This week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Sept. 18, becomes the first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol — after a life breaking so many barriers for women. Thinking about her life over the past week, I’ve realized how many of the things I take for granted began with her work. As a woman, I can have a credit card in my name, open a bank account, and buy a house through a mortgage without a husband's signature. I can also inherit land, and I am protected from being fired if I become pregnant, none of which was possible for every woman in the United States before the 1970s. While Ginsburg was not personally involved in every single new right that women gained after 1970, almost all of them can point to the 1971 Supreme Court case Reed v. Reed, for which she wrote the brief. The step-by-step progress ever since can be a guide as we press ever further.
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Adam Russell Taylor
Breonna Taylor’s life mattered. Her life was precious and it was beloved by God. Yet the decision by the grand jury in Jefferson County, Ky., painfully says otherwise. Breonna Taylor’s name didn’t even appear in Wednesday’s indictment against Brett Hankison, which raises alarming questions about what case the attorney general made to defend the value of her life. The decision exposes the value gap in our justice system that so often dismisses and degrades the value of Black life and treats police recklessness and misconduct with impunity. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron failed to explain why Hankison felt it was necessary to shoot wildly and blindly into the apartment from the parking lot or the details around how this seemingly faulty no-knock warrant was obtained and executed in the first place.
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