Mandela Tops the SERP

I'm making my way, in fits and starts, through Kate Braestrup's Marriage and Other Acts of Charity. It's a thought-provoking essay on the religious dimensions of the marital state, penned by a minister who lost her husband (and father of her four children) to a tragic accident.

Last March, on a solo spring break ramble, I happened to see the book, and purchase it, at Prairie Lights in Iowa City.

Tonight, I decided, as a little experiment, to see what would come up on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for a Google search on the terms "marriage, sentencing, corrections."

The answer was Nelson Mandela, who remained married to his second wife, Winnie Madikezela, throughout his 27 years in prison. She endured an 18-month incarceration of her own and was there to meet him upon his release in 1990.

Winnie had been unfaithful to Nelson while he was imprisoned, however, and the couple had political differences over the proper means by which to resist apartheid. Her rhetoric had turned violent, including an endorsement of the practice of "necklacing" - burning people alive using tires and gasoline. She was also found criminally complicit in the kidnapping and murder of a 14-year-old boy by her bodyguards, for which she paid a fine after originally being sentenced to six years in prison.

Amid all this, the marriage of Nelson and Winnie Mandela - nominally intact for so long - finally ended. They separated in 1992, two years after Nelson Mandela's release from prison, and were divorced in the mid-1990s.

In recent months, Winnie Madikizela has become even more estranged from Nelson Mandela. In March, she gave a notorious interview in which she accused him of betraying the blacks of South Africa by not doing enough for the poor.

I doubt that Winnie Madikizela has read Kate Braestrup's book. But she should. If she did, she might find it in her heart to be more charitable to her former marriage partner.

Getting Good at Breaking and Entering

Many exigencies can motivate burglars; often, of course, it's substance abuse. In the throes of addiction, breaking and entering, along with theft, become merely the means to an end of getting cash for drugs.

But what if the reason for the burglary were an unavoidable existential emergency: to wit, a rare genetic disorder resulting in chronological impairment? More specifically, an impairment causing someone to move back and forth between discrete moments of time, leaving their clothes behind when they do - thus necessitating burglaries to cover the ensuing nakedness.

This is the fanciful but intriguing premise of Audrey Niffenegger's emotionally rich novel The Time Traveler's Wife, which was made into a fine film last year starring Rachel MacAdams and Eric Bana. Bana's traveler commits burglary after burglary, just to stay clothed after being chronologically disrobed. I've not seen such repetition of the same crime on screen since Jeremy Irons's Moonlighting in 1983, where Polish laborers stranded on London after the crackdown on the Solidarity movement resorted to shoplifting to survive.

Yet these burglaries are completely prosaic in the context of the larger themes. What is it like, in a marriage or any intimate relationship, when, for whateve reason, one's partner is not available? MacAdams's character, the traveler's wife, has been likened to Penolope in The Odyssey, keeping the flame of the relationship alive even amid years of waiting.

Gardy as Submissive Husband

Ron Gardenhire, the Minnesota Twins' manager, has very little in common with Madonna, the long-running pop music celebrity. Like her, however, he now often goes by only one name.

Tonight, as the Twins played at Target Field for the first time, I heard Gardy do a hilarious radio commercial for a hardware store chain. It turned on the premise that the man who has the final say about on-field decisions for the Twins is perfectly prepared to defer to his wife's decisions on matters domestic - including, of course, which hardware store to patronize and what to get there.

In other words, a case of separate spheres, as feminist scholars might put it.

As I smiled about Gardy's willingness to be guided by his wife on household purchases and projects, I had to recall my dad, who was equally comfortable with a division of labor of that type. In particular, it reminded me of a sermon I heard him preach in the 1970s on Ephesians, Chapter 5.

Ephesians 5 contains passages that can easily be misinterpreted. "Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior,"it says in verse 22. Pretty heady words to hear, if you're a husband on a power trip.

Instead of male superiority, my dad offered a persuasive and biblically grounded interpretation calling for mutual submission between partners in a marriage. After all, the much-invoked verse 22 is preceded by this one: "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ."

My dad would have been amused by Gardy's commercial. He might even have used it in a sermon on Ephesians 5, if he were still preaching today.

Prisoners' Right to Marry

The governor of New Hampshire signed legislation yesterday making same-sex marriage legal there, beginning on January 1, 2010. This brings the number of states to have done so to six — seven, if California is included. Approximately 18,000 same-sex couples were married in California before voters repealed the law permitting them by approving Proposition 8 in November, and those marriages remain valid.

Prominent attorney David Boies appeared on the Charlie Rose talk show in the evening to outline the status of a constitutional challenge to Prop. 8. He has filed the case and expects a ruling at the district court level to come possibly as early as this summer.

In laying out the rationale for an equal protection challenge to Prop. 8, Boies pointed to well established Supreme Court precedents holding that the right to marry is a fundamental right. The most widely known is still Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 87 S.Ct. 1817, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1967), striking down racial restrictions on marriage.

Another example of the right to marry as a fundamental right, Boies said, is prisoners’ right to marry. He did not get into the details of that case with Charlie Rose, but I looked it up. In Turner v. Safely, 482 U.S. 78, 107 S. Ct. 2254, 96 L.Ed2d 64 (1987), the Supreme Court upheld a prisoner’s right to marry, even if the marriage is to another prisoner. The litigation arose in a correctional facility in Missouri housing both male and female inmates.

What will happen when an inmate in a state allowing same-sex marriage wants to marry someone of the same sex? California has already given some thought to the issue, as NPR reported last summer.

To borrow a line from Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’