Who doesn’t love kissing a baby? They’re cute, they’re cuddly, they make fun noises and, as long as they’re not spitting up on you, they remind you of the amazing wonder of life.
A front-page story in last week’s Delaware Gazette noted the adoption of a contract for “respite” services for juveniles. The story incorrectly reported that the contract was for $110,000 rather than its actual value of just $10,000 (the Gazette kindly printed a correction the following day) and the article didn’t have the space to go into the reasons behind the use of respite care and the source of the funding used to provide it.
Jennifer had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Formerly an above-average student with no disciplinary problems, she had begun to get in trouble at school. Her grades were slipping. Frequently she did not come home when her parents told her to and for long stretches of the day they could not locate her and she would not respond to their phone calls or text messages. Then she began skipping school. Her mother or father would drive her to the front door and watch her go inside, but within an hour they’d have a call from the school office that she was not in the building and had not reported to class. As her behavior become more and more unusual they become convinced that drug use was the root cause. More worrisome even than that, they had begun to notice marks on her arms and face.
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.