Tuesday, November 11, 2008 - Posts
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My dad, who died one year and five days ago, was a Korean War vet; he volunteered for the Navy at 16, lying about his age. It was not something he ever mentioned. He once told me that talking about war inevitably glorifies it, and that he refused to do. But he always carefully displayed the flag on days that honored the nation—Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and, of course, Inauguration Day (even for Richard Nixon, whom he loathed).
While he was dying, brutally and painfully and slowly, of bladder cancer, a consequence of the nicotine addiction he had kicked more than 30 years before (lungs recover from smoking but not the bladder—who knew?), we spent a lot of time just sitting around together in front of the TV. That’s when I found out that, every day, my father made sure that we listened in silence when names of the American soldiers who had died in Iraq were read aloud. If we missed it on TV, he himself would read it aloud from the paper. He hated the Iraq war, believing it was wasteful and destructive, both of their (the Iraqis’) country and of ours; he despised Bush for getting us into it, and for many other things. But we had to stop in quiet respect for those who had lost their lives in their country’s employ.
After he died, my stepmother pulled out a box of his medals—maybe a dozen, carefully displayed under glass. My three sibs and I were shocked. We had been given no hint that these existed. He wouldn’t tell her what some of them were for. We tried looking them up on the Web. Maybe he’d been downed in a top-secret mission behind North Korean lines. Or maybe he just wouldn’t talk about those medals lest doing so would glorify war.
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Yesterday the Supreme Court heard a case about the reach of the Federal Gun Control Act and whether it includes someone convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence. The case was less about the Second Amendment than how to read a badly drafted 1996 law that tried to take guns out of the hands of domestic abusers convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence as opposed to violent felonies. Courtesy of the LA Times' David Savage, here’s a report of oral argument, which evidently went poorly for the proponents of disarming wife beaters. Of note in the transcript is the following exchange between Justice Antonin Scalia and Nicole Saharsky, the Justice Department lawyer arguing for the stricter interpretation of the law.
JUSTICE SCALIA: And this was misdemeanor assault and battery, wasn't it?
MS. SAHARSKY: Yes, that's right. I mean, I really—
JUSTICE SCALIA: So it's not that serious an offense. That's why we call it a misdemeanor.
MS. SAHARSKY: Well, I mean, certainly the offense is this particular case was serious. The charging document reflects that Respondent hit his wife all around the face until it swelled out, kicked her all around her body, kicked here in the ribs—
JUSTICE SCALIA: Then he should have been charged with a felony, but he wasn't. He was charged with a misdemeanor.
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