Douglas Whaley

Wrigley Field I grew up in a sports family [see “My Competitive Parents” at http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-competitive-parents.html ] and to this day watch a lot of sports [“On Being a Gay Sports Fan” at http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-being-gay-sports-fan.html ].   When I was newly out of law school and in my mid-twenties I moved to Chicago and, in my spare time, often went out to Wrigley Field to see the Chicago Cubs play.   This was a great time for watching a fabled group of Cubs: third baseman Ron Santo, first baseman Ernie Banks, pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, outfielder Billy Williams, and the manager Leo Durocher.   Wrigley Field was and is a wonderful ball park, and its fans in attendance are magical, always joining in lustily at the 7 th inning stretch for the singing of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”   Though the Cubbies failed to make the World Series either of the two years (1968, 1969) that I attended their games...

I had a heart transplant right before Thanksgiving in 2009 [see http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2010/01/about-that-heart-transplant.html ], and, as required by law whenever anyone has had such a life-altering experience, I promptly started a blog.   In the beginning I published two or more posts a week, but that was easy to do then because I had lots of topics at my disposal.   I’ve been given an interesting life (law professor, gay rights activist, former Catholic but now atheist, four long term relationships with both men and a woman (two of them marriages), father, owner of pets, novelist, tournament bridge player, and much more, and these things were the fodder for those posts.   But as the years went on I’ve mostly exhausted the stories from my earlier life and discussions of the philosophy by which I live, and the postings have trailed off in number quite a bit.   In recent years I’ve averaged two posts a month, the decline being not one of interest b...

  Today the United States Supreme Court heard 150 minutes (60 minutes is the usual amount) of oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges , the appeal from the Sixth Circuit’s decision that upheld the right of the States of Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, and Kentucky to ban gay marriages.   For my discussion of that decision see http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2014/11/gay-marriage-6th-circuit-jeffrey-sutton.html .   The Court divided the oral arguments into two parts: 90 minutes on the question of whether the 14 th Amendment of the Constitution (equal protection, due process of the laws) requires the states to recognize gay marriages, and 60 minutes on whether gay marriages validly entered into in states recognizing such marriages (like my husband and my marriage in New York two years ago) must be honored in states that do not (like Ohio, where we live).   A bit of terminology: since those in favor of gay marriage lost in the court below they are “petitioners” in t...

NBC News anchor Brian Williams has likely lost his job forever because when reporting a story on January 30, 2015, he referred to “ a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.”   This was demonstrated to be false, and the next night Brian Williams himself apologized on the air, saying with amazement that his “own notes” showed he was in the chopper behind the one that was struck.   This incident caused commentators to report similar misstatements Williams had made about his coverage of the Katrina hurricane and the fall of the Berlin Wall.   Since a news anchor’s veracity is at the heart of the faith viewers place in choosing which newscast to watch, Brian Williams was suspended from reporting at all for NBC, and, far from being one of the most trusted persons in the country, he is now suspected of being at the best incompetent and at worst a compulsive liar. ...