Kristen Stewart is a dirty, dirty whore. Rupert Sanders is a man.

Can we take a minute to talk about the Kristen Stewart-Rupert Sanders-Robert Pattinson mess? It wasn't long after a national magazine broke the pictures of Stewart and Sanders behaving very inappropriately for a cohabiting woman and a married man that Stewart issued a public apology, seemingly aimed at Pattison, her long-term boyfriend. And almost in the same breath that the gossip rags were reporting on this apology, they were all commenting on the fact that Stewart's apology did not mention Sanders' wife and children. That sentiment has been repeated widely since then, that somehow Stewart's statement was insufficient because it lacked any recognition of the pain she caused to Sanders' family. Meanwhile, Sanders also issued a public statement, apologizing to his family. But I have yet to see anyone anywhere suggest that Sanders' statement was lacking as it made no mention of Pattinson, who may not be legally married to Stewart but does (did) live with her. No one has referred to him as a homewrecker.

I've complained about this kind of double standard before. The woman is painted as the homewrecking hussy who needs to be redeemed and the man, who really can't be expected to help himself, is the one who can ultimately redeem her.

To which I can only say a very exasperated, "COME ON!" They are both at fault here. They both cheated. One isn't more or less responsible based on sex. They should not be held to different standards. And, frankly, neither one of them should be expected to issue public apologies to the cuckolded partners, because, awkward! I'm quite confident that if I had been cheated on, the last thing in the world I would want would be a public statement published on every gossip website in the world from the person who slept with my partner saying how terribly sorry she was for causing me pain. Such a public apology would be wildly inappropriate. But, gosh darn it, if the gossip rags are going to judge Stewart for not following this hideously awful suggestion, they'd sure as heck better start judging Sanders, too.

That sound you hear is me banging my head against the wall

It's presidential election season, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But that ridiculous, absurd, ludicrous, illogical, just plain stupid story about President Obama using a Social Security Number stolen from a French immigrant is making the rounds again. And it makes me crazy.

Because, first and foremost, the story just ain't true. The French guy's SSN was totally different. Just as a starter. There are other logic and fact flaws in the story, but I'm not going to get into them here. But the people who spread this story by posting it on FB or e-mailing it to everyone they know or wearing it on a sandwich board as they wander around town don't give a rat's ass whether the story is true. They just want to believe bad things about the president and jump on everything and anything they hear. Without actually thinking about it.

This is the only explanation because it seems so obvious to me that anyone, ANYONE, capable of critical thought who comes across this story should recognize the impossibility of this story being true. Really, even a brief moment of thoughtful reflection is all that should be necessary to realize that the current sitting President of the United States who was before that a Senator and before that a state Senator could not possibly be using a stolen SSN without someone, somewhere noticing it. The IRS to whom the man submits a tax return every year? The SSA who collects a tax and sends him a statement every year, showing what his current retirement income would be? The Post Office who issued him a passport? The FBI who did a background check on him before he could get the security clearance a Senator requires? Or any number of other state and federal agencies who have had to do something, process some record over the years? I mean, either we have the most inept boobs at pretty much every desk job and managerial position at just about every agency throughout the federal government (a tempting conclusion to tea partiers, no doubt, but highly unrealistic) or this would require the biggest conspiracy ever known to humankind. This conspiracy would make the forged birth certificate conspiracy look like a single drop of rain next to a hurricane. And yet, not one person, not ONE, has blown the whistle and come forward with evidence of this major and life-long felony committed by the president of our nation? And his sweet grandmother? It's ridiculous and it clearly could not possibly be true. As anyone thinking clearly and rationally should see.

But, yet, even decent people just pass on this story, via e-mail chains, without giving it a second thought. No, wait, a first thought. And so once again, presidential election season will be filled with this nonsense and a little part of my soul will die every day. Because I can't keep having this conversation. But when people cite this crap, I can't let it go, either.

If a right exists, but nobody wrote it down on parchment paper with a quill pen in 1787, is it still a right?

In today's Tea Party, radicalized, vitriolic atmosphere of discussing rights and invoking Founding Fathers, it has become en vogue to complain that people are claiming to have rights that aren't listed anywhere in the Bill of Rights. Or the Declaration of Independence, for that matter. Usually the complaints come from those who oppose whatever it is the right-seekers are asking for.

