RBG to the Fullest.

While Ruth Bader Ginsburg's body lays in state at the Capitol, the world is turning. We are at our breaking point but I hope you feel like me. I don't feel any more broken than I did before she met the sky. Sure, sometimes I numbly enter the zoom code for my kid's remote learning class. But I have been doing this for months. We are, after all, in the middle of a pandemic.

My worry list includes huge things, such as how we got to a point where climate fires are becoming the norm along our west coast. It also includes smaller things, like how are my small children supposed to make new friends over Zoom? (They're not). How are we supposed to go on like this? What. Went. Wrong.

So many things went wrong to get us here. There's also that little bit of truth called bad luck. That the new pandemic is airborne probably falls into the latter category.

Nonetheless, here we are.

What I'd like to say tonight is inspired by a podcast I recently listened to. It was two great minds sitting together. Mayor Pete Buttigieg started a podcast called "The Deciding Decade." Glennon Doyle was one of his first guests and they talked about patriotism, feminism, queerness. Love. In the midst of their conversation Glennon said something really deep and revealing that is especially timeless as we lay Ruth Bader Ginsburg's soul to rest.

"White women make a deal with the devil early on. And it's not conscious. Somewhere early on, we decide that we will accept our proximity to power, and all the comfort and safety and belonging that that will get us. But in exchange we will never ask for our own power. We will stay quiet and grateful and accommodating. We will accept things like the protection and safety the police offers us, but we will never look "over there," and ask what the police are doing to them. We will go into our kids' elementary school and ask for 9 ipads for each of our kids, but we will not turn our heads and ask why the school down the road does not have clean water." (Glennon Doyle).

Ruth Bader Ginsburg pioneered really basic issues like women being able to have credit in their own names (Equal Opportunity Act of 1974). She also used her dissenting voice to change laws, such as equal pay (Ledbetter v. Goodyear, 2007 dissent). She fought for women to be able to work while pregnant without discrimination, serve on juries and of course, she was the deciding swing vote in Obergefell v. Hodges which allowed for same sex marriage in the United States of America.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg very clearly cannot be replaced. But.

White women whose proximity to power blinds them to their own inalienable rights over their - over our - bodies are unfit for a Supreme Court appointment.

And that is who Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell will jam through the process.

So we need to accept this. She will be a white woman in her 40s who is meant to serve on the Court for a long time. She is designed to unravel the rights that Ruth Bader Ginsburg fought for. The expectation that her jurisprudence will dangle as a partisan political statement in the Book of the United States History is all but certain. She will not believe in the fundamental separation of Church and State. In fact, she will commingle her own Christian religious beliefs and exert her white, straight privilege over those who need their non-Christian, non-straight, non-white liberty protected the most. We can despair about these facts. Aren't we Americans, after all? Don't we embrace liberty and progress? Not this time, my friends. Not this time.

We must breathe deeply and accept this truth. This misguided white woman who seeks to quash even her own liberties will be given a powerful position as a reward for betraying herself and her sisterhood. This damaging incumbent president is either gone in January or he's gone four years from now. But she will be here until death. We cannot change this.

Our job is going to be to help all of our sisters, including this new religious right woman on the Supreme Court, to understand how her brainwash has hurt her, regardless of the law journal articles she published, the classes she taught, the clerkships she performed, or the title she had at the law firm she worked for before being chosen for this honorable duty to our country.

As long as you are a woman in the world; doesn't matter if you are a Supreme Court Justice or a Prime Minister, or a wealthy noble, celebrity, banker, educator, delivery person, or cleaning person. If you don't have agency over your own body; your own health decisions. -- you are lost. You are breathing in the hypnotic paralysis of white male privilege to your own detriment and to the detriment of all who come next.

But we are here to help. And even if we can't bring her to a place of freedom and light, the almighty sisterhood of those of us who are growing into all stages of life will benefit from our voices. We are resolute and we will not stop telling her she is wrong. We have energy beyond bounds. And we've got plenty of time left. We might also cry and zombie our way through the hard parts of the pandemic and the seemingly apocalyptic events of 2020. But we will not lose our resolve. Even if we fail to stare down this one lost woman's religious dogma, we can make hers the last voice of dissent for our, for her, rights. And most important, there are others. In this case, there are eight others. We can fight for their souls as well.