blind insight

Tradition! Tradition.

Merry-After-Christmas-Shopping-Sale-Frenzy Day! Never one to venture out into the streets (or malls) on this most chaotic of days, I'm safely ensconced in the office (and actually working, though not at this precise moment) and recovering from yet another food-n-fun filled Jewish Christmas.

Christmas Eve brings us the Matzah Ball, an annual gathering of youngish Jewish folks. Alas, I've never actually had fun at the Matzah Ball. It's always too dark, too loud, and too crowded for me to actually communicate with anyone. Last year was truly awful. I'd expected to be deep in the backcountry on a hut trip with my boyfriend of nearly a year, but he'd summarily dumped me just ten days before. Needless to say, I was in no condition to be out in public, let alone confronted with the cold hard reality of the Jewish singles scene. I wound up sitting at a table in a corner with my friend Britt, drinking waaaaaaaaaaay too many Cosmopolitans and making snarky comments about the sea of dorks in which we were swimming.

So this year, I refused to pay $30 to watch hordes of Jews in their 20s and 30s hit on one another. I do have a wonderful boyfriend, after all, and don't need to subject myself to the madness. But against my better judgment, I agreed to go downtown to a pre-party at another LoDo bar. The best thing about this party was its cost: zippo. On all other fronts, it was a mini-Matzah Ball, complete with too-low lighting, too-loud music, and a too-nebbishy crowd.

To further complicate things, the friend I came with disappeared to check out his prospects, leaving me with his best friend's girlfriend, who had arrived just that day from Hong Kong. Not only was her English marginal (though far, far better than my Chinese), she had that Asian-girl habit of speaking very softly and covering her mouth, making it utterly impossible for me to understand her. I tried to explain the niceties of "How To Communicate With Madeline," but to no avail. She finally gave up on me, leaving me to lean against the bar and try to make sense of the dim shapes moving around me. A few brave souls tried to strike up conversation with me, which was initially flattering but ultimately ended in my embarrassment and the poor boys' frustrated departure. Finally, after my free drink tickets ran out, I decided to throw in the towel and caught a cab for home.

Christmas day is known in the Cohen household as "Mommy's Birthday," and so has always been an important day of family activity. I arrived in Boulder mid-morning, in time for a delicious brunch at the home of one of my parents' friends, who splits her time between selling overpriced Boulder County real estate and turning out fabulous meals.

After brunch, it was time for the traditional family Christmas day activities: watching a movie and eating Chinese food. Usually, we see whatever blockbuster epic is released on Christmas Day, but after suffering through Martin Scorsese's irredeemably awful Gangs of New York last year, mom wanted something lighter. So lighter we found, in the form of Steve Martin's remake of Cheaper By The Dozen. This was good for a few laughs, but obviously had been rushed to a Christmas release, since you could actually see the boom mike in a couple of shots and there were glaring consistency problems with the story (the ages of the Baker children, for example). But at least it was the first movie I've seen in a couple of months that did not last for three hours.

After my mother's birthday treasure hunt (another long-standing family tradition that perhaps I will explain at a later date), we met several friends at the Orchid Pavillion for Chinese food. One of the women is Chinese, and she had pre-ordered the entire meal, including many dishes not found on the menu. In between wolfing down the delicious (if a tad un-spicy for my taste) food, we greeted the steady stream of fellow Jews that flowed through the restaurant. At times, it appeared that the entire synagogue was in attendance. In fact, after the birthday cake arrived and we'd eaten token bites, my mother strolled around the restaurant offering pieces to her friends at neighboring tables.

True, it's not Santa and stockings and turkey and caroling, but as we sat around the table listening to my parents' friends re-tell the story of how Roberta Flack flew them to Aspen on an hour's notice for a New Year's Eve party at the home of a Saudi prince, I sat back and enjoyed the warm feeling of Christmas tradition.

Get out the Vote.

