How the Bros Saved Feminism

In 1972, the fraternity brothers of Lambda Chi at Oklahoma State University had a little problem.  Like most frat bros, they liked to get drunk.  I'm not talking about a little drunk.  I'm talking about the kind of drunk where throwing your buddy into a wall seems like polite conversation.  I'm talking about the kind of drunk where running a lawnmower up and down the hallway seems like a good idea.  There was just one little problem.  At the time Oklahoma had a strange law where men had to be 21 to buy beer, but women only had to be 18.  For a large number of the Lambda Chi bros, if they wanted to get drunk they had to be nice as hell to their girlfriends, sisters, or any other random member of the female gender that might be willing to use their state given benefit to bless them with the most delicious of suds.  Oklahoma's theory behind the law was that women, being as they claimed the weaker and gentler of the sexes, were much less likely to be involved in wild booze fueled shenanigans.  Well, it goes without saying that the Lambda Chi bros thought this was total bullshit, and by some miracle a few even had the gumption to try and do something about it.

After being challenged by an old fogey professor to either get off their asses or quit their bitching, a few of the bros decided to challenge the law in court.  To strengthen their case, they convinced the owner of a local beer store, called the Honk'n'Holler, to join the lawsuit.  By which I mean they just kind of lied to the owner about what they were truly up to.  The fraternity then raised enough money to hire a less than skilled good old boy lawyer, who filed a lawsuit with the local district court claiming that the state law discriminated against men between the ages of 18 and 21.  Things went about as well as you can expect.  The case was dismissed.

Now that might have been the end of it, but it’s at this point in the story that Ruth Bader Ginsberg got involved.  Yes, that Ginsberg, the one who would later become a Supreme Court Justice.  At the time Ginsberg was a famous feminist and lawyer for the ACLU who specialized in gender equality.  Hearing of the case, she offered her services pro bono.  Now one might ask why the hell a famed feminist lawyer gave a damn about some bros getting their hands on some brewskis?  Well, it’s because Ginsberg is a freaking legal genius.  At the time, though women had been given the vote by the 19th Amendment in 1920, there was no federal law guaranteeing them equal status, leading to all sorts of screwed up gender biased shenanigans.  Most of the rip-roaring feminists of the time were pushing for what was called the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have put gender equality in the constitution.  Thousands of rallies full of chanting and impassioned speeches were being held across the country in support.  However, the ratification of the amendment by the states had stalled out short of the three quarters needed.

Enter Ginsberg.  With the Equal Rights Amendment floundering she decided to make a more surgical strike.  To her way of thinking a new amendment wasn't needed given that the constitution already had the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed equal status under the law, most notably in relation to race.  All Ginsberg had to do was convince a bunch of frumpy old white men that gender ought to be included as well.  This was where she got clever.  Ginsberg recognized two important things that many of her feminist contemporaries did not.  First, to create change you have to deal with the world as it is, rather than how you would like it to be.  Second, if you want a group of old frumpy white men to give a shit about something, you have to give them something they will give a shit about.  The right of Oklahoma frat boys to buy beer fit the bill perfectly.

Under Ginsberg's leadership the case, called Craig v Boren, was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1976 sided with the frat bros in declaring the Oklahoma law to be unconstitutional.  At long last 18 year old men in Oklahoma could buy beer, though only until 1983 when the drinking age was raised to 21 for everyone.  However, more importantly, for the first time the Supreme Court recognized that the 14th Amendment applied to gender, paving the way for numerous future cases, ones actually involving women's equality, which in turn have led to the much more equal society we live in today.  Not bad for a clever lawyer and a bunch of drunken bros.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:North_Texas_Agricultural_College_party_with_students_bobbing_for_apples_(10008564).jpg

The Surrender of Fort Sumter

The year 1861 was not exactly a banner year for the United States.  Not really being super supportive of Abe Lincoln's election as president, seven states led by South Carolina seceded and formed their own government which they creatively called the Confederate States of America.  One of the first acts of the new Confederate government was to seize control of all federal government property within its borders, including customs houses, arsenals, and fortifications.  This move was less than popular in the United States for reasons that can only be described as obvious given that if you're probably going to fight a war with somebody the last thing you want is for them to have a bunch of guns and forts.  However, president James Buchanan did nothing to stop the seizures, preferring instead to serve out his term as president with his thumb up his ass.  The same could not be said for Major Robert Anderson, commander of Fort Sumter, a newly built fortification which dominated the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.  Rather than hand the brand spanking new fort over, Anderson instead flipped the Confederates the bird by stockpiling it with food and weapons.  The Confederates, as to be expected, responded by surrounding the fort with soldiers and cannons.  This sparked a political crisis that both sides did their best to ignore over the next several months. 

Unfortunately for the men serving under Major Anderson, though he had a lot of balls, he didn't exactly have much sense.  Fort Sumter was technically still under construction at the time, meaning it had a big hole in its wall and only 60 cannons, most of which were facing the ocean.  However, the whole cannon thing wasn’t really an issue, given that Anderson only had 85 men under his command.  On the other side, the Confederates had somewhere in the vicinity of 6,000 men and a metric shit ton of cannons.  It goes without saying that things were a little tense. On the Union side it was feared that any kind of attack to better secure the fort would lead to more states seceding.  On the Confederate side the newly formed government, being super into states’ rights, couldn't agree whether or not it was a Confederate problem or just a South Carolina problem.  When Abe Lincoln was inaugurated as president in March, this was the hot pile of shit that Buchanan left for him on the Oval Office desk.

