It is a cruel trick of chronology that when we lose those who have been blessed with great longevity, they have no remaining contemporaries to laud their good deeds. Such is the case after the passing on Monday of Richard Firestone at the age of 98. Born Aug. 7, 1913, Firestone first came to Delaware to attend Ohio Wesleyan University. There he met his future wife, Ruth, a prolific artist. They were married in 1936 and Dick headed off to law school at the University of Cincinnati. He was admitted to the Ohio bar on Aug. 11, 1939, just weeks prior to the start of World War II.
It has been quite an eventful week for the issue of same-sex marriage. On Wednesday the Washington state legislature approved a bill to permit same sex marriages in the state and Governor Chris Gregoire has said that she will sign the bill making Washington the seventh state to permit marriages between individuals of the same sex. In a poll taken just days before, citizens of Washington said that if there was a ballot initiative to overturn the law, they would vote to uphold it by a margin of 55–38.
Lucy Langston and Ralph Quarles loved one another. Their relationship had been going on for several years and Quarles intended to have Lucy move in with him and expand their family. But Lucy and Ralph could not let neighbors know about their relationship and they most certainly could not marry.
When is a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court not really a unanimous decision at all? When do two Justices who usually agree take to calling each other’s arguments a ‘distortion’, ‘highly artificial’, and having ‘little if any support.’ When is a minority opinion really the majority opinion? The answer to each of those questions can found in a decision released by the United States Supreme Court on Monday. In one of the more anticipated decisions of the term, the Supreme Court had to determine whether law enforcement agents can perform electronic surveillance on a suspect by placing a GPS device on the suspect’s vehicle and tracking his movements. The government argued that because the GPS device was attached in a public place there was no intrusion and therefore no search warrant was necessary.
There are a handful of landmark Supreme Court cases that Americans can cite by name. Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona and Bush v. Gore are among the cases whose names are as well known as their rulings. There are other cases whose holdings are well known even though their names are not.
Church schools can be found in nearly every community in America and Redford, Mich., is no exception. Along with the many public schools in the charter township of 48,000 people, the Catholic church runs two schools and the Lutheran church operates a school through the Hosanna-Tabor church.
President Obama was in Ohio this week, speaking in the Cleveland area about the state of the nation’s economy. He surprised reporters (and no doubt Congressional Republicans as well) when he announced that he was appointing former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as head of the new federal consumer financial protection bureau.
It was a fascinating Christmas. Among the presents I received were a bacon cookbook, a bacon candy bar and a spectacular T-shirt that says, “Bacon is a vegetable” on the front of it. Clearly, my family has realized that I really like bacon. The candy bar is already gone and I’ll certainly be wearing the shirt and using the cookbook, but if you weren’t as fortunate in the gift department, you might just be heading back to the store to return some of your gifts.
