liberty,” Thomas turns to another term invoked in the majority opinion: “dignity.” Dignity shouldn’t be an issue, he says, because there’s no dignity clause in the Constitution. Also, because black Americans didn’t lose their dignity under slavery:

The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.

The majority’s musings are thus deeply misguided, but at least those musings can have no effect on the dignity of the persons the majority demeans.

Samuel Alito

Finally, we come to Samuel Alito, who has the most nasty things to say about gay marriage itself. Here, he argues that a conception of marriage that is not focused on procreation—i.e., one that has room for same-sex couples—is only possible because the traditional baby-centric model has become “frayed” and “decayed.”

Have you guys heard about all these single moms?

If this traditional understanding of the purpose of marriage does not ring true to all ears today, that is probably because the tie between marriage and procreation has frayed. Today, for instance, more than 40% of all children in this country are born to unmarried women. This development undoubtedly is both a cause and a result of changes in our society’s understanding of marriage. While, for many, the attributes of marriage in 21st century America have changed, those States that do not want to recognize same-sex marriage have not yet given up on the traditional understanding. They worry that by officially abandoning the older understanding, they may contribute to marriage’s further decay. It is far beyond the outer reaches of this Court’s authority to say that a State may not adhere to the understanding of marriage that has long prevailed, not just in this country and others with similar cultural roots, but also in a great variety of countries and cultures all around the globe.

Alito then considers the majority’s comparison between laws that prohibit gay marriage with those that subordinated women and people of color—and concludes that homophobes will now be relegated to “whispering” their homophobic ideas in the safety of their own homes, lest they be labeled as bigots. Which—call me crazy—sounds like a desirable state of affairs to me.

Perhaps recognizing how its reasoning may be used, the majority attempts, toward the end of its opinion, to reassure those who oppose same-sex marriage that their rights of conscience will be protected. Ante, at 26–27. We will soon see whether this proves to be true. I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.

If any of this stuff strikes you as upsetting, don’t worry about it too much. The good guys won. The bad guys lost, and their gripes about losing are just that: gripes. Time to celebrate.


Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.


Why the SCOTUS Ruling on Gay Marriage Feels So Good

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Why the SCOTUS Ruling on Gay Marriage Feels So Good

Today we celebrate federal acknowledgment in the U.S. that same-sex love is love period. We celebrate the ease with which committed gay couples all over the country can fortify lives together, and that those lives will be protected under the law, just as they have been for their straight counterparts. We celebrate the act of putting into writing the assertion that gays are no longer second-class citizens. It is so ordered that gay people are people, too.

All of that fills my heart beyond what I understood to be its capacity. It’s why my mother called me crying happy tears this morning. It’s a beautiful thing to have experienced in my lifetime. I’m so thankful for today.

I can’t help but be happiest, though, about the defeat of the anti-marriage equality crusaders. The defeat of people who signed up to lose, who wasted their time and ours on a platform of animus and contempt. The defeat of people who put principle over the practical, who fought to preserve their limited understanding of an already imperfect institution over the actual human lives that would benefit from it. The defeat of people who did what bigots do: discriminate, vilify, fear-monger, argue irrationally and without respect to human dignity, and then bristle when they’re called out for what they are (bigots).

The jig is up. The world has turned and left you fuming, seething, weeping. Fuck you, Mike Huckabee. Fuck you, Bryan Fischer. Fuck you, Maggie Gallagher. Fuck you, Ben Carson. Fuck you, Fox News. You should all feel like assholes because you are all assholes. And now you’re also, definitively, losers. And it feels incredible.

In his speech today following the Supreme Court’s ruling, President Obama reminded us to respect the defeated. He said:

I know that Americans of goodwill continue to hold a wide range of views on this issue. Opposition in some cases has been based on sincere and deeply-held beliefs. All of us who welcome today’s news should be mindful of that fact. Recognize different viewpoints, revere our deep commitment to religious freedom.

You know what, though? Fuck those people. Fuck their myopic “good will,” fuck their views on this issue that are anti-equality, fuck their misguided sincerity, their deeply held beliefs, their refusal to see what’s right, their insistence on hiding behind some passages (and ignoring hundreds of others) from their beloved Bibles. Be mindful of the fact that they are wrong, they were always wrong, and our country officially has ruled them wrong. They have every right to be wrong. They have every right to believe what they do. But their toxic opinions lost potency today. Soon they’ll be barely detectable at all.

We haven’t heard the last of them. People will continue to want to decry, discriminate against, and be generally shitty to LGBT people under the guise of religious beliefs and personal freedom. Stories about businesses refusing services to gay couples will continue to surface and possibly one day we’ll see a case or two play out in the SCOTUS. There are huge segments of the gay population just trying to survive, not get married. For them, today’s victory might provide little, if any comfort. It’s not over, but today the anti-gay religious right’s grip on this issue loosened irrevocably. Today they lost and they’ll continue to lose. Along the way we’ll be reminded that winning feels great, and defeating feels even better.