Following the lead of two other Vassar-grad bloggers (Rebecca Davis and Gabe Anderson), I urge you to visit the website of the uber-conservative American Family Association to vote in its "marriage poll." AFA's objective seems to be to show Congress that Americans overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage. The poll asks respondents to choose between the following three choices:

I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and "civil unions"

I favor legalization of homosexual marriage

I favor a "civil union" with the full benefits of marriage except for the name

Presumably, AFA figured that only like-minded folks would visit its site and vote in its poll. But the survey seems to have been co-opted by liberal forces. Gabe Anderson writes that the first forward he received said that when the sender voted, 93% of respondents opposed gay marriage and 3% were in favor; the next forward showed 30% in favor of gay marriage. When Gabe voted, it showed 51.45% in favor. And by the time I voted a few minutes ago, the poll said that nearly 60% of respondents favor legalization of gay marriage, and another 8% support civil unions for gay couples.

I suspect that as soon as AFA realizes that its respondents' "family values" are rather more inclusive than AFA's, it will yank this thing off its site. So stop that last-minute online holiday shopping for a moment and visit MarriagePoll.com to cast your vote.

While you're there, you might want to check out some of AFA's other "information." And then do yourself, your civil liberties, and your 2003 tax bill a favor by making a charitable contribution to an organization such as People For The American Way, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Anti-Defamation League, or the ACLU.

Happy holidays from the land of the free.

Reopening an old wound.

Somehow, I managed to find the post I originally drafted in response to Emily Bazelon's piece about Judge Kozinski. Here's most of it below. I apologize for the redundancy, but my friend Dawn and I were discussing Kozinski's reprehensible hypocrisy (and cavalier attitude towards human life) at lunch today, so this stuff was still on my mind.
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Anyone with knowledge of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and a sense of my political leanings will not be surprised to hear that I'm no great fan of Judge Alex Kozinski. Nevertheless, I read with great interest this thorough and rather balanced profile by Emily Bazelon, which will appear in print in the January/February '04 issue of Legal Affairs.

If you don't have time or interest to read the whole piece, you should at least read the section, relatively early on, in which Bazelon discusses the Thomas Thompson death penalty case, and Kozinski's role in sending Thompson to his death. I was clerking for Judge Betty B. Fletcher when we discovered the communication error that appeared to foreclose rehearing en banc (by the full court) in Thompson's appeal. And, as we pressed for a recall of the mandate and en banc rehearing in the days before Thompson's scheduled execution, I was the law clerk responsible for the case in Judge Fletcher's chambers. Ultimately, Judge Fletcher authored the majority en banc decision, finding Thompson's trial unfair, overturning the three-judge panel decision to the contrary, and granting Thompson habeas corpus relief.

Most of what went on during those harrowing days must remain behind the doors of the judge's chambers. But much of the internal workings (and failings) of the Ninth Circuit as it wrestled with Thompson's case was aired in Judge Kozinski's dissent, Judge Reinhardt's concurrence, and Judge Reinhardt's later law review article about the case. [For you lawyer types, the opinions can be found at 120 F.3d 1045 (9th Cir. 1997) (en banc).] And Bazelon's piece provides a pretty accurate (albeit mostly from Judge Kozinski's standpoint) overview of what was perhaps the most intense and important period of my clerkship.

From the time Judge Fletcher and I arrived in San Francisco before the en banc oral argument until I flew to Colorado the day after the decision to look for a post-clerkship apartment in Denver, I don't think I slept more than a couple of hours. This was in early August of 1997, and the American Bar Association happened to be holding its annual meeting in San Francisco during the week of the argument, so the en banc courtroom at the stunning Ninth Circuit courthouse was packed. Even the law clerks were relegated to watching the argument on closed-circuit television in an adjacent courtroom (and because of the throngs of ABAers in town, neither Judge Fletcher nor I could get a hotel room in the city, adding to the stress and chaos of the week).

Once the arguments were over and the judges had conferred, Judge Fletcher and I began crafting the opinion, madly writing, researching, editing, and conferring with other judges and clerks. As I recall, the argument took place less than two days before the scheduled execution, so we were racing against the clock to prepare an opinion that addressed the many complex legal questions before the court, satisfied a majority of the judges on the en banc panel, and met Judge Fletcher's rigorous standards for judicial writing. Finally, on the morning before the execution date (it was to take place at midnight that night), the opinion issued, along with Judge Kozinski's scathing dissent, which (as I recall Judge Reinhardt pointed out in concurrence) displayed a shocking disregard for the value of a human life relative to that of "the judicial process." Other dissenting judges railed on about the "facts" of Thompson's case, ignoring extensive contradictory evidence and the grave constitutional errors that occurred in Thompson's trial, which had prompted seven former California prosecutors to file an amicus brief on Thompson's behalf.

