Today’s court ruling weakening discrimination protections for LGBTQ people stands out as extraordinarily strange to me for the simple fact that there was no case. The web designer in question never received a request to create a website for a gay wedding, but instead argued that a hypothetical situation in which she did would violate her rights. I’ve never really heard of anything like this before— how does she even have standing to sue? Can @radiofreederry or someone with more knowledge of legalese than me elaborate on this?
In this latest case, there is no website and no wedding—just an argument from an anti-LGBTQ group in search of the court’s favor…
No person has hired Smith to create a wedding website. In fact, Smith has never designed a wedding website, according to her petition to the court. As such, there is no client Smith has told she is rejecting due to her stated religious beliefs that marriage is only allowed between one man and one woman. In the absence of all that, ADF has, instead, fashioned Smith as the victim of an injury that has never occurred.
So who has hypothetically victimized Smith? A Colorado anti-discrimination law, which, since 2008, has included protections from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. ADF claims Smith’s desire “to bring glory to God by creating unique expression that shares her religious beliefs of creating wedding websites” is thwarted by this law “because she only wants to make websites that comport with her values that same-sex marriage is illegitimate.” Were Smith to get into the wedding website business, the anti-discrimination law “would force me to say things about marriage I disagree with,” Smith wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Times, when her case was argued at the Supreme Court last December…
Can the court rule on thought experiments?
I’ve been going insane about this because it seems to me that there would literally be no standing in this case. I think I need to dig deeper into this because I feel like this should have been thrown out several courts down for simple failure to state a claim on which relief may be sought, and surely the defense should have been able to figure that out no later than the discovery phase of the initial action.
It looks like the ADF is arguing that the case counts as a “Pre-enforcement challenge,” because Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus (2014) found that “An allegation of future injury may suffice if the threatened injury is ‘certainly impending,’ or there is a 'substantial risk’ that the harm will occur.” So she would likely have standing to sue if there were “substantial risk” she’d be put into her hypothetical situation. But how can she be at “substantial risk” of having someone ask her to make a gay wedding website when she’s never made a wedding website before? This whole thing stretches credulity
It’s incredibly contrived! The plaintiff is not and has not been in the business of designing wedding websites, and the only evidence that they may be asked to do so is fabricated! It’s one of the most flagrant examples of conservative legislating from the bench that I’ve ever seen.
“[Aeneas] tells Achates to fetch some gifts as well, plucked from the ruins of Troy: a gown stiff with figures stitched in gold, and a woven veil with yellow sprays of acanthus round the border. Helen’s glory, gifts she carried out of Mycenae, fleeing Argos for Troy to seal her wicked marriage— the marvelous handiwork of Helen’s mother, Leda.”
– Aeneid 1.647-52, trans. Fagles
“Acanthus often has a special binary significance, serving to mediate between life and death, and most likely contributed to the plant’s popularity in funerary contexts … Perhaps the most important animal motif on the Ara Pacis is the snake that is about to consume fledglings huddled together in a nest directly below the great acanthus calyx. Symbolically, the snake and the nestlings recall the omen prefiguring the fall of Troy, out of whose ashes arose Rome.”
– From Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion, and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome, John Pollini
Dido … clambers in frenzy up the soaring pyre and unsheathes a sword, a Trojan sword she once sought as a gift, but not for such an end. …
her women see her doubled over the sword, the blood foaming over the blade, her hands splattered red.
…
sobs, and grief, and the wails of women ringing out through homes, and the heavens echo back the keening din— for all the world as if enemies stormed the walls and all of Carthage or old Tyre were toppling down and flames in their fury, wave on mounting wave were billowing over the roofs of men and gods.
I love all of Les Amis, but their introductory paragraphs have also been pretty thoroughly analyzed - @everyonewasabird and @fremedon have pretty comprehensive posts on them from previous Brickclubs. Rather than go through them individually, then, I’ll try to point out some general trends that would be relevant to Marius (given that we meet them as soon as he’s kicked out of his house, we can assume there’s a connection):
The first major issue is the legacy of the French Revolution (1789) and the Terror (1793). All of the characters we meet here (with the exception of Grantaire) are attached to the legacy of the former, but they’re divided over the latter. Enjolras, for instance, is compared to Saint-Just – a more radical figure from that time period – and with his “warlike nature” and link to the “revolutionary apocalypse,” he’s definitely more in the tradition of ‘93 than ‘89, even if he’s attached to both. Combeferre, on the other hand, fears that kind of violence, only finding it acceptable if the only alternative is for things to stay the same. Like Marius’ newfound Bonapartism, all of their ideas come out of the clash and evolution of thought after the Revolution and the French Empire under Napoleon, placing each Ami in a similar position to him as they work out their ideas. All of them, though, came to a different conclusion than Marius, prioritizing the Republic over the Empire. At the same time, they’re all distinct from each other, too, revealing the diversity in French republican thought. With his limited exposure to political ideas outside of royalism (and now, idolization of Napoleon), the myriad veins of republicanism that the Amis offer broaden up the political sphere of the novel significantly.
