"The province of Ontario swooped in and took them from their parents, declaring that they had to be protected from exploitation."

"Then it exhibited the children three times a day in a human zoo called Quintland, to be raised as a sort of science experiment. Three million visitors came in the 1930s.... Little is left of the playground where the 'Quints' were displayed to thousands of paying customers who peered through wire mesh from elevated walkways. Though they still resent the way the government exploited them, Annette and Cécile smile at the mention of Quintland. 'Paradise,' Annette said of the compound. 'Was it ever,' Cécile agreed. The mesh kept them from seeing the spectators, but both sisters said they could certainly hear them, and often played the crowd for laughs. 'It wasn’t good for the children to be like that, to be shown like that, playing naturally and knowing that other people were looking,' Cécile said. 'It was sort of theft from us.'"

From "2 Survivors of Canada’s First Quintuplet Clan Reluctantly Re-emerge." The re-emergence is on the occasion of a pending decision by the North Bay city council whether to move the log house where the Dionne quintuplets were born to a fairground 45 minutes away. Annette and Cécile didn't want the house moved, and the city council voted last night not to move it. From the second link:

Shortly after their birth, the province of Ontario took them away from their parents, making them “wards of the king,” saying it was necessary to prevent their exploitation. The province soon built a human zoo in which they were exhibited to about 6,000 sightseers a day until the age of 9.

Here's a picture of the premier of Ontario — whose idea it was to take the children away — posing with the babies:



Nice outfit, ghoul.

ADDED: That was the second time in the 13-year history of this blog that I have used the word "ghoul." The other time was in 2005, soon after John Roberts joined the Supreme Court and a lightbulb happened to burst over his head. Not a metaphorical lightbulb, and actual lightbulb. And it was Halloween....

The NYT, perhaps, found it "unfit to print" a transition that would have connected the trauma of William Rehnquist's death to the Halloween lightbulb burst and the new Chief Justice dressed as a zany comedian. Surely, it must have been tempting to write that it was the ghost of the old Chief that burst the bulb and that the new Chief's costume speaks of lighthearted happiness, while the dying old Chief, traumatizing everyone, by contrast seemed a ghoul.

The word "ghoul" has appeared 4 other times, and 3 of them are from the same source, a Scalia opinion that analogizes a doctrine called the Lemon test to a movie monster that won't die. ("[L]ike some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad after being repeatedly killed and buried....") The 4th one was just last week, a reference to an effort to name a baby Ghoul Nipple.

"Ghoul" comes from the Arabic word "ghoul," which means "to seize," and the OED defines it as "An evil spirit supposed (in Muslim countries) to rob graves and prey on human corpses." So Scalia kind of got the word wrong, didn't he? He should have written "zombie." Influenced by Scalia, I got it wrong too.

The day in disgust.

What's been disgusting people in the last 24 hours? I wondered, after blogging something that disgusted Meade and me and noticing the the new post went on top of yesterday's post about Comey being "just completely disgusted" when Trump subjected him to a handshake.

Here's what I've come up with:

1. The avolatte. "Yes, this is a latte served inside of an avocado. Look at it. It’s sickening."

2. What's that white thing that seems to be growing out of your child's gums? It's not some weird new disease, just some fingernail bitings. One woman — who ultimately tweezed out 27 shreds — made video of her adventure in her son's mouth and posted it on Facebook. The son's name — if this is relevant to analyzing her level of vigilance about health matters — is Kale.

3. "If Trump took a dump on his desk, you would defend it," said Anderson Cooper last night to his guest Jeffrey Lord.

4. In Japan, promoting the movie "Tokyo Ghoul," there's a Tokyo Ghoul café. Here's the website for the café with some pictures from the comic book and the dishes intended to evoke them. (Here's a trailer for the new movie.)

5. I avoided the hoo-ha over the men's romper, but maybe I can catch the wave on the jeado. "Real men wear speedos, but it takes a confident man to wear a jeado."

6. "It's not that Trump isn't or shouldn't be frightening. But it's conspicuous that our media landscape is now a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into camps of captive audiences geeked up on terror and disgust. The more scared and hate-filled we are, the more advertising dollars come pouring in, on both sides."

7. From "'Alien' Is Sci-Fi Horror's Most Feminist Movie Franchise," by Tom Seymour: "The Alien movies visualize the two things so many men look upon with disgust and horror—getting penetrated themselves, and watching a woman giving birth... In the Alien films... moments of rape are always moments of impregnation. They provide a dual, intensified horror."

