Poem for Wednesday

Justice
By Langston Hughes

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.

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I am very angry at the California Supreme Court. I have nothing cuttingly articulate or original to say, other than the oft-articulated belief that bigots shouldn't have the right to marry because it's bad for family values everywhere. How anyone can pretend this is something other than a civil rights issue is a mystery to me. The only consolation is that when I was in college, the idea that there would be gay marriage in any state during my lifetime seemed impossible, so even though this is a painful setback, I really believe that it's a temporary one. Not that that makes things better for people who've been told that tonight, they don't have the full rights of citizens in their state.

After a brief early post office run to send a package to a friend in Iraq with the army and to pick up what turned out to be a package from the Chalice Well Shop containing this pendant, I spent the morning watching the news on Sotomayor and the Prop 8 decision. After school, I took Adam for his second Bar Mitzvah rehearsal in the sanctuary, this time with interpretive speeches (both of which need more work than the Torah and Haftarah portions, but they're coming along). Traffic wasn't so bad this week, which was a relief because it rained on and off all day -- worst in the morning, when the county had a flash flood warning that made me nervous about driving on River Road.

We have now finished watching Slings & Arrows, which makes me very sad, as the whole family enjoyed it very much and the kids were attentive even during intense discussions of Shakespeare. Somehow Adam and I got into a conversation about Beethoven's Fifth at some point in the evening, and he thought he remembered that there was a scene involving flying whales and Beethoven's Fifth in Fantasia 2000, which I don't think he has seen since the year it came out (when he was four years old). We put in the DVD and although it wasn't a precise memory -- the Beethoven's Fifth animation involved abstract butterflies and bats, while the whales were accompanied by Respighi's "Pines of Rome," but I was still pretty impressed. And speaking of flying sea mammals, because they make me smile, more National Aquarium dolphin show: