Diane: What about Kurt?
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: What about him?
Diane: We don’t agree about anything.
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I didn’t agree with anything with Scalia, but I liked him.
Diane: Yeah, why did you like him? The opera?
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: No.
Diane: Then what then?
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He made me laugh.
Diane: That’s it?
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yeah.
Diane: You certainly didn’t agree about abortion.
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: We violently disagreed about abortion and school prayer. He was a nightmare on everything. He was a nightmare on diversity, but he was funny. He made me laugh, so we had dinner together.
Diane: So you just wouldn’t talk about the political stuff?
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Well, he teased me. I teased him. You know life is too short to fight over everything, and you’re right about opera. Opera is good. Food is good. And his pasta was amazing. His spaghetti carbonara… my lord. You can’t hate a man like that.
Diane: My husband is going to work for the NRA.
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: You ever read Scalia’s 2000 dissent on Stenberg v. Carhart? Working with the NRA is child’s play. You like who you like. I don’t like bland people, and a lot of the people who agree with me politically are bland.
Diane: It’s different for me than it was for you.
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: What do you mean?
Diane: When you fought, you fought against white males, the dominant culture, but for me, I would be up against another dominated culture, Black lawyers. So what do I do?
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I don’t know.
Diane: If you knew that Obama was going to nominate a Black justice to replace you, would you have stepped aside?
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: No.
Diane: Why not?
Dream Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Well, I know what I would do, but I don’t know what my replacement would do if he got nominated. What you know is always better than what might happen.