Today, there was a letter to the editor in the local paper about the right to marry. The letter writer's short, pithy letter was only one paragraph, five brief sentences. He said he'd decided to do a little research, looked in the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, and other writings of the founders and found no mention of that right. Ipso facto, he concludes there is no such right.

(I will stop now and note that my assumption is that Mr. Letter Writer opposes same-sex marriage and so wrote this letter to rebut the argument that such couples have any sort of "right" to marry. His letter did not offer any greater context, so I am feeling free to make my own reasonable inferences. If anyone can offer a better idea of what this guy meant, let me know.)

Naturally, some comments rebutted this sadly simplistic take on things. And, of course, some other comments agreed, further complaining about the "penumbra" of rights horse hockey that our rogue, out-of-control courts have come up with as they legislate from the bench. If it's not in the Constitution, by gosh, it's not a right, they cry!

As a lawyer and a student of the Constitution, this nonsense makes me crazy. If the people making these arguments (that rights don't exist unless they're specifically enumerated in the Constitution) really thought it through, they'd see that it's nonsense. If the Bill of Rights explicitly listed every right that we as citizens, or as humans, possess, well, we'd never have ratified the Constitution because we'd still be writing the damn thing. They can't possibly all be listed. But not being listed does not mean those rights do not exist and to argue otherwise is dangerous in the extreme.

The Constitution says not one word about procreation. But I'm fairly confident the letter-writer would argue to his dying breath that he had an absolute, fundamental right to have his children and to raise them as he saw fit.

I would also wager that the letter writer would object strenuously (at least I hope he would) if any state tried to pass a law saying that brunettes could not marry blonds or that people with green eyes could only marry other green-eyed crazies. I would hope he would expect the Supreme Court to strike down any such law just as they rightly struck down laws banning mixed-race marriages.

Those are just two examples. The Founders never intended the Bill of Rights to be an exhaustive list. In fact, that was one of the objections to having a bill of rights, because it could be seen as exhaustive and could therefore some day be used by a letter-writer in Kansas as authority for arguing against a right. I guess Mr. Letter Writer didn't read that in the Founding Fathers' documents he so thoroughly researched.

But the Bill of Rights does offer some clues. It talks about the right of persons to be secure in their homes and their effects. It talks about liberty. It includes the rights of religion, association, and speech which, when combined and viewed properly, can cover a lot of things. Oh, and let's not forget that we've since amended the document to be clear that all persons are entitled to equal protection of the law. It's a simple phrase, but it means so much and applies to oh so many situations. Some (many) would even suggest it would apply to
the situation where the state offers up marriage as a legal option, but only to couples the state approves of.

The bottom line is that we can't look to the enumerated rights specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights and stop there. That isn't all there is to it. Those rights are the tip of the iceberg. It requires thoughtful analysis to look beyond that basic list and consider the full import of the ideals they embody. This is why the extreme textualism some people apply to Constitutional analysis makes me nuts, because it is the very last thing the founders would have wanted us to do. Sheesh, anyone who thinks we are limited to the explicit words the Founders included in that fairly brief document didn't study the founding of our nation at all.

I want to go to there

The Bibles in the hotel room thing has always irked me. There's something so blandly presumptuous about it. As if they assume no one can really object to the bible and so putting one particular religion in your face like that is ok.

So I'm kind of in love with this hotel. The hotel in England that replaced all of the bibles with "Fifty Shades of Gray." Now, I have no desire to read that book as everything I've heard leads me to believe it's a horrible piece of writing. And I'm a little sorry I know that the 50ish year old woman on the plane next to me last week who complained about how hot the plane was was reading that book. But I really don't like finding a bible in every darn hotel room I check into. (Did you know you can call ahead and ask for it to be removed? But what would they do if I asked for the Quran or the Bhagadvad-Gita instead?)

I also want to go to there because, you know, it's in England. The Lake District even. (Go back now and re-read your Pride and Prejudice if you don't remember why I care about the Lake District.) I must say, touring around the Lake District, free from the spectre of a silly book of myths, sounds way, way better than my real life these days.

Things cops and prosecutors shouldn't care about #1

Grown men touching themselves while watching adult films in an adult movie theater. Yes, I am thinking of Fred Willard today. But he's not the first one and he won't be the last.

