This started as a comment in APR, but I figured I needed to say it to anybody who will read it, especially given a few pretty angry comments I posted right after RBG passed.
I’ve had a couple days to process my feelings about RBG.
Part of me is still mad at her for putting us in this position on top of everything else, but I’m madder at the 2016 and 2014 voters that really put us here.
A conversation with my wife struck me though, and I realized that basically everything I believe about what it means to be a modern American woman came out of the decision portrayed in the movie “On Basis of Sex”. I was raised by a single mother, so was my wife. Our assumptions about what it meant for career, role of both spouses in a relationship etc were based on the idea that gender roles were bullshit. Hell, my search for a life companion started with “I want to marry my best friend” not anything else. Society didn’t agree and my wife faced many barriers I didn’t in her career, and a different bunch of barriers one she became disabled and dealt with the medical biases against conditions and illnesses “only women get”. But it didn’t affect what WE believed. Had she not become disabled when we were still deciding if we wanted kids and we decided to start a family, I would have been the one to be the stay-at-home or if both working “do most of the childrearing”. I’m more temperentially suited to childcare than she is.
Without RBG? Maybe we would have been raised, even with our single, independent mothers, in 1950s bullshit. Our whole lives would have been different. We probably wouldn’t have met (we wouldn’t have met without the Usenet — our online relationship predated the Internet by about 5 years, but that’s another time travel counterfactual we laugh at. Even with Usenet it was still very improbable that our paths crossed and it would not have if her family didn’t think becoming a scientist was something a woman should do).
My conscious opionion of RBG is based entirely on her time in the Supreme Court, I was unaware of her real impact on our world which came when she was a lawyer. As a Justice she was always in the minority, always basically playing a losing hand. You get an occasional victory and a bunch of defeats, that same depressing ratchet where Aspirational America has been steadily dismantled over the past 50 years, my entire life. Where the victories lay were similar to the one that so profoundly affected my life. At least in the more cosmopolitan cities embracing diversity of culture, religion, race, gender identity, who you love etc is where we got closer to Aspirational America in my lifetime.
So it never really occurred to me until she was gone how profoundly she affected my life, and the lives of those I love the most. (my mom, sister, mother in law and wife are all going strong and each and every one had careers and lives that would not have been possible without destruction of the gender-role based laws that RBG accomplished as a laywer).
So yeah, I can now get over the fact that RBG was at the end of a fight she couldn’t win by force of arms (she was never in a court that had anything but a 5-4 majority or worse against her) but only by persuasion, taking the wins where she could get it. Perhaps when Obama was in power she didn’t think he’d replace her with somebody that had her unique skills in that area. Maybe she wanted to be replaced by the first female president. She rolled the dice on those fronts and lost, and we’re in a tougher spot now because of it.
However honestly, a 5-4 R majority on the court or 6-3 or 5-3 don't change anything we have to do to save our Republic. Even in an alternate world where Garland was seated and we had a majority until she died we’d still be in the spot where if Trump wins and we don’t take the Senate back this Republic is done and the court composition won’t really matter (Trump is already ignoring Supreme Court rulings — see DACA and various immigration rulings — kids are still being separated, new citizens still aren’t being sworn in etc)
Thanks for everybody who was patient with me while I was working through the anger. I can now celebrate the fact that I wouldn’t have lived the life I did, with the woman I just celebrated a 20 year anniversary with (and our relationship goes back 30 years total...we took a while to get married) without RBG changing the world when she was decades younger than I am now. Nothing I have done or ever will do can compare to the impact she had on my life, a person she never knew existed.