[Photo via Getty]

Olympic Sailor Missing: Empty Boat Found Floating Near Miami

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Olympic Sailor Missing: Empty Boat Found Floating Near Miami

Authorities are searching for an Olympic sailor whose empty boat was found floating, still in gear off the coast of Miami Thursday.

Trevor Moore, 30, competed in the 2012 London Olympics. Friends say he took an inflatable dinghy out in the Biscayne Bay on Thursday around 1 p.m.

That was apparently the last time anyone saw him—the boat was reportedly found empty, tangled up in moorings around 5 p.m. Via CBS:

Among the items found on the inflatable boat were a life jacket and a GPS. A source told CBS4 the GPS showed that the [boat] reduced speed by Soldier Key, south of Stiltsville, and zig-zagged back to where it came from. It’s believed that Moore was off the boat at that time.

Leira, a sailing coach, said he’s concerned. He said it’s not difficult to be knocked off an inflatable.

“If you’re traveling at a high rate of speed, it’s very easy to fall off unless you have a safety band, you can easily fall off the boat and the boat can keep moving if you are not on board,” said Leira.

At least four agencies are involved in the search, which reportedly involves helicopter support and at least eleven boats.


Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Left-Wing Privilege, Tal Fortgang, Ivy League, and Other Buzzwords

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Left-Wing Privilege, Tal Fortgang, Ivy League, and Other Buzzwords

Tal Fortgang, the white Princeton student who experienced the briefest flutter of virality last year after he wrote a bold essay refusing to “check his privilege,” is back with a new thing about, let’s see, “Left-wing privilege,” which exists, Tal Fortgang says at great length.

What is so great about being “Left-wing,” according to Tal Fortgang, Princeton ‘17?

20. I can be social and go to parties without facing mockery and looks of confusion from those who assume my lifestyle is ascetic and Puritanical.

There are 37 other ones too.

[Photo: Flickr]

Severe T'storms and Flash Floods Likely in Eastern U.S. This Weekend

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Severe T'storms and Flash Floods Likely in Eastern U.S. This Weekend

Away we go into the last weekend of June, and the month will draw to a close just as it (and we) began life: wet and angry. In fact, we’re closing the month with a storm system that’s more common in fall than the middle of summer. Heavy rain will soon overspread much of the eastern United States this weekend, accompanied by some severe thunderstorms on the southern end of the system.

A cute li’l trough in the jet stream is in the process of dipping down over the Great Lakes at this hour, and when combined with the lift provided by a nearby jet streak (pocket of stronger winds within the jet stream), a well-developed low pressure system will set up in the Ohio Valley tonight and tomorrow. The system will quickly strengthen tomorrow as it move toward the Northeast, but not before it produces a widespread area of heavy rain and severe thunderstorms.

Severe T'storms and Flash Floods Likely in Eastern U.S. This Weekend

A shield of heavy, steady rain will likely overspread much of the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic on Saturday and Sunday—earlier west and later east. Flash flood and flood watches are in effect from Quincy, Illinois, east toward Washington D.C. and Buffalo, New York, including just about everybody in between. The difference between a flash flood watch and flood watch is pretty much pedantic—if you’re under a flash flood watch, the risk is there for lots of heavy rain in a short period of time that could lead to rapidly rising waters.

Most of these areas can expect a wide slug of two or more inches of rain, with more than four inches possible by the time the precipitation ends sometime on Saturday night or Sunday.

Severe T'storms and Flash Floods Likely in Eastern U.S. This Weekend

On the southern side of the system, there should be enough lift, instability, and wind shear to trigger severe thunderstorms. A slight (two out of five) risk for severe weather is in place from eastern Georgia north through the Mason-Dixon line. All modes of severe weather—damaging winds, large hail, and tornadoes—are possible from the storms on Saturday. Keep an eye on the weather and listen out for watches and warnings, especially if you plan to be outdoors or away from safe shelter during the day.

It’s going to be a gross, soggy weekend, but it could be worse given the time of the year: at least it’s not 100°F or hurricaning (that’s a verb, right?). Plus, many of these areas—especially deeper into New England and farther south toward the central Appalachians and parts of the Carolinas—could use the rain, as they’ve slipped into a moderate drought over the past couple of months.

[Images: author]


You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.

Sad Brand Tweets You Would Have Seen If Gay Marriage Had Lost

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Sad Brand Tweets You Would Have Seen If Gay Marriage Had Lost

Same-sex marriage is now legal in the United States, and brands have been losing their minds. Their excitement—much of which has been flooding my Twitter timeline all day—is more than understandable, but it really makes you wonder what the internet would have looked like had the Supreme Court decided against marriage equality.

In an alternate universe, what would have been the opposite of #LoveWins? Below are some imagined tweets you might have seen from some of your favorite brands if history hadn’t been made today.


Chipotle:

(Use the slider to reveal the sad version.)

Coca-Cola:

(Use the slider to reveal the sad version.)

Hot Topic:

(Use the slider to reveal the sad version.)

Totino’s:

Hillary Clinton:

Jell-O:

(Use the slider to reveal the sad version.)

