It's not that The Nine is too heavy or serious. It's so well-written and compelling and I could keep reading. It's that the issues that have shaped the Supreme Court in the past twenty years are all ones that it kind of hurts to read about. I have opinions about politics--while I'm not particularly active, they're fairly strongly held opinions. And while I do understand how reasonable people can be on the other side of some of these things, I disagree with them so strongly that it's painful to read about Antonin Scalia tearing into a lawyer with what I consider to be a spurious argument.
The first part of the book discusses abortion a good deal, and while I can see how someone could be under what I consider to be a mistaken impression about when life begins, I can set that aside and see it as a debate. I get outraged when people get violent about it, but that's not an issue before the court today. But I am blinded by rage when people try to pass laws that say that a pregnant woman who is going to die cannot save her life by having an abortion, but must instead die with her baby. Because "mother's health" is a term that needs scare quotes.
This exact issue hasn't come up, but the mother's health clause has been under discussion, and the idea of someone in authority, the lawmakers in my own country saying this to a mother--to a husband and father who is facing this horrific situation--is so staggeringly awful, so evil, that I can't bear to read about it.
And now we're into the 2000 elections, and I know how it's going to turn out. And I know already that it was a travesty, I knew that, but I think reading about the details is going to be more harrowing than I can manage right now. Is that weird? That I don't have the emotional strength to read about the details of a political struggle that ended almost 10 years ago an the fallout of which is just a fact of life by now?
What can I say? I'm a delicate flower.
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