On top of that, they’re a group; they can learn from each other in a way that Marius hasn’t had a chance to. Even Grantaire, who claims to not believe in anything, has friends, and while he distances himself from specific ideologies, his jokes illustrate that he’s familiar with them (for example: “He sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles”). Marius doesn’t have friends or people to really work through ideas with. Oddly enough, the most similar structure to this that we’ve seen so far is the royalist salon. The key difference (aside from the obvious) is the chance to learn from different perspectives, whether that’s based on variations in republicanism, in priorities (conflict vs education, the local vs the international), or both. They’re not even all defined by their politics. Courfeyrac (who easily has the most insulting character introduction in the book) is defined by his character and personality first, with his political ideas mainly being a given from his participation in this group. These variations in emphasis, then, not only show us the diversity of their views, but the varying intensities with which they hold them (as in, you could talk to Courfeyrac about something that isn’t political, but you couldn’t do that with Enjolras) and how they’re kept together in spite of their disagreements (a common goal – a Republic – and many fun and socially savvy members). All of these factors serve to give a sense of liveliness as well, contrasting sharply with the “phantoms” of the royalist salon.
Les Amis aren’t very diverse class-wise, but they’re still better than the salon. Bahorel and Feuilly, at least, aren’t bourgeois or aristocrats.
Feuilly also brings us to the international level, far beyond Marius’ early attempts at imagining himself as part of a country. Focusing on the partition of Poland in particular, Feuilly advocates for national self-determination in all lands under imperial rule. The idea that a people should govern themselves was key to republican thought more broadly in that time (nationalism really took shape in the 18th-19th centuries), but to Feuilly, this isn’t just an issue of nationalism, but of tyranny:
“There has not been a despot, nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed, approved, counter-signed, and copied, ne variatur, the partition of Poland.”
The word “despot” ties this back to France in a way, with his rejection of despotism as it affects Poland possibly implying a similar anger at the same phenomenon in France. The Bourbons at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 were, after all, the same Bourbons who ruled during the Restoration.
A quick note on Lesgle: I didn’t get the joke around “Bossuet” the first time I read this book. Then, I had to take a class on the French monarchy, and I was assigned a text by Bossuet of Meaux, court preacher to Louis XIV and fierce proponent of absolutism. His name seemed familiar, but it took me a while to think to check Les Mis? And now I think calling Lesgle Bossuet because he’s Lesgle (like l’aigle=eagle) of Meaux is one of the funniest jokes in this book.
Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always harshly treated by Enjolras, roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning to the charge, he said of Enjolras: “What fine marble!” -3.4.1
“The Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy. This statue was from the hand of the Greek sculptor Strongylion, who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the Beautiful Leg, Eucnemos, which Nero carried with him in his travels. This Strongylion left but two statues which placed Nero and Brutus in accord. Brutus was in love with the one, Nero with the other. All history is nothing but wearisome repetition. One century is the plagiarist of the other.”- Grantaire, 3.4.4
“hahah wow can you believe these guys, falling in love with statues that would definitely never love them back. What chumps. –Hey no reason but d'you ever think about how we keep making the same damn mistakes ,just humanity in general, not talking about myself specifically of course–”
yknow sue me but I feel like this isn’t actually true
hey we aren’t told that isn’t his name
maybe that’s why Enjolras has so much faith in Marius as a potential revolutionary. a subconscious belief that sharing a name will unite them for the cause.
His full name is Jean-Combeferre Jean-Prouvaire Jean-Feuilly Jean-Courfeyrac Jean-Bahorel Jean-Legle Jean-Joly Jean-Grantaire Marius-Pontmercy Enjolras.
Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart
“No I can’t come out tonight I’m sobbing about this entomologist’s heartfelt plea for someone to care about an endangered moth”
This is how I learn there’s a moth whose tiny caterpillars live exclusively off the old shells of dead tortoises.
[Image description: text from a section titled On Being Endangered: An Afterthought that says:
Realizing that a species is imperiled has broad connotations, given that it tells us something about the plight of nature itself. It reminds us of the need to implement conservation measures and to protect the region of which the species is a part. But aside form the broader picture, species have intrinsic worth and are deserving of preservation. Surely an oddity such as C. vicinella cannot simply be allowed to vanish.
We should speak up on behalf of this little moth, not only because by so doing we would bolster conservation efforts now underway in Florida, [highlighting begins] but because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing. [end highlighting]
But is quaintness all that can be said on behalf of this moth? Does this insect not have hidden value beyond its overt appeal? Does not its silk and glue add, potentially, to its worth? Could these products not be unique in ways that could ultimately prove applicable?
End image description]
because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing
I was so inspired by this I made it into a piece of art for a final in one of my courses for storytelling in conservation
Thank you so much for creating this. One thing I really love about this website is that when any traditionally unlovable species in danger of slipping into history as a barely acknowledged footnote, there are always people here who will take the time to learn about them and love them. To me, that is the internet at its most beautiful.
If you didn’t already send this to authors Dr. Mark and Nancy Deyrup I have a feeling they would really love to see it. I would be happy to email it to them and credit it you if you are comfortable with that, though of course I completely understand if you would rather keep it here on Tumblr. Thank you so much for sharing it with all of us!
ALT