Chick-fil-A:

(Chick-fil-A did not tweet about same sex marriage.)

Sad Brand Tweets You Would Have Seen If Gay Marriage Had Lost


Denny’s:

(Denny’s did not tweet about same sex marriage.)

Sad Brand Tweets You Would Have Seen If Gay Marriage Had Lost


Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

Images via Screengrab/Shutterstock/Twitter/Coca-Cola/Z0/Flickr

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Salty Donald Trump Bans Univision from Golf Course, Doxes Jorge Ramos 

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Salty Donald Trump Bans Univision from Golf Course, Doxes Jorge Ramos 

After Univision ended its relationship with “verbal billionaire” and permanently open mouth Donald Trump’s Miss Universe Organization this week over Trump’s stance against Mexican immigration, the Donald fired back with an angry letter stating that oh yeah well you guys aren’t allowed on my golf course anymore. So there.

The angry man with the stubby little fingers posted his letter to Univision CEO Randy Falco on Instagram, so America’s voters can see exactly how he handles foreign policy in that one dream he keeps having where he’s elected president:

“A meaningful border [between the U.S. and Mexico] will be immediately created, not the laughingstock that currently exist,” Trump crows in a P.S. (He is an expert on laughingstocks.)

Trump also wants a meaningful border between his Trump Doral golf course in Miami and the Univision offices next door, banning all Univision employees from the property and demanding that Univision “close the gate which is being constructed between our respective properties.”

Earlier, Trump had posted a handwritten interview request from Univision’s Jorge Ramos, ostensibly as evidence that Univision still needs Trump. He didn’t bother to redact Ramos’s phone number, though: a dick-waving move that’s actually against Instagram’s terms of service. Six hours after it was first posted, the photo remains up.

Trump’s stake in the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants—which he co-owns with NBC—is valued at $14 million by Donald Trump and $0 by Forbes, which finds it “of negligible value.”

Trump has threatened to sue Univision for defaulting on a contract he says is worth $13.5 million.

[h/t THR, Photo: AP Images]


Brian Stelter Thinks Wolf Is the Worst

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Brian Stelter Thinks Wolf Is the Worst

This afternoon, CNN media reporter and Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter tweeted and quickly deleted the phrase “Ugh wolf is the worst,” according to a tipster who provided us with the above screenshot. To whom might Stelter have been referring? Maybe Law and Order producer Dick Wolf? Perhaps he was complaining about the book Wolf Hall? Or could it be that he was talking smack about his esteemed colleague Wolf Blitzer?

UPDATE: As a commenter points out, Stelter commented on the tweet, writing that he “had copy & pasted someone else’s words and then accidentally tweeted it. i’m a twitter dunce, but, a fan of wolf.”

A likely story. But what if it was supposed to be a DM? Blitzer was on air, opening his show The Situation Room, just as the tweet went out at 5:03 p.m. Blitzer didn’t do or say anything offensive in the show’s first few minutes, but at 5:04, an iPhone ringtone can be heard during his broadcast (clip below). Maybe the clocks are a little off, and Stelter was reacting to Wolf’s phone going off on the air?

In any case, it’s clear that the tweet was a mistake. Between this and two mysterious missives sent out by Jake Tapper last year, CNN might considering offering a remedial Twitter training course to its staffers.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Lawsuit: Preppy Paradise Vineyard Vines Store Ignored Employee Rape

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Lawsuit: Preppy Paradise Vineyard Vines Store Ignored Employee Rape

Americans in need of short pink khakis, lime green fleeces, and koozies of various hues, often turn to Vineyard Vines, a store that’s outfitted the young Tates and Sloanes of this country since 1998. Now, a lawsuit alleges one store covered up an ugly trail of sexual assault.

The case, filed this week by Ciara Robinson of Central Valley, NY, says her whale-logo’d manager Daniel Pezzola repeatedly hit on, groped, slapped, hit, insulted, threatened, and eventually raped her—all inside a Vineyard Vines retail store. Even worse, Robinson alleges, the abuse often happened around other employees, none of whom intervened or reported the behavior.

Robinson’s list of Pezzola’s alleged misdeeds is long and awful:

Lawsuit: Preppy Paradise Vineyard Vines Store Ignored Employee Rape

Lawsuit: Preppy Paradise Vineyard Vines Store Ignored Employee Rape


Finally, the complaint continues, Pezzola raped Robinson in a back room of the Vineyard Vines store (corporate motto: “The Good Life”):

Lawsuit: Preppy Paradise Vineyard Vines Store Ignored Employee Rape


Robinson says that when she reported the rape to another supervisor, Nicole Corcoran, she was “laughed at,” and Corcoran replied “Ew! In my chair.” Messages sent to Corcoran’s superior about the rape (Vineyard Vines district manager Lou Artese) were ignored entirely—though sordid details were leaked to other VV employees, increasing Robinson’s humiliation. Robinson says that even after Pezzola admitted to some of his behavior, he was never disciplined—and Robinson herself was ultimately fired for an alleged history of disciplinary infractions.

Robinson is suing for punitive damages, compensation for suffering, and her old job back.

