DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

"I wonder how many women in the world he could make happy. I mean, the world's a big place, so it's going to be a large number, but comparatively? I mean comparatively?" - words of wisdom from a disgruntled friend

Beginning in the early 1900s, the US government minted $20 gold coins designed by Saint-Gaudens. They were never released, and by the Great Depression, Americans were hoarding their gold coins and depleting all gold stocks, fearful the dollar would crash. The US government issued a directive disallowing such hoarding and demanding citizens return such gold. The $20 coins, which had never been released, were to be melted down and stored in Fort Knox. However, not all of them were returned: several went to private buyers, including one to King Farouk of Egypt. That coin was eventually auctioned off for US $7.6 million. Ten more were found a decade ago. This is the story of those coins and the extreme measures the government has taken to recover them.

Lawrence v. Texas overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, coming on the heels of Romer v. Evans. All great cases to know the history of, and to harshly judge Scalia by, but the New Yorker history of Lawrence contains all sorts of facts that I never knew, like that Lawrence and Garner weren't even a couple. Some of the better quotes from it:

Does it matter that, in Justice Kennedy’s stirring meditation on privacy and dignity and the “manifold possibilities” of liberty, the truth of the non-relationship between the non-lovers John Lawrence and Tyron Garner was lost? Does it matter that our collective memory locks the two men together in a mythic embrace? The plaintiffs who seek redress at the Supreme Court are rarely as polished as the movie versions that the Court can bring itself to love. But it’s rare that they disappear altogether, the way Lawrence and Garner did.

“Sodomy” was, for centuries, a crime defined by its unspeakable nature. The eighteenth-century British legal commentator William Blackstone called it a crime “not fit to be named,” which takes you only so far when it comes to drafting a ban.

Justice Lewis Powell, Jr., the swing vote in the 1986 Bowers decision, was seventy-eight when the case reached the high court. Baffled, he told his clerk, “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual.” That clerk, as it turns out, was gay.

And the argument officemate beat me on (or picked up at least one ballot - can't remember) when my teammate and I were arguing to repeal DADT back in the day:

Already there is enormous anxiety among gay-rights activists over which vehicle is better, whether the Court is ready to make this profound change in the definition of marriage, and whether, even if the Court allows gay marriage, it will launch a national backlash that will end up curbing gay progress in America in the long run.

And here's another article about Bob Kerrey, the senator from Nebraska who was one of the sole senators - from a very unusual state - to oppose the DOMA. It looks like he participated in the slaughter of women and children back in Vietnam. For some more light reading, read about the My Lai Massacre.