Lou Grant: You know, Mary, you've got spunk.

Mary Richards: Why, thank you, Mr. Grant.

Lou Grant: I hate spunk.

  .....The Mary Tyler Moore Show

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg had spunk!

"I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

And there were men in her life who felt like just Mr. Grant.

"There was a senator, I think it was after my pancreatic cancer, who announced with great glee that I was going to be dead within six months. That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now himself dead. And I am very much alive."

She never wavered in her fight for what she believed in. Justice Ginsburg was always one of the Supreme Court’s most important advocates for abortion rights.

"My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do."

And in 2013, during hearings on same-sex marriage, in a discussion about the Defense of Marriage act, she said that it had imposed on the US a two-tier system.

“There are two kinds of marriage: full marriage and the skim-milk marriage.”

She continued to flourish as she aged and fight for what she believed in right up until her death.

"Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn't be that women are the exception."

And as a woman, myself who has entered her 60s, what I love about her most is her challenging age discrimination.

In her late 60s she started to face tremendous pressure to retire so a liberal Democrat could be named to replace her. She declined to step down at a point that would have been decades earlier than most of her male peers

And as she got into her 80s’s, Ginsburg increasingly faced the indignity of age-related speculation about her competency. She was asked in 2018 when she plans to retire and she responded:

I’m now 85. My senior colleague Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was 90. So, I think I have about at least five more years.”

Notorious RBG never lost her spunk, never refrained from expressing her passion for equality.

“When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.”

Notorious RBG!

#justice #righteous #aging #aginggracefully #agingwell #aginglikefinewine

#agingredefined #disruptaging #agingbackwards #reverseaging