8. From "As Indians, we take our cotton heritage too lightly": "Remember the outrage last year in the US when an Indian supplier of 'Egyptian cotton' bedsheets to major department stores was found to have used other cotton? The disgust and horror was akin to sturgeon caviar being found to have been diluted with dyed salmon roe or horsemeat being detected in so-called beef products in UK. But how many know that India also produces... an equally wonderful ESL cotton variety, albeit rather unimaginatively named Suvin, the result of a 'marriage' of a local cotton gal 'Sujatha' with a Caribbean cotton lad called St Vincent in the mid-1970s?"

9. "Where do we draw the line on sledging?" I don't know. I had to figure out what "sledging" even is. Fortunately, there's an entire Wikipedia article on this cricket-specific issue: "Sledging is a term used in cricket to describe the practice whereby some players seek to gain an advantage by insulting or verbally intimidating the opposing player.... There is debate in the cricketing world as to whether this constitutes poor sportsmanship or good-humoured banter."

10. "Found this while doing yard work. My brother asked why women would buy baseball themed pads."

"Baby kissing is a practice in which politicians and candidates campaigning for office kiss babies in order to garner public support."

So begins the Wikipedia article "Baby kissing," which I'm reading this morning after getting this viral tweet:

Little girl slaps Biden’s creepy ghoul hand away. pic.twitter.com/oBfceo5iOM

— Suburban Black Man 🇺🇸 (@goodblackdude) November 21, 2021

Is Biden a "creepy ghoul" there? I see a responsive tweet that says "I blame the mother for putting her child in this situation. Why do these people always b[r]ing their children around this creep?" 

But mothers have been holding their babies up to politicians, expecting not just light petting, but outright kissing for as long as I can remember. It's been a synonym for campaigning. That's why there's a Wikipedia article "Baby kissing." 

Look how lovely our most charismatic President looked doing it (and he's even crotch-grabbing!):

Of course, some babies don't like it, and they don't know or care that the stranger handling them is the President. Some Presidents manage to make the baby's rejection work as a charming photo op:

From the Wikipedia article:

"In the end, the [School] District’s case hinges on the need to generate conflict between an individual’s rights under the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses and its own Establishment Clause duties..."

"... and then develop some explanation why one of these Clauses in the First Amendment should '"trum[p]"' the other two. But the project falters badly. Not only does the District fail to offer a sound reason to prefer one constitutional guarantee over another. It cannot even show that they are at odds. In truth, there is no conflict between the constitutional commands before us. There is only the 'mere shadow' of a conflict, a false choice premised on a misconstruction of the Establishment Clause. And in no world may a government entity’s concerns about phantom constitutional violations justify actual violations of an individual’s First Amendment rights. Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic—whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a [football] field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head. Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. And the only meaningful justification the government offered for its reprisal rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination."

From Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, announced just now, written by Justice Gorsuch and joined by the 5 Justices most likely to join Gorsuch.

I believe the judge should have said a little more about why those South Carolina license plates violate the Establishment Clause.

A federal judge has told South Carolina to stop making and selling the "I Believe" license plate. (Via Hot Air.)

In court, an attorney for [Americans United for Separation of Church and State] said state lawmakers had approved what she called a "uniquely Christian" license plate....

"The question really presented here is whether government should be allowed to exclude a religious message precisely because it's religious. Are we going to say it's okay in the public square to express a preference for a secular humanist position of 'In God we trust' or a preference for a football team or a university? And then at the same time say any expression of a religious viewpoint is per se, impermissible," said DMV attorney Kevin Hall....

I wrote about the "I Believe" license plate back in July:

The "I Believe" specialty plate is almost surely a state endorsement of Christianity that violates the Establishment Clause. (There's no array of specialty plates for different religions and no atheist plate. What would an atheist plate look like?)

But I'm taken aback by the federal judge's incredibly skimpy analysis of the legal question. (PDF.) After articulating the 3-part "Lemon test," Cameron McGowan Currie simply asserts:

Based on the record now before the court, the court finds it unlikely that the I Believe Act satisfies even one of these three requirements. As the Act must satisfy all three requirements to survive constitutional scrutiny, the court concludes Plaintiffs have made a strong showing of likelihood of success on the merits as to their Establishment Clause Claim.

That says nothing more than: I think it's unlikely that any of the 3 parts of the test is met. Nothing about why and no acknowledgment of the counter-arguments. It's a serious question, and it is certain that if the Supreme Court were to look at this case, it would take more than an invocation of the much-maligned Lemon test to say no to South Carolina's fund-raising and facilitation of individual expression via license plate.