Once the opinion was out and the dust settled, I went down to the gym in the courthouse basement to burn off some nervous energy. I was still on the treadmill when Judge Fletcher came to tell me that the Supreme Court had granted certiorari. But rather than reversing the Ninth Circuit outright, vacating its decision, and allowing the execution to go forward at midnight that night, the Court had set the case for briefing and argument in the upcoming term. For the moment, at least, Tommy Thompson would live.

Just a few months later, after I'd returned to Colorado and started practicing law "for real," the Supreme Court reversed our decision and held that the Ninth Circuit lacked the power to rehear the case at the time and under the procedural circumstances that it had. Echoing Judge Kozinski's view, the Court effectively held that the grave constitutional errors leading to Thompson's conviction and death sentence were subordinate to the judicial process, and that the successive habeas petition bar of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 precluded consideration of those errors and of the likelihood that Thompson was not guilty of a death-eligible offense.

As I recall, the case went back to the district court, then again reached the Ninth Circuit, and was eventually reheard again by an en banc court, which was constrained to deny Thompson habeas corpus relief. Thompson was executed soon thereafter.

Judge Fletcher is one of the smartest and most conscientious jurists ever to sit on the federal bench. While certain members of Congress (or the courts) might disagree, she takes exceptional care to remain true to the law in her jurisprudence. But at the same time, she understands only too well the importance of ensuring that if the death penalty is to exist at all, the punishment must not be carried out where it has been imposed in an unfair proceeding, or where any doubt exists as to the condemned man's guilt of a death-eligible offense.

Judge Kozinski may be content to let "formalism" guide his judicial decision-making. But I was proud to clerk for a judge who was willing to set aside procedural niceties and devote endless hours in an attempt to find a way to stop an unfairly-convicted man from being executed.

Kitchen confidential.

I've spent the past four hours baking and cooking, mostly to disastrous results. First, my ruggelach (baked according to my mother's legendary recipe) came out a crumbly, flattened mess. So much for sending a traditional Jewish treat home for Steve's family to enjoy at Christmas. Then, my caramel pecan squares appeared to be perfect, but I cut them a teeny bit too soon so now have to wait for the stuff to harden in order to attempt a quick fix. Last, I made a curried rice dish with almonds and raisins, for tonight's Hanukkah party with my family's close friends. This seems to be alright, but the rice is a bit gummy for some reason, and I almost forgot to add the all-important butter. Oy. You would think I'd never set foot in a kitchen before.

In fact, I love to cook and bake. The nascent Jewish mother in me revels in the joy of feeding the people I love, and I find it incredibly relaxing to putz around the kitchen concocting tasty treats. Perhaps my efforts today were foiled because I was too sleepy and wasn't concentrating. Or because I forgot to turn on the all-important Billie Holiday CD to which I usually cook. Yet as I was working, I felt smooth and methodical, unfettered by time constraints or stress. Thus, I am even more annoyed that what should have been a lovely Sunday morning in the kitchen has turned into a frustrating, messy debacle.

I'll write more later, maybe even about something more important and interesting than my kitchen catastrophes. For the moment, I need to get outside for a run or something to collect myself and burn off the irritation of the morning's failures.

Why I'm here.

Because for many prisoners, I'm the last line of defense against abuses of power such as this.

And because every once in a while, the courts come through with decisions like these.

Thanks (?) for the memories.

Oy vey.

I just drafted a long entry in reaction to this profile of Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, and somehow my computer ate the whole damn thing. I don't have the energy to redraft the entire post again, but basically I was reminiscing about my personal experience on the Thomas Thompson death penalty case, which is discussed in some detail in the linked article. Even if you don't have the time or interest to read the whole Kozinski article, that portion of it (relatively near the beginning) is worth reading.

I was clerking for Judge Betty Fletcher at the time. Following an unprecedented and distressing sequence of miscommunications, the Ninth Circuit voted at the eleventh hour to rehear Thompson's appeal en banc, Judge Fletcher was assigned to the en banc panel, and I had the privilege of being her law clerk on the case. When we finally issued the en banc opinion (authored by Judge Fletcher) granting habeas relief to Thompson and staying his execution just hours before it was to take place, I'd been writing, researching, and conferring with judges and clerks for days on end. I remember going downstairs to the gym in the Ninth Circuit courthouse to burn off some of the residual adrenaline, and still being on the stairmaster when Judge Fletcher came in to tell me the Supreme Court had granted certiorari.

