I was worried that she was going to do what a lot of others have done by focusing on Hale as a person and his views (which were terrible, even for the time), as looking just at that sort of misses the point and moves the focus to the wrong place. (Some terrible people with regressive views can still make legally valid points.) But thankfully not, as she’s quite right to point out that the really fucked up thing is that Alito is making the argument that we need to base our notion of rights granted by the constitution on “legal traditions,” and by going back to Hale - both his legal positions and his time period - the “legal traditions” that are being pretty explicitly referenced here are “women are not legally persons.” That was the basis for Hale’s arguments. (And yeah that is part of the legal tradition - but an obsolete one.) This really needs to be acknowledged - and emphasized, because it’s an incredibly unpopular idea that the vast majority of people would reject when put so baldly.
Reading the old Babylonian story of the taming of Enkidu, I was stuck by the parallels to the Abrahamic apple story and became convinced the two tales were essentially telling the same story. (In both, there’s originally little distinguishing the people from other animals, but then there’s this change, this new knowledge, that prevents them from continuing to live in this wild state in nature peacefully alongside other animals.) Both stories were relating a myth of how they thought their ancestors had become “civilized” (i.e. moved from gathering-hunting to agriculture) or even had become human. The apple story made a lot more sense to me in that light - and helped me understand how various Christian heresies saw the eating of the apple as a good thing, and even viewed the serpent in the garden as a prefiguration of Jesus.