You can read the full legal complaint here, and view exhibits (including sections of the Vineyard Vines employee manual) here.


Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

Frank Bruni Honors Gay Marriage Decision in Sad, Third-Person Column

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Frank Bruni Honors Gay Marriage Decision in Sad, Third-Person Column

As soon as the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage was made public on Friday, the New York Times published a strange celebration of that ruling by Frank Bruni, the paper’s only gay columnist (and second-worst one). This is a good thing for Bruni, but a bad thing for anyone looking for an enlightening perspective on the news.

It’s easy to tell that the column is going to be bad very quickly, when with the 4oth word, Bruni starts referring to himself as “he”:

HOW will the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage alter the way Americans feel about the country, and how we feel about ourselves?

I can’t speak for everyone. But I can speak for this one 12-year-old boy.

He stands out among his siblings because he lacks their optimism about things, even their quickness to smile. He has a darkness that they don’t. He’s a worrier, a brooder. He’s also more self-conscious. He can’t get comfortable with himself.

What follows is a long-winded, third-person recounting of Bruni’s life as a gay man, from closeted teenager to partnered adult living in a house with a white-picket fence. Is it interesting? It is not.

Bruni narrates himself as a young boy who doesn’t understand his feelings and as a teenager who quickly leafs through a weird book about being gay. Then he goes to college:

I can speak for a 20-year-old college student. He has opened up to his family and to many friends about who he is, not because he possesses any particular courage but because being honest involves less strain, less effort, than keeping secrets and dreading their exposure. Also because he wants to meet men like him, develop crushes he can act on, even fall in love.

And so far, there’s been no terrible price. His family doesn’t wholly understand him, but they want and resolve to. For every friend who now keeps a distance, there’s another who draws closer.

This is written in a somber tone, but why? By any reasonable measure, this is a success story! Frank Bruni came out before he could even drink and... nothing bad happened? His parents didn’t really understand his life and he lost some old friends but made some new ones. This is otherwise known as “being in college.”

Bruni writes that “he wishes there were a way to be honest without wearing a tag,” and that he was forced to live life “as someone to be tolerated.” Bruni was in a fraternity as an undergrad, and after graduate school became a Pulitzer fellow. He worked at some good newspapers before finding a home at the New York Times, where he won several journalism awards and enjoyed the paper’s most luxurious positions: travel writer, food critic, columnist.

Bruni fucking excelled at life, and more power to him because of it. Bruni says that his life was bogged down by always having to explain that being gay is a not a choice—

And he is always having to explain, to one inquisitive person after another, that he didn’t choose this path, that it’s not a statement or a caprice, that he neither rues nor relishes it, that it’s just there: fundamental, foundational, forever. The ritual grinds him down.

—but... did he really? Is this the lasting legacy of homophobia? That a very successful man had to tell the inquisitive people of New York City that you don’t choose to be gay?

As an adult, he resides in a nice home with his boyfriend, but chooses nonetheless to live in the shadows.

I can speak for a 30-year-old man who owns and lives in a house in the suburbs with another man his age. They’re romantic partners. A couple. A white picket fence surrounds the yard behind their red brick colonial. It keeps the German shepherd from straying off.

But this fantasy has been edited, abridged. The man and his partner have never spoken of children, because that would involve special, intricate arrangements and because most people don’t really approve.

They have never hugged in the front yard, never kissed in front of a window, because what would the neighbors think? What would the neighbors do?

A good way for Bruni to show his neighbors that being gay was normal would have been to kiss his man, all the time, in front of the open windows.

We fast forward to today, where, Bruni writers, the Supreme Court has caused American society to “rupture.” He continues:

Tomorrow’s 12-year-old won’t feel the foreboding that yesterday’s did. Tomorrow’s 16-year-old will be less likely to confront, sort through and reject so many sad stereotypes of what it means to be gay or lesbian.

There won’t be so many apologies and explanations for the 20-year-old, 30-year-old or 45-year-old, and there won’t be such a ready acceptance of limits. There won’t be the same limits, period.

This is broadly true, of course, but it also would have happened—was happening, is happening—had the Supreme Court ceased to exist yesterday. Society’s progressive march forward on gay rights should not be chalked up to a bunch of elderly people on a hill, who, if we’re being generous, dunked an alley-oop that had been hanging in the air for years. To attribute the optimism of the future to one decision made by one branch of the government is at best disingenuous and irresponsible; at worst, it’s disrespectful.

The Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage will be a mile marker on the road to the hazy paradise that Bruni describes. The five justices making up the majority did not kill homophobia (to say nothing of transphobia). Hopefully they didn’t also give birth to too many more columns like this one.


Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

President Obama Took Me To Church Today

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My parents came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, and so they remember when blacks weren’t allowed to vote, and all the speeches and marches and blood that went into that fight, and all that came after. They did okay for themselves, got married, and moved out to the suburbs to do the whole American Dream thing. But still, they were skeptical.