Rather than simply vacating the Ninth Circuit decision and allowing the execution to go forward at midnight that night, the Court set the case for oral argument. The Court then took advantage of a handily-presented opportunity to slap down the rebellious Ninth Circuit, and ultimately issued this ruling (go to page 662 of the linked volume). In essence, the Supremes, like Judge Kozinski in his horrifying dissent, decided that the grave constitutional errors at Thompson's trial were subordinate to the proper functioning of the "judicial process." As Judge Kozinski suggested, maybe next time the courts would get it right. And so, in the spring of 1998, Thomas Thompson was put to death by the State of California, though he likely was innocent of any death-eligible crime.

The Thompson case was the most intense and, at the time, satisfying experience of my wonderful clerkship. When we finished the en banc opinion and secured the votes of a majority of the panel judges, I truly felt that I had done my part to prevent a wrongful execution (are there any rightful ones?) and to protect individual liberties. But looking back, I realize that I've been pretty much Oh-for-April in my death cases since then.

ET, phone home.

I was a bit of a teenage rebel -- mohawk and all -- but I'd like to think that I didn't cause my parents too much grief. Sure, my mother probably would have sold me to the highest bidder during my 15th year, but after that, I did most of my rebelling against my conformist peers, not against my parents. And whatever ummm... experimentation I did, I managed to keep safely concealed from the parental gaze.

But there were a couple of nights during high school when I would push the curfew envelope, or would simply forget to call to say I was coming home later than expected. I'd arrive home to find my mother in a panic. Yet as soon as she realized that I was home safe and sound, the panic disintegrated into anger, and then relief.

I never understood why she was so worried. After all, I was an honor student, youth group president, early-decision college admit, and all around solid kid, even if I wore 50 black bracelets on each arm, shaved my head, and had a rather odd-looking bunch of friends. And as long as I was driving, my folks knew I wouldn't be drinking (so of course they always let me take the car).

Over the past 15 hours, I think I've come a small ways closer to understanding what I put my parents through. Steve was supposed to finish his finals yesterday, and I expected I'd hear from him some time after he handed in his final project around 5:00. We'd talked about having dinner together, although with me sick as a dog and sticking to soup, that didn't seem likely. So when 6:00 rolled around, without a word from Steve, I didn't think much of it. But hen 7:00 passed . . . and by 8:00, I was starting to get annoyed. Sure, he had finals, but he had to be done with them by now, and I was sitting home sick and needing some TLC.

Finally, I called his cell (the only phone he uses). But instead of a ring -- or even his voicemail -- I got a recording from AT&T telling me that the number had been disconnected. At this point, a tiny pang of worry crept into my annoyance. I tried again. Same recording. Very strange.

I thought about it for a bit, and decided that in the throes of finals, he must have forgotten to pay his bills. But I figured he would at least have the courtesy to call me from another line, particularly since I was home with the flu. I called a girlfriend, who convinced me that being pissed off was better than being worried, and that Steve was probably out drinking to celebrate the end of exams. But I couldn't relax, and paced the house trying to figure out what might have happened.

I called Steve's roommate's number, but got voicemail, and left a panicky message. Finally, I tried to sleep, but left one hearing aid on just in case the phone rang. Which it did. Twice. Neither of which was Steve. Each time, I bolted out of bed and grabbed the receiver, then nearly burst into tears when I discovered someone else on the line. I eventually turned off my aids and drifted into a restless sleep, filled with horrible visions of Steve lying mangled and bloody in a snow bank somewhere off of Highway 93.

When I woke up, I hoped to find a message from Steve on my voicemail, since he often calls after I've gone to sleep (one of the perks of dating a hearing-aid wearer is that you can call late to leave a message without fear of waking her). Instead, his roommate had called to tell me that he hadn't seen Steve for days and didn't know where he might be. So much for alleviating my concern. Now I was truly panicked.

