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Breakfast Scramble (Wednesday)

DavidL's Breakfast Scramble
To Kill a constitution, one does not have to truly brain dead to post for the Puffington Post, but it seems to help.  Amanda Terkel, link [1]:

WASHINGTON — The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not protect against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

[…]

For the record, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Marcia Greenberger, founder and co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, called the justice’s comments “shocking” and said he was essentially saying that if the government sanctions discrimination against women, the judiciary offers no recourse

If the Fourteenth was taken to apply to discrimination on the basis of sex, we would have not have to bother with adopting the Nineteenth Amendment to extend the vote to women, nor would the nags have felt the urge push the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment.   Further, the all male draft would have surely been unconstitutional.

Fifty three percent of the nation is female.  Will the nags simply shut up and quit acting like an unempowered minority.

To Kill a classic, from Mark Schultz, Publishers Weekly [2]:

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of “all modern American literature.” Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation’s most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: “nigger.”

Twain himself defined a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read.” Rather than see Twain’s most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the “n” word (as well as the “in” word, “Injun”) by replacing it with the word “slave.”

from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 32, via Literature.org [3]:

I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up — from down towards Orleans. That didn’t help me much, though; for I didn’t know the names of bars down that way. I see I’d got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on — or — Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out:

“It warn’t the grounding — that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and crippled a man. And I think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember now, he DID die

Sure the word nigger is offensive, and to use it is to identify the speaker as a racist.   Which is exactly the author’s intent, to tag both Huck and Aunt Sally as racists.   After all Huck Finn is not about a raft trip down the Mississippi.   It is an anal examination of a racist culture.   We can never learn our history by disneyfying iit.

More, Johnathan Turley [4]:

Would we rewrite Faulkner as well? How about all of the modern movies and books using this term as part of modern urban speech? Authors write to capture characters who are often racist or living in racist times. This publisher may billed itself as the “NewSouth” but this book was written about the Old South.  To sanitize history or literature is an act of violence against the artistic work of these authors.

Tho those who would censor the likes of Clemens, or Faulkner:  Literature, you can’t handle literature.  Best stick to the Disney Channel.