When A Man Loves a Woman

It was the spring of 1966.  The Civil Rights movement was in full swing, and Vietnam was the major issue on college campuses.  Meanwhile, Percy Sledge recorded his ballad to love in a studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama – When a Man Loves a Woman.

• When a man loves a woman,
• Can’t keep his mind on nothin’ else, 
• He’d change the world for the good thing he’s found.
• Is she is bad, he can’t see it, 
• She can do no wrong,
• Turn his back on his best friend if he put her down.
• When a man loves a woman,
• He’ll spend his very last dime
• Tryin’ to hold on to what he needs.
• He’d give up all his comforts
• And sleep out in the rain, 
• Is she said that’s the way
• It ought to be.

Flags Again

I know.  A lot’s happened since I last wrote about “Our America”.  There’s the Trump verdict, the complete sell-out of the Republican Party (thanks Lisa Murkowski for giving us some hope) and the conundrum of a failed Gaza Peace Accord.  Meanwhile, I was working back to back to back track meets and now pole vault camps.  There wasn’t time left to write.  

But one event sticks out in my mind from the past few weeks.  I’ve already written two essays  about “Flags”, particularly historic American flags that have been “turned” (some literally upside down) to represent some outlandish and extreme political movement.  And I specifically wrote about the flags that Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Samuel Alito flew over his houses in the past few years. 

Sleeper Agents

Alito, the seventy-five year old, Yale Law School graduate reached the pinnacle of the legal profession when he was nominated to the Supreme Court by George W Bush.  With the rise of the Conservative Majority in the Court, he is a leader working to cancel the expansions of personal rights made by the Court in the last seventy years.  I heard it described aptly last week on a broadcast.  The commentator said, “Think of (Justices) Thomas and Alito as ‘sleeper agents’, lying in wait for decades, only able to express themselves in caustic dissenting opinions.”

 But now they are “in charge”; influencing the Court even more than the Chief Justice John Roberts.  They are the leaders of a majority created by the political machinations of Mitch McConnell, the Federalist Society and the appointment pen of  then-President Donald Trump.  They have decades of frustration to overcome, decades of failure to revisit, and decades of insults to “right”.  And they’re doing it.

Ethics

So how dare anyone challenge Justice Alito’s ethics, when he has so much to do.  Who would dare call him into question, the one who waited so long to finally gain control?  And the answer to that question was that bastion of American “liberalism”,  The New York Times.  The Times questioned Alito’s legal ethics, judicial integrity, and his basic honesty.  The newspaper published multiple stories about those “damn” flags flying over Alito’s residences.  

Alito, the proud child of Italian immigrants from Trenton, New Jersey, could have done what most men would do when their integrity was questioned.  He could have stood on the long conservative tradition of taking responsibility for his actions. But Alito did the least courageous thing:  he blamed the whole thing on his wife, Martha Ann.

You know, I’ve only been married for a few years (coming up on twelve), not the near-forty years that Justice Alito and Martha Ann have been joined in wedlock.  But even from my relatively brief experience, I know my duty, my obligation; my commitment that all marriages demand.  Even the law that Alito supposedly holds so “dear” makes it clear:  a spouse cannot be legally required to testify against their “better half”.   But, not for the Justice:  it was all her fault, and he couldn’t stop her.

A Man

Then there’s perhaps an outdated view of “manliness”.  Does a “real man”, something that the MAGA right is supposedly enthralled with; does a “real man” blame his wife?  And not just blame; but, publicly, in writing, on Supreme Court stationary in open public letters?  Does a “real man” throw his own wife “under the bus”, and not just any vehicle, but the behemoth of the National media?

And there is one other point.  Justice Alito is the author of the “Dodds” Decision, the one that allowed many states to take away the fifty-year old right of women to determine what happens to their own body.  Women were denied that power, mostly by older white men.  Now Samuel Alito, also an older white man, says he can’t control what flag his own wife flies over the homes he shares with her.  She, and other women like her, can’t determine whether an abortion is right or wrong, but they sure as Hell can tell their husband what to do about flags.

Percy Sledge outlined what a man would do for a woman he loved.  He’d change the world, turn his back on his friends, refuse to see the bad in her.  He’d sleep out in the rain, if that’s what it took to prove his love.  Justice Alito showed us what a man will do to maintain power.  You can see it yourself, the tire tracks clear on the back of Martha Ann.  And that tells us so much more about the Justice, even more than the bitter opinions he writes for the Court.  Maybe Percy should have written:

            “When a man loves his power, can’t keep him mind on nothin’ else…”