I read a sympathetic obituary of Rose Bird in my newspaper today. I hadn't heard of her before.

http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,111915,00.html

-- Anonymous, December 08, 1999

Answers

Rose Bird was one of my few early heroes. She was an odd hero, really, a political babe in the woods who was felled by right wing politicians who saw a chance to take out a judge who voted her conscience on a wide range of issues in California by attacking her on the issue of the death penalty. I admired her and was saddened to read a couple of years ago about her working for free as a law clerk in a place where they didn't even know who she was.

She was a martyr in the cause for abolition of the death penalty and abandoned by everyone, even her supporters. Her name has become like poison spit from the mouths of the right. It was tough to be anywhere to the left here in California for a long while, and it still is. Gray Davis walks a thin line.

I've always felt that the vitriol with which she was attacked was a result of her gender. She was not only attacked politically, but personally in the most mean-spirited way possible. It sickened and saddened me at the time, and her fall (along with two other liberal- leaning justices) convinced me that the country and my own state were so far away from representing my point of view that I became seriously politically alienated as a result. No wonder after two terms of Reagan and one of Bush, with Jerry Brown in disrepute and Rose Bird pilloried. If Clinton hadn't been elected I might have left the country. Now, of course, he looks like shit but at the time, he was the first viable politician I'd seen in a decade that represented any part of my own beliefs.

Rose Bird was a courageous woman with strong beliefs who I admired very much. I'm sorry she's gone. I hope she can be at least remembered honestly and not only through the poisonous rhetoric of the political right.

-- Anonymous, December 09, 1999

I don't find it too tough to be to the left in San Francisco, which is still in CA (last time I looked), but we wish it was a separate country from the US altogether most of the time, let alone being different from from what many people still think of as "California" - I've found when many people talk about "California," they are really talking about * Southern* California.

Agree about Rose Bird though - she was great, and I don't think she was too young to be a justice, any more than Jerry Brown was too young to be governor at the time. He was a great governor, IMO, was in no way flaky, and he's now a great mayor - I just wish he was the mayor of SF, instead of the other Brown, whom I can't stand and never could stand.

But I digress, as usual. :)

-- Anonymous, December 12, 1999