Now for some reason the man all the Confederates hated taking office didn’t exactly calm the situation.  If anything, it just kicked things up a notch.  Soon after Honest Abe’s inauguration, a Confederate cannon fired a round at Fort Sumter.  The Union soldiers inside braced themselves for battle, but rather than more cannonballs, they were instead greeted by a panicked Confederate officer rowing over to the fort to apologize because some idiot had accidentally fired the shot.  The Union soldiers accepted the apology, and then went back to waiting to be killed.  By mid-April, the Confederates finally got their shit together enough to take some action.  A Union fleet carrying relief supplies was on its way, and not exactly being supportive of that, the Confederates decided to attack the fort.  Over the course of a day and a half the Confederates fired over 3,000 artillery rounds into the structure, killing exactly zero people.  Despite the less than stellar bombardment, Major Anderson decided that his position was untenable and that it would probably be best if he surrendered.

The surrendering did not go well.  The first person Anderson negotiated with was a man named Colonel Louis Wigfall.  The negotiations went well, but unfortunately it was soon after discovered that Wigfall had been given exactly zero authority to negotiate anything.  He had pretty much just rowed over for a chat.  Following this less than stellar start, the Confederates sent a group of officers over to the fort that could actually negotiate.  However, these negotiations were a little derailed when one member of the group, a man by the name of Roger Pryor, decided that it was a perfect time to get his drink on. Grabbing a bottle of whiskey in the fort’s hospital, Pryor downed a shot and soon after went down himself, probably because what he thought was whiskey was actually a bottle of iodine.  The Union soldiers, horrified at what may happen if Pryor died, desperately pumped his stomach and saved his life.  After this little bit of excitement, Major Anderson quickly agreed to surrender Fort Sumter to the Confederates before anything else could go wrong, but only on the condition that he and his men would be allowed to leave and that before they did they would be able to fire off a hundred gun salute to the U.S. flag.  The Confederates, apparently being a magnanimous bunch, agreed.  Unfortunately, the hundred gun salute turned into a fifty gun salute, mostly because a spark blew up a pile of cartridges, killing two Union soldiers and injuring four others.  This is how the U.S. Civil War began.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bombardment_of_Fort_Sumter,_Charleston_Harbor.jpg

Citizens United

In 2004, a movie maker by the name of Michael Moore released a little documentary called Fahrenheit 9/11 right in the middle of the presidential election.  If you haven't seen it, the premise pretty much was that President George W. Bush was a shit eating asshat who had not only stolen the election in 2000, but also had secret connections to Osama Bin Laden's family and had declared war in Iraq and Afghanistan for self-profit.  Though lacking in a little thing called facts, the film proved quite popular, appearing in theaters nationwide and getting released on video earlier than normal in order to be on shelves before the election.  However, as can be expected with anything with politics, not everyone was happy.  Not long after the film’s release, a conservative advocacy group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that the movie and its advertisements constituted illegal campaign spending by corporations.  To be fair to Citizen's United, Michael Moore did come right out and say that he hoped the movie swayed the election, and it was largely funded by left leaning movie producers who themselves made large contributions to the Democratic Party.  However, the FEC didn't see things that way and the complaint was dismissed.

Still pretty unhappy, Citizens United decided that if you can't beat them, then join them.  The group produced its own movie, creatively called Celsius 41.11, which declared Moore to be a jackass and Bush's opponent, John Kerry, to be dirty fucking liar.  It was just as factual as Moore’s movie.  However, before Celsius 41.11 could be shown to the public, the FEC declared its release during the election to be illegal.  When Citizens United asked what the difference was between their movie and Moore's, they were told that Moore could pretty much do whatever the hell he wanted because he and his producers were in the business of making movies.  Citizens United replied by saying fine, and then like the little engine that just never gave the fuck up, spent the next four years making a bunch of conservative leaning documentaries to build up their credentials as a maker of movies.

Things came to a head in 2008, right in the middle of the Democratic presidential primaries, when Citizens Untied prepared to release a film creatively called Hillary: The Movie, which was about how candidate Hillary Clinton was a skeezy lying piece of garbage (at least according to the film).  The FEC, not really buying the whole "we're movie producers now" thing, of course declared the film's planned release during the election to be illegal, a declaration to which Citizens United responded by suing the FEC, claiming that laws prohibiting corporate and union funding in elections violated the First Amendment.  A district court found in favor of the FEC, so Citizens United, basically at this point the shitty version of Rocky as he would have appeared in one of their films, appealed to the Supreme Court.  That's when things got decidedly wacky.

During oral arguments before the Supreme Court, the lawyer for the FEC let it slip that under election law as written the FEC believed it had the right to even ban a book if said book had been funded by corporations or unions and contained even one line advocating for or against a candidate during an election.  The whole idea of the government having the right to ban books and other such media just because a certain group created them did not sit well with many of the Supreme Court justices for some reason.  Things ballooned from there to questions of why the hell media corporations, which after all were still corporations controlled by random asshats, got special treatment when it came to political advocacy.  Debate raged back and forth, and in the end, five of the nine justices voted in a landmark decision that if media corporations were treated like people when it came to election spending, then by god, all corporations should be treated like people.

Well, we all know what happened after that.  Corporate, union, and advocacy group money flooded into U.S. elections.  Campaign spending more than doubled, most of it pumped in by a few super rich individuals taking advantage of loopholes created by the Supreme Court decision which allowed them to give as much money to advocacy groups as they damn well pleased.  So what can we take from all this?  Well, basically Michael Moore and a bunch of Hollywood producers used a loophole in campaign finance laws to create a two hour political ad and as a result things swung the other way to the point that they are pretty fucked up.  So you know, thanks a lot Michael Moore.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Citizens_United_Money_Globe_(16164666014).jpg