Poor, poor Brett Kavanaugh
He wasn’t able to finish his dessert because protesters were outside the restaurant. (He should count himself lucky. Poor Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t get past the cheeseboard.)Alexandra Petri FTW, reporting that there is no right to dinner written into the Constitution or the Bible:
The Bible (technically not the Constitution, but there are people working to fix that!) relates that Adam and Eve ate dinner, once, in public, and this was such a grave offense that they were kicked out of their home immediately and hassled with flaming swords. Mankind was then forced to develop farming and wear pants.
God was very clear on the subject: Dinner is a sin. How could there possibly be a right to it? Jesus ate a nice dinner with 12 friends upstairs in a restaurant one time and he was sent to die in a horrible manner. He who eats dinner will get his deserts, afterwards.
Some argue that even if this made any theological sense, theology should not hold sway in the governance of our country, where there is (or at any rate, used to be) something called the establishment clause that separates church and state. To this, the Supreme Court responds, “You have hit adulthood, and you still believe in Establishment Clause?”
Besides, it is not merely the Bible that suggests you have no right to dinner and are naive and wrong to think that you do. Why, didn’t the philosopher Pythagoras believe that fava beans contained souls, and therefore avoid eating them at all costs? And where are fava beans served but at dinner? (Lunches and dinners, I suppose, if you are creative — but that is not very originalist.)
Can we update our thinking on this point at all, given that Pythagoras was operating in the 6th century BCE and the bean thing sounds made up? No. Tradition is the bedrock of all jurisprudence. To those who would suggest that we evolve, or that we not impose our religious or leguminous beliefs on others, I say, “HERETIC! HERETIC! TORCHES, QUICKLY!”
I understand that all this may seem counterintuitive to Justice Kavanaugh, as a person who lives in the present time and is accustomed to thinking of himself as an entity entitled to respect and endowed with the power to make choices for himself and his family.
He might want his old freedom back, or ask for someone to escort him through the gantlet of protesters who want him to feel bad about his choices, which after all don’t affect anyone other than millions of people whose lives are going to be fundamentally changed and whom he is consigning to a status lower than that of full person with the bodily autonomy and right to direct their lives that this entails.
He might say, “This is a horrible constraint to put on me! I am just trying to live my life, with my family, according to my own lights! I just want to have dinner, like a person!” And I sympathize! I would love to find that this was a right. But there is no right, however seemingly basic, that cannot vanish away like a ghostly mist the second someone remembers that there might be a medieval text, somewhere, out there that disagrees. And the Bible. And the beans. I’m sorry! My hands are tied.
Poor Brett. He just wanted to exercise his right to privacy. Sadly, he doesn’t have one. None of us do.