***

I won't bore you with a disquisition on the history of the Lemon test. I'll just entertain you with Justice Scalia's famous mockery of the Court's spotty reliance on it:

[L]ike some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad after being repeatedly killed and buried, Lemon stalks our Establishment Clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children and school attorneys of Center Moriches Union Free School District. Its most recent burial, only last Term, was, to be sure, not fully six-feet under: our decision in Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992), conspicuously avoided using the supposed "test," but also declined the invitation to repudiate it. Over the years, however, no fewer than five of the currently sitting Justices have, in their own opinions, personally driven pencils through the creature's heart (the author of today's opinion repeatedly), and a sixth has joined an opinion doing so. [Citations omitted.]

The secret of the Lemon test's survival, I think, is that it is so easy to kill. It is there to scare us (and our audience) when we wish it to do so, but we can command it to return to the tomb at will. See, e.g., Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 679 (1984) (noting instances in which Court has not applied Lemon test). When we wish to strike down a practice it forbids, we invoke it, see, e.g., Aguilar v. Fenton, 473 U.S. 402 (1985) (striking down state remedial education program administered in part in parochial schools); when we wish to uphold a practice it forbids, we ignore it entirely, see Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983) (upholding state legislative chaplains). Sometimes, we take a middle course, calling its three prongs "no more than helpful signposts," Hunt v. McNair, 413 U.S. 734, 741 (1973). Such a docile and useful monster is worth keeping around, at least in a somnolent state; one never knows when one might need him.

And so, Judge Currie has prodded the old monster.

"Snappy Fishsuit; Acne Fountain; Sex Fruit; Loser; Fat Meat; Stud Duck; Ghoul Nipple; Number 16 Bus Shelter; Yeah Detroit; Tula Does The Hula In Hawaii; Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine The Hulk And The Flash Combined; and Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116."

Actual names cited by the lawyer for the Georgia Department of Health in a letter to the ACLU explaining that there is some power of the state to reject names that parents might want to impose on their babies. But the lawyer was also denying that the last name "Allah" was rejected because there was something substantively wrong with the name. The state says the problem is only that the last name on a birth certificate from the Office of Vital Records needs to be either the mother's last name, the father's last name, or some combination of the 2. If you want some other name, you should petition the court for a name change, and any problems with the name will be addressed at that point.

Here's the report in the NYT, which seems to be saying that the ACLU's argument is only based on a provision of the state statutory code that says birth certificates need a name "as designated by both parents." I'd like a link to the whole statutory provision. I guess the fight is over whether parents get to choose a last name as well as a first name at the birth certificate stage. An ACLU lawyer is quoted saying the parents "feel very strongly that they want all of their children to have the same last name." The parents — whose last names are Handy and Walk — already have 2 children with the last name Allah. (One of them is named Masterful Allah.)

Remember when Paul Kantner and Grace Slick named their baby God? False! Grace Slick just said the baby's name was "god" — "We spell it with a small g because we want her to be humble" — but that was just some fluffy blah blah of the time. The baby's name was China.

The Supreme Court's religion and the Constitution cases "satisfy no one — including the Justices" who go on "fact-free intuitions about religion..."

"... which vary with their attitudes toward religion, which in turn derive from their religious beliefs and affiliations, or lack thereof." They "form confident views without any empirical basis."

Fact-free constitutional adjudication is abetted by constitutional lawyers (prominently including professors of constitutional law), who “know little about their proper subject matter— a complex of political, social, and economic phenomena. They know only cases. An exclusive diet of Supreme Court opinions is a recipe for intellectual malnutrition.”

Writes Judge Posner in "Reflections on Judging" (quoting himself in an earlier book). Here's his footnote summarizing the mess in the case law:

"Who would rather read about some dry, multipronged doctrinal test than about 60,000 naked Hoosiers..."

"...(in his nude-dancing opinion) or even just nine people selected at random from the Kansas City phone book (addressing the relative competence of the nine justices to decide right-to-die issues)? And his colorful prose could have serious consequences — I am not sure the Lemon test on religion and the First Amendment ever recovered from Justice Scalia comparing it to a B-movie ghoul."

Writes Paul Clement, explaining why "scores of law students, across the ideological spectrum, confess that they always read the Scalia opinion first — whether majority, dissent or concurrence."

"CPAC did two straw polls: One with former President Donald Trump included and one without him."