Seriously, I have to wonder what the cop wandering the aisles of an adult theater really expects to see. What do they think the patrons go there for? What do the other patrons think their fellow film-goers are there for?

Arresting a guy like Fred Willard for jerking off in the dark private of an adult film theater is a complete and total waste. We the taxpayers paying for this nonsense should revolt. There are a dozen shootings every day in Chicago. My town has a rash of home burglaries. I'm pretty sure car thefts are common around the country. There are much, much better things for police and prosecutors to be spending their time and energy (aka money) on than grown adults doing exactly what we would expect them to do while watching adult films at adult movie theaters.

Please, cops, spend your time doing things that actually make us safer or solve real crimes or something. And let the Fred Willards of the world get their jollies in a dark adult movie theater. For crying out loud.

Oh, the fuzzy law on silly t.v. shows makes my head hurt. But then again, sometimes the fuzzy law in district court makes my head hurt, too. So maybe the tv shows aren't so far off.

Prison for everyone!

Today's local paper included a short article about a man who was facing two counts of felony theft. Now felony theft is a pretty low level offense. You pretty much have to be a psycho killer to get prison for felony theft. So it was no surprise to me to read that this particular person, who apparently had no prior criminal history, got a diversion.

A diversion is something you've probably heard of, where no conviction is actually entered and the defendant has certain conditions that he has to meet. If those conditions are met and the defendant stays out of trouble for some designated period of time (say a year), then the diverted charge goes away. If the defendant screws up in some way, the charges come back and the defendant can now be convicted and face a criminal sentence. You're not eligible for diversion if you have any substantial criminal history. (I'm not sure on the exact details because I've only ever done appellate work and for the last 8 years or so, I've not done much below first-degree murder.)

The details of this particular diversion agreement require the guy to perform 100 hours of community service, take a theft offender class, a gambling addiction class, and write a letter of apology to the victims. The article says nothing about restitution, but that is something the district court should absolutely include in the diversion agreement, if the victims ask for it.

To me, this seems like an entirely reasonable, just, beneficial-to-society resolution of a low-level case like this. And yet, the first 7 or so comments on this story were all about how the county is so ridiculously soft on crime, how there was no punishment here, mocking the letter of apology, suggesting he should get milk and cookies, too, etc. Which just makes me wonder, what on earth do people want? Would these people like to go a little Merchant of Venice on this petty criminal and get a pound of flesh? Would they like to throw this guy in jail for months on end? Where they would undoubtedly whine if he had access to tv, exercise, decent food, or educational opportunities?

The reality is that we incarcerate too many people. Way too many people. People who commit low-level felonies, have no criminal history, or don't pose physical risks to others should not be incarcerated. That seems like a self-evident starting point. Next point is that we don't really gain anything by giving this guy a criminal record, which will make it harder for him to find gainful employment. Do we want him to turn his path around and become a productive member of society? Or do we want him to be unemployable, which increases the likelihood that he will turn to crime again and continue to be a drain on the rest of us? Again, the answer seems self-evident to me.

Instead of incarcerating this guy, we're teaching him things. Making him perform services for his community, which might actually make him feel useful and connected to the community. Instead of being isolated, as one naturally is when one is behind bars.

And that letter of apology to the victims? I don't think that should be mocked at all. There is real value in getting him to own up to what he did and to acknowledge the effect it had on his victims. The value is to both the defendant and to the victims. I studied this movement toward restorative justice back in law school. Bringing victims and offenders together can be very powerful, even with something as simple as a letter of apology. It's an idea that should be pursued, not mocked.

The bottom line is that this is the way we should address crimes whenever possible. We shouldn't knee-jerk and send everyone to jail. We shouldn't punish, punish, punish. We're only hurting ourselves if we do because we're the ones who have to pay for all that bed space behind bars and we're the ones who have to deal with the very real problem of finding ways to reintegrate people after they're released from prison. That problem of reintegration has got to be one of the biggest causes of recidivism, so why would we set ourselves up for failure?

Not everyone should go to prison. In fact, I would suggest that we'd all be better off if the vast majority of people convicted of crimes never went to prison. Certainly, sending this guy to prison won't do anyone any good. Thankfully, the judge and prosecutors get that, even if idiots online don't.