I called the area hospitals, which told me that no one by his name had been admitted. Then I called the Boulder and Golden police, which reported no contacts with him. While this news brought me some relief, it didn't bring me any closer to knowing where the hell he was, and whether he was OK. So I tried his cell again, and this time, his voicemail picked up immediately. Left a message, and started veering back into the angry camp and away from worry city.

Another couple of hours went by, with no word. His cell phone clearly was off, since voicemail kicked without a ring, and no one answered on the roommate's line. In addition to the dizziness and fatigue of the flu, I felt the slow burn of frustration begin to course through my body.

Finally, some time after 10:00 this morning, he finally called. I almost couldn't speak, I was so relieved, and angry, and relieved. Of course there was really nothing to the story, other than a marathon all-nighter in the engineering building, inexplicable phone problems, and some post-finals drinking with his classmates, followed by the first real sleep he'd had in days. And of course he was apologetic and sheepish about not calling me. And of course I was so very, very relieved to hear his voice that I couldn't stay angry for long.

So to my parents, I apologize for putting you through that kind of worry, and I hope never again to cause you such anxiety. And to all of you out there, don't forget to call home.

I want my mommy.

Clearly, I offended the gods of good health by thumbing my nose at the throngs of panicked people lined up for flu shots. For here I am, laid low by the vicious virus. I hate being sick. I don't really believe in it. Sick days are for skiing! But alas, I can barely hold my head up without feeling dizzy, so sliding down a mountain at high speed on a pair of wooden boards is probably out for me today.

Fortunately, I'm in a slow period at work while I wait for judges and opponents to take action in my various cases. I have one 10th Circuit brief to file soon, but I've gotten an extension and am well into my research, so a few days out of the office won't mean too much stress when I return. If I have to be sick, this isn't a bad week for it.

I don't get sick very often, but when illness does strike I am suddenly six years old, wanting to curl up in bed with hot tea and let my mommy take care of me. So when I called my mom this morning, she jumped instantly into Jewish Mother Mode, and within a couple of hours was on my doorstep with the makings of her delicious (vegetarian) chicken soup and a few other essentials. In the meantime, my computer had decided to join me in sickness, so I was feeling cut off from the world without e-mail and the 'net to keep me company. My mother, whose superhuman talents extend well beyond the kitchen, pulled open my CPU and poked around for a while, then made a few strategic phone calls, first to my fix-it-genius brother, then to CompUSA, where the tech confirmed my brother's diagnosis: my monitor was dead.

As technological difficulties go, a fritzed-out monitor is one of the easier and less expensive ones to remediate. While I crawled under a blanket in front of the TV, my mom zipped up to CompUSA, confirmed that the monitor was, indeed, beyond repair, and soon arrived back at my sickbed with a spankin' new screen.

I guess my needs are a little more complicated, expensive, and labor intensive than when I was six, but my mommy is still there to fill them for me!

Enough writing for now. I need to put my head down so the room will stop spinning, and then I need to eat some more of that delicious soup . . . .

Lovely.

On the way home from Los Angeles last night, I finished reading The Lovely Bones. I started this extraordinary book on the plane ride to LA, and was eagerly anticipating the home-bound reading time.

No, "eagerly" is the wrong word. This was one of the most painful, wrenching novels I have ever read. Though I loved it, I also suffered through it, word by word and page upon page, fighting back tears, hands quite literally shaking. I finished the book with less than thirty minutes of flight time left. I had another book with me, but when I closed The Lovely Bones, I turned off the small light over my seat, dropped my head into my hands, closed my aching eyes, and tried to let go of the churning emotions inside me.

Books often touch me deeply, but for reasons I do not fully understand, this book left me drained, exhausted, shivering. The editorial reviews linked above scarcely capture the power of Alice Sebold's prose, each phrase seemingly scraped from the depths of her soul and written in blood. "Haunting and heartbreaking" it is, but far, far more so than mere adjectives can convey. At moments, I almost wanted to tear open the door to the plane and throw the book into the wind, as the grief left in the wake of narrator Susie's murder seeped like a red-wine stain into the hearts and minds and pores of those left behind her. Even more painful was to see Susie watching from her own heaven as her family disintegrates and her siblings and peers grow up and experience all that was stolen from her.