I grew up in the only white town in a majority-black county. I spent my whole life playing soccer, and I was a teenager before I wasn’t the only black kid on an all-white team. My best friend, whom I consider my blood and my soulmate, is white. We met in kindergarten, and we grew up bussing in to black schools to take classes in rooms full of white kids. My parents tried to convince me my whole childhood about how America was ugly, about how there was a chance that something very bad could happen to me for no other reason than I was black, and how that reason would be sufficient, because as long as black people have died and lived and died again on these shores, that reason has always been sufficient.

I didn’t really believe them. Though they assured me that the world was segregated, everywhere, I never believed them. I considered myself part of a utopian, postracial future, and the only time I sensed segregation was when we went to church. It was a huge church, and every Sunday, we’d wait an eternity in line as hundreds of cars shipped thousands of well-dressed, good-smelling black people to sing and dance and talk about the grace of Jesus Christ. We often had to sit in one of the overflow rooms, watching the reverend preach on a projector. I hated it. I didn’t really believe what he had to say about God, and it was the only place, outside of my home, where I felt startlingly aware of my blackness. It was heavy on my shoulders, like a cape, as I watched all these people in suits and skirts and big hats joyfully revel in the word of God, and in their community, and in their blackness. It made me uncomfortable. It felt wrong. When I was 14, they asked me if I wanted to go to church. I politely declined, and I haven’t been since.

Coincidentally, that was around the time the world began to reveal itself to me, and I opened my eyes to it, and something changed irrevocably. I was suddenly profoundly aware of my blackness, and this cape I wore and wear on my shoulders, every day, in the shower and to school and to work and on dates and to bed. The weight never gets easier, and it causes you to bow your shoulders and bend your knees, to tiptoe around. You shrink beneath it. Painfully aware of your blackness, you become smaller.

The only time the cape comes off, or at least easier to bear, is when I hang out in groups with my black friends, or my family. It’s lighter then, and there’s a palpable weightlessness, and in these moments, I think I’m something like the man God made me to be.

But my blackness grows heavier, nearly unbearable, on days like last Wednesday, when a 21-year-old man named Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and killed nine people who invited him in to join them as they joyfully reveled in the word of God and in their community and in their blackness, for no other reason than the color of their skin. It’s happened before, more times than anyone wants or even knows how to begin to count, and it’ll happen again and again—a stream of black bodies being destroyed by white men. You begin to despair, then, because all you can do is hope that the souls that inhabited these black bodies make their way to Heaven, or somewhere like it.

Today, President Barack Obama delivered the eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church’s reverend, who was shot dead along with eight fellow revelers. The country’s first black president has been blasted over the last six and a half years for not acknowledging his cape, or at least not making ours any easier to bear, but this was a sensational, spectacular destruction of black lives, and so it made sense he was there, speaking. For about 40 minutes, he addressed Pinckney’s family, and his flock, the country, and the world. He addressed me. At one point the president started speaking about Roof directly, and the easily imaginable theft of lives of people who look like me, because they look like me.

“We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew of all this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act,” he said. “It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs, and arson, and shots fired at churches. Not random, but as a means of control. A way to terrorize and oppress. An act that he imagined would incite fear, and recrimination. Violence and suspicion. An act that he assumed would deepen divisions that would trace back to our nation’s original sin.

Oh,” he said, the faint traces of a chuckle bubbling deep in his chest. “But God works in mysterious ways.”

In that moment, I again thought of my blackness. For about 40 minutes, to remember a dead preacher, Obama became one. For about 40 minutes, he spoke, as members of Pinckney’s family and flock urged him on. He spoke about being black, about the pain and the fear and the uncertainty and the heartbreak that floods every black heart, every day, and he spoke about it unflinchingly, with pride, in front of anyone and everyone who was watching. I got chills, and then I started to smile. I was back in church, joyfully reveling in the word of a God I do not know, and in a community I’ve never visited, and in the very blackness that could be my undoing. I wanted to laugh out loud and stand up, but something kept me seated, watching this church service in another room.

And then he started to sing. It was planned, of course, scripted. Obama spoke the words, “amazing grace.” Then he sat in silence for five seconds or so. Then he said those two words again, in a deep, gravelly voice. He was singing “Amazing Grace,” an old Negro spiritual that blacks in this country have been singing in churches for generations. I still remembered.

Everyone at the ceremony stood and joined him. I got chills again as I mouthed the words, staring through my computer screen. When he named the eight others who lost their lives—Cynthia Hurd, and Susie Jackson, and Ethel Lance, and DePayne Middleton-Doctor, and Tywanza L. Sanders, and Daniel L. Simmons Sr., and Shoranda Coleman Singleton, and Myra Thompson—I panicked, thinking I’d cry. I didn’t. Because for that moment, I felt stronger—actually, physically stronger. I felt my cape, more than ever, but for the first time since I first donned it, over a decade ago, my blackness felt light, and warm. I didn’t feel small. And then I thought about my parents.

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Hero Woman Climbs S.C. Statehouse Flagpole to Remove Confederate Flag

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Hero Woman Climbs S.C. Statehouse Flagpole to Remove Confederate Flag

On Saturday morning, a North Carolina woman climbed the flagpole outside the South Carolina statehouse and temporarily removed the Confederate flag flying there.