"In the first, Trump crushed with 70%, which, if you've followed politics over the past, say, five years, will not surprise you. DeSantis came in second with 21%, the ONLY candidate not named Trump who got more than 1% in the straw poll. In the second straw poll -- without Trump -- DeSantis took 68%(!) of the vote. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo came in second with 5% followed by Donald Trump Jr. and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at 4% and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem at 3%."

From "The leader of the Republican Party *not* named Donald Trump" from Chris Cillizza (CNN). 

Meanwhile, about that "Don't Fauci My Florida" campaign merchandise — which we talked about yesterday — there's "Ron DeSantis' Anti-Fauci Florida Merchandise Prompts Outrage: 'This Is Madness'" (from Newsweek): 

The [former] governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, was among those to criticize his Florida counterpart over the sale of such items. He tweeted: "DeSantis is a well educated crackpot with no allegiance to our country, his constituency or the truth."...

MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid was similarly scathing, sharing a link to The Washington Post's report on the merchandise alongside the quip: "Siri: show me an ignorant ghoul..."

They really are helping him sell more merchandise.

A reinvigorated Supreme Court.

Linda Greenhouse describes the Supreme Court "in the midst of a generational shift": an aging Justice tells the new young Chief Justice to call them by their first names ("I'm Nino"); Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was seen about town "laughing and kidding" with her husband; Justice Thomas asked two questions at an oral argument the other day (amazing!); Justice Stevens cracked a (very mild) joke on the bench the other day.

As Greenhouse analyzes it, it's not so much the arrival of a vigorous new man as being free of the the sickly old man:

The explanation for the court's mood is no mystery. It is relief. The justices who lived through the long year of Chief Justice Rehnquist's battle with thyroid cancer are survivors of a collective trauma, the dimensions of which are obvious only in retrospect.

After a description of that "trauma," which culminates at Rehnquist's funeral, Greenhouse's article ends with these two paragraphs:

Flash forward barely two months to an ordinary argument day in the courtroom, when a light bulb above the bench suddenly exploded with a jarring bang that brought court police officers to their feet. There was a tense silence before the benign explanation became clear. It was "a trick they play on new chief justices all the time," Chief Justice Roberts commented.

The incident occurred on Halloween, not a day when the chief justice could linger in his chambers. He had to get home, where, disguised as Groucho Marx, this father of two young children greeted the neighborhood trick-or-treaters at his front door.

The NYT, perhaps, found it "unfit to print" a transition that would have connected the trauma of William Rehnquist's death to the Halloween lightbulb burst and the new Chief Justice dressed as a zany comedian. Surely, it must have been tempting to write that it was the ghost of the old Chief that burst the bulb and that the new Chief's costume speaks of lighthearted happiness, while the dying old Chief, traumatizing everyone, by contrast seemed a ghoul.

"The Fox News star Tucker Carlson said on Monday evening that he would leave on a vacation, starting immediately, days after a writer on his program, Blake Neff, resigned over racist, sexist and misogynist messages..."

"... that Mr. Neff published pseudonymously on an online message board. Mr. Carlson told viewers that he would return to his show next week and described the vacation as 'long planned,' suggesting that his time off had been set before Mr. Neff was revealed on Friday as the author of the offensive posts.... Mr. Neff... resigned last week after Fox News learned of his activity on AutoAdmit, an online forum popular with law students. There, Mr. Neff had written messages that denigrated African-Americans, Asian-Americans and women.... 'What Blake wrote anonymously was wrong,' [Carlson] told viewers. 'We don’t endorse those words. They have no connection to the show. It is wrong to attack people for qualities they cannot control.'... Mr. Carlson, who has used his platform to denounce a so-called cancel culture that he says stymies free speech, appended a somewhat defiant note. He said that Mr. Neff 'has paid a very heavy price' for his behavior, 'but we should also point out to the ghouls now beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man, that self-righteousness also has its costs... We are all human.... When we pretend we are holy, we are lying. When we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it, there’s no question."

From "Tucker Carlson to Take ‘Long-Planned’ Vacation After Writer’s Resignation/On his Monday evening show, the Fox News host said racist and sexist posts by one of his writers, Blake Neff, were 'wrong,' while castigating his detractors as 'ghouls'" (NYT).

I hope this "ghouls" terminology catches on. It was only 3 days ago that I myself said: "I've been seeing this Steven Pinker story out of the corner of my eye for a while. I don't even know what the cancel ghouls even say that he did wrong. I just assume they're crying wolf."

IN THE COMMENTS: Wince links to the fascination with the word "ghoul" in "Gangs of New York":