Perhaps because I spend my days focusing on the injustices wrought upon the murderers, I could hardly bear to imagine the pain of the murder victims, both dead and living. Or perhaps because my emotions seem close to the surface these days, Sebold's wrenching tale scratched just deep enough to strike a nerve. But for whatever reason, this was one of the most powerful novels I have experienced in a long, long time. In the wake of its reading, I feel scarred, yet somehow cleansed.

Identity. It's a word that

Identity. It's a word that seems to get bandied about a lot these days. But what does it really mean? What is my identity, and on what does it depend? Am I simply a collection of names (Madeline, Cookie, Ms. Cohen, Mad, Rad Mad, Madso, Blaze, honey, "you"), numbers (three phone numbers, two e-mail addresses, and a couple of street addresses), nouns (lawyer, public defender, climber, skier, triathlete, writer, blogger, daughter, sister, aunt, girlfriend, activist, Democrat, traveler), and adjectives (Jewish, active, adventurous, neurotic, liberal, hard-of-hearing, legally blind, silly, smart (I hope), hot (in my dreams))? I certainly am all of these things (and more), but is my "me-ness" simply an amalgamation of resume lines and profile checkboxes or is does it transcend them all?

I've had a few conversations this week that started me thinking about identity. First, over at DeafGA, there's been some talk about whether certain people (e.g., gargantuan basketballer Yao, who apparently is hard of hearing in one ear) are "really" deaf or hard-of-hearing. More implicitly than explicitly, there seems to be a feeling among some of our members that someone whose impairment affects only one ear (or only a certain decibel range, or whatever) is not "really" (and should not identify him or herself as) deaf or hearing impaired.

A slightly different conversation, though I think reflecting a similar attitude, came with a friend whose former girlfriend, a convert to Judaism, told him that she felt she had to choose between him (a non-Jew) and her new religion. Though he was very supportive of her Judaism during their relationship, had agreed to raise their theoretical future children Jewish, and participated in many Jewish events with her, she somehow felt that her own Jewish identity was contingent on being with a Jewish partner.

Having found myself in a committed and satisfying relationship with a man who is not Jewish, I've realized that this is far from true -- my identity as a Jew comes from within me, and is neither threatened nor compromised by the fact that Steve grew up Catholic. But my friend's ex-girlfriend, a convert, is still shaping her identity as a Jewish woman. And, in a phenomenon not at all unusual among converts, she has embraced Judaism and the Jewish community with such fervor that it often seems that her identity begins and ends with her new religion. For her, then, I imagine it must have threatened her entire self-image to contemplate marrying a man who is not Jewish.

This is not meant to be an attack on my friends, nor is it meant to suggest that I am immune from exclusionary attitudes. Quite to the contrary, in many contexts I've seen myself fall prey to this very phenomenon. We often talk about poseurs, wannabes, and the like. Native Coloradans mock the transplants from either coast. Orthodox Jews look down their noses at members of the Reform movement. And die-hard powder junkies dis the lodge bunnies. What I'm really trying to understand is not group identity, but why any individual's self-identification with a particular "identifier" should threaten anyone else's sense of entitlement to the same one.

That is, does the fact that someone who wears a hearing aid in only one ear self-identifies as hearing-impaired undermine my own identity as a person with a hearing impairment? By the same token, does the fact that I don't like to identify myself as blind (though I often joke about it) threaten the identity of other blind people? If the chicks who hang out at the climbing gym in their cute little tank tops call themselves "rock climbers" even though they've never touched an actual granite cliff, does this weaken my own identity as a climber? Does the fact that my boyfriend celebrates Christmas (and hates lox) challenge my identity as a Jew? Hardly.

It would be disingenuous to say that my identity is entirely internal to me. Rather, it constantly is influenced by my experiences and by the people with whom I interact in various ways. In certain settings, with certain people, and at certain moments, I feel entirely "myself." At other times, I feel like an inexperienced actress, awkwardly wearing the costume and the make-up and carrying the props to play the role of "me," but sure that all the world can see through the greasepaint to the imposter underneath. But does my self-definition, or level of comfort in my own skin, depend on anyone else's vision of themselves?

Perhaps it is not so much that my identity is threatened by any other person's self-identification with any group or category by which I characterize myself, but that another's decision to place him or herself in a particular box calls into question my own sense of belonging there. Groucho Marx once said, "I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." The flip side of this coin is that if someone else, whose worthiness I question, wants to belong to a particular "club," it forces me to question my own identity as a member.