“We removed the flag today because we can’t wait any longer,” Bree Newsome said in a press release. “We can’t continue like this another day. It’s time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality.”

Newsome’s identity was confirmed to the New York Daily News by organizer Tamika Lewis. One other activist, James Tyson, who had stood at the bottom of the 30-foot pole as Newsome climbed, was arrested.

Police asked Newsome, who was wearing climbing gear, to come down, as she was about half-way up the pole, the Charleston Post Courier reports. Newsome refused, continued to climb, and unhooked the flag.

When she alighted, she was arrested, and the flag was replaced within an hour. Newsome and Tyson face charges of defacing a monument.

“We didn’t see it fit to have the flag stand erect while the people who were massacred were laid to rest under it,” Lewis told the Daily News.


Image via Clover Hope/Twitter. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

This Python Ate a Porcupine, Which Turned Out to Be a Bad Idea

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This Python Ate a Porcupine, Which Turned Out to Be a Bad Idea

We all eat the wrong thing sometimes, but this 12-foot-long South African python made a major error. It swallowed a porcupine whole. Spoilers: No, it did not survive.

LiveScience reports that a bicyclist captured these photos of the snake right after it had gulped down its meal. At the time, park rangers speculated that it had eaten something like a small warthog.

This Python Ate a Porcupine, Which Turned Out to Be a Bad Idea

But then the snake appears to have suffered a setback. A week after these photos were taken, park rangers found it dead. Apparently, it had fallen off a ledge. But why would that kill a snake? When the rangers opened the snake up, they discovered the answer.

This Python Ate a Porcupine, Which Turned Out to Be a Bad Idea

It had eaten a 30 pound porcupine, whose quills probably pierced its digestive tract in the fall, and killed it. In this image, you can see the mostly-undigested porcupine, whose quills lodged in the snake’s stomach, at right.

Now we know who wins when a snake fights a porcupine. Nobody.

[via LiveScience and Lake Elund Game Reserve]


Contact the author at annalee@gizmodo.com.
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Look at These Ugly-Ass Dogs, From the World's Ugliest Dog Contest

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Look at These Ugly-Ass Dogs, From the World's Ugliest Dog Contest

The winner of this year’s World’s Ugliest Dog Contest is a 10-year-old pit bull-Dutch shepherd mix from Loxahatchee, Florida named Quasi Modo, the Associated Press reports. Quasi Modo has a spinal birth defect and a positive attitude.

Quasi Modo’s owner takes home $1,500, the AP reports. Second and third place were taken by two Chinese crested and Chihuahua mixes named Sweepee Rambo and Frodo, respectively.

The contest was held at the Sonoma-Marin Fair on Friday, in Petaluma, California. Previous winners include Peanut, Elwood (RIP), and Yoda.

Below are some more ugly-ass dogs, all winners in their own way.

Look at These Ugly-Ass Dogs, From the World's Ugliest Dog Contest

This dog is named Pork!

Look at These Ugly-Ass Dogs, From the World's Ugliest Dog Contest

Seventeen-year-old Boolah wears a doggie diaper.

Look at These Ugly-Ass Dogs, From the World's Ugliest Dog Contest

Icky likes to smooch.

Look at These Ugly-Ass Dogs, From the World's Ugliest Dog Contest

This is runner-up Sweepee Rambo. Congratulations to all the participants.


All photos via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

The Gawker Review Weekend Reading List [6.27.15]

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The Gawker Review Weekend Reading List [6.27.15]

“We won’t die secret deaths anymore,” begins Prior Walter in the final moment of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about AIDS and gay love in New York City circa 1985. “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come... You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More life. The Great Work begins.” Friday—as the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide—the US moved forward in its fight to grant equal rights to all citizens. Ever forward.


“Why the SCOTUS Ruling on Gay Marriage Feels So Good” by Rich Juzwiak

I can’t help but be happiest, though, about the defeat of the anti-marriage equality crusaders. The defeat of people who signed up to lose, who wasted their time and ours on a platform of animus and contempt. The defeat of people who put principle over the practical, who fought to preserve their limited understanding of an already imperfect institution over the actual human lives that would benefit from it. The defeat of people who did what bigots do: discriminate, vilify, fear-monger, argue irrationally and without respect to human dignity, and then bristle when they’re called out for what they are (bigots).

http://gawker.com/why-the-scotus...

“The True Story of a Texas Prison Riot” by Seth Freed Wessler

The Willacy County Correctional Center in Raymondville, Texas, is now empty. As of late May, a single security guard sat in a small car in the entrance to the parking lot. It has been like this since prisoners so ransacked the facilities in a February riot, cutting and burning holes in the Kevlar domes that held them, that the Federal Bureau of Prisons declared it “uninhabitable.” The agency moved the inmates to other prisons and declined to renew its contract with the private corrections company that ran the facility. Nearly all of the 400 employees were terminated.

Willacy’s operating company, Management & Training Corp., says the riot was plotted by inmates and was unavoidable; the SWAT team it deployed to control inmates, a measured response to prisoner unrest. This version of the story, which has circulated in the press since the days after the riot, is at best a partial truth, and one that obscures the company’s own aggression. A fuller account of the events at Willacy points to deep problems with the federal government’s management of a soaring population of immigrants it incarcerates for border crimes.

http://www.thenation.com/article/210449...

“I Don’t Believe in God, but I Believe in Lithium” by Jamie Lowe

Lithium, a mood stabilizer that can help stop and prevent manic cycles, is usually the first medication tried with bipolar patients; it’s effective for most of them. Including me. I was discharged and sent back to high school with an apple-size bruise on my hip. For two decades since then, I have been taking lithium almost continuously. It has curbed my mania, my depression and, most significant, the wild delusional cycles that have taken me from obsessing over the value of zero to creating a hippie cult (my uniform: bell-bottoms, psychedelic sports bra and body glitter, head to toe). As long as I take those three pink lithium-carbonate capsules every day, I can function. If I don’t, I will be riding on top of subway cars measuring speed and looking for light in elevated realms.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/mag...

“Black Churches Taught Us to Forgive White People. We Learned to Shame Ourselves” by Kiese Laymon

My problem with church was that I knew what could have been. Every other Wednesday – and Grandma took me with her most of the time – the older women of the church had something called Home Mission: they would meet at alternate houses, and bring food, their Bibles, notebooks and their testimonies. There was no set music at Home Mission, but those women, Grandma’s friends, used their lives and their Bibles as primary texts to boast, confess and critique their way into tearful song every single time. They revealed the partial truths of their lives, connected those partial truths to everyone in that room, wandered in some of the closets of those partial truths, and wondered if those partial truths held for women not in the room. They made space for everyone listening to share.

Long before I wanted to write like Morrison, Baldwin or Andre 3000, I wanted to write like the women in Home Mission spoke to each other. Their word was black love.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/...

“The Flies in Kehinde Wiley’s Milk” by Vinson Cunningham

If reflection, recognition, representation—so often identified with Wiley’s work—comprised its entire attraction, I’d be grateful for its existence, in the same way that I’m grateful for the existence of, say, Tyler Perry. Mere existence is a real and valuable politics, one whose importance shouldn’t be underestimated. But this, for me, is where the difficulty starts with Wiley: If his paintings have any value as art qua art, that value lies in something else—his best paintings read as jokes.

http://www.theawl.com/2015/06/the-fl...

“It’s 2015 and the Dominican Republic Is Ethnically Cleansing Itself” by Judnick Mayard

Memory is as short as history is violent. Less than a century ago, this same country staged a massacre against this same group of black people. In 1937, the dictator Trujillo ordered millions of Haitian—a.k.a. black—folks in the country slaughtered, for the same euphemistic reason: “overflow.” At the time, the racist litmus test was your pronunciation of perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, which requires a rolling of the rs. In French and Creole, the “r” sound is made with the throat, not the tongue; it was impossible for the Haitians. Some estimate that 20,000 of them died in the Parsley Massacre, many of them Dominican families. The event is so relatively recent that the time period of this new clause predates it. People who survived that—or were born in the aftermath of it—are now once again being hunted and uprooted.

http://jezebel.com/its-2015-and-t...

“Dumber Thank Your Average Bear” by Wesley Morris

But MacFarlane — writing once again with Wellesley Wild and Alec Sulkin — isn’t sophisticated or honest enough to unpack his sexual and racial fantasies and hangups. He just spews them. Ted becoming a person includes the acquiring of a surname. He chooses Clubber Lang, after the villain Mr. T played in Rocky III. Samantha’s full name turns out to be Sam L. Jackson, but she’s been too busy getting high and studying the law to know who that is. Either way, her cluelessness is the premise for a series of limp jokes predicated upon racial ignorance.

As a filmmaker, MacFarlane makes a show of how easy it is to assume a black affiliation and cherry-pick from black cultural and political history. America just rode a wave of speculation and revulsion over Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who’s been living for years as a black one. With MacFarlane, the appropriation is both too much and not enough. Dolezal has remained committed to her performance. She believes she is what she says she is. But MacFarlane doesn’t appear to believe in anything. He just likes to mess around with things that still have value without seeming to get whether that value is greater than his jokes. It’s as if he doesn’t really know what he’s laughing at or care what race and sexuality and gender are. It’s as if he doesn’t know women or black people — just white comedy writers who love to make fun of them.

http://grantland.com/features/dumbe...

[Image via Getty]

David Crosby: Joni Mitchell Had an Aneurysm, 'Is Not Speaking'

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David Crosby: Joni Mitchell Had an Aneurysm, 'Is Not Speaking'

During an interview with HuffPost Live, David Crosby said that Joni Mitchell has suffered an aneurysm and, to his knowledge, has lost her ability to speak. “She took a terrible hit. She had an aneurysm, and nobody found her for a while,” Crosby said. “And she’s going to have to struggle back from it the way you struggle back from a traumatic brain injury.”

In May, Billboard reported that Mitchell had suffered an aneurysm, a report that conflicted with an update from her website indicating that she simply had a “minor medical emergency.” The last official statement from Mitchell, which also came from her website, stated that the singer is fully aware and in possession of her “full senses”

Crosby remains hopeful even though he hasn’t seen or spoken to Mitchell: “She’s probably the best of us — probably the greatest living singer-songwriter. ... We’re all holding our breath and thinking a good thought, hoping that it’s going to turn out okay.” [Huffington Post]


David Crosby: Joni Mitchell Had an Aneurysm, 'Is Not Speaking'

Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris have replaced Beyonce and Jay Z, stealing their throne and crowning themselves as the richest celebrity couple. Forbes named Swift and Harris the world’s highest-paid celebrity couple in 2015. The two earned a combined $146 million, while Bey and Jay earned a paltry $110.5 million. The report indicates that Harris is the world’s “highest-paid DJ,” a phrase that induces both giggles and quizzical looks. [Us Weekly]


David Crosby: Joni Mitchell Had an Aneurysm, 'Is Not Speaking'

Rita Ora recently told British tabloid The Sun, that Chris Brown isn’t the terrible, no good person that everyone thinks he is. “[He’s] strong, powerful, and someone that is important to me personally and professionally,” Ora said while defending her collaboration with the terrible person. “He’s a good person with a good heart and a lovely family,” she added. Ora also alluded to the “discrimination” Brown has faced since beating a woman and being arrested multiple times: “the discrimination and all what people think? If you have a great song then no one cares.” Ora is right, there is no greater salvation for terrible people than a “great song” and a little bit of celebrity. [Just Jared]


  • Ke$ha would like to officiate a gay wedding. $he’s already ordained, so if you’re looking to get hitched, give her a call. If Ke$ha officiates your wedding, please e-mail us. [Just Jared]
  • Marcus Grodd and Lacy Faddoul, some people from The Bachelor, secretly got married. [Us Weekly]
  • Kim Kardashian thought her career was over after her divorce from Kris Humphries. [Us Weekly]
  • Here’s the trailer for Tom Hardy’s new gangster movie, Legend. [People]
  • Wyclef Jean isn’t pleased with Donald Trump. [TMZ]
  • Someone has decided to turn the O.C. into a musical. [People]
  • According to Chrissy Teigen, John Legend is an old man. [E!]
  • Tracy Morgan was out and about in New York. [E!]
  • Happy birthday to the world’s most talented baby, Ariana Grande! [Gossip Cop]

Images via Getty.

At Least 150 Dead After ISIS Sneak Into Kobani on "Suicide Mission"

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At Least 150 Dead After ISIS Sneak Into Kobani on "Suicide Mission"

Islamic State fighters have killed more than 150 people in Kobani and nearby villages in the past two days, the New York Times reports. After sneaking into the town disguised as local rebels. ISIS militants set off car bombs and gunned down civilians in the street.

According to the Times, about 100 ISIS fighters, reportedly disguised as members of the Kurdish YPG militia and other Syrian rebel groups, entered the town, from which they had been driven in January, around dawn on Thursday.

“They entered the neighborhoods and started killing civilians on their way,” Baran Mesko, a Kurdish activist in Kobani, said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that ISIS “fired at anything that moved.”

“From yesterday morning at 4 a.m., Daesh sneaked in and started killing in their silent way,” a Kurdish fighter, Simyar Sheikhi, told the Times.

Many civilians were killed in the cross-fire, as Kurdish militia fighters fought back; others were killed in their homes, or randomly targeted by Islamic State snipers. The Associated Press reports that, by some estimates, as many as 200 civilians have been killed in the fighting since Thursday.

Kurdish fighters said they had secured the town by Saturday. The attack was “a suicide mission,” Redur Xelil, a spokesman for the Kurdish YPG militia told Reuters. “Its aim wasn’t to take the city but to create terror.”


Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

At Least One Injured in Fire at Upper West Side High-Rise Building

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At Least One Injured in Fire at Upper West Side High-Rise Building

On Saturday afternoon, a fire could be seen raging in The Avery, a high-rise building on the Upper West Side, near Riverside Boulevard. NBC News reports that one person was injured, and the fire has been contained.

NBC News reports that, according to the FDNY, the fire started on a terrace on the 21st floor of the high-rise building on West End Avenue near 65th Street.

Trump Place—not to be confused with Trump Palacespans eleven blocks on the west side of Manhattan. While the condo building still bears its developer’s name, the Trump Organization was fired in 2012 as manager of the complex and replaced with AKAM Living Services.

Eleven people were injured in an earlier fire at Trump Place, in 2012.

Update, 2:55 p.m. – An earlier version of this post misidentified the building as part of the surrounding Trump Place. From NBC:

FDNY officials initially referred to the building as a “Trump Tower,” but the building is called The Avery and does not appear to have a connection to Donald Trump. Several nearby buildings are known as Trump Place.


Image via Sophie Morello/Twitter. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

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