West Hollywood Lowers Flags to Half-Staff in Recognition of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Who Died Today

UPDATE: Sept. 24, 1:08 p.m.:  The City of West Hollywood has decided to extend its recognition of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by continuing to keep flags at half staff until 27 days after the date of her death, which occurred on Sept. 18. City Manager Paul Arevalo made that decision, with each day representing one of the 27 years Ruth Bader Ginsburg served as a Supreme Court Justice.

The City of West Hollywood has ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff in recognition of the death today of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The flags will remain lowered until her burial, which hasn’t yet been announced.

Ginsburg, 87, died at her home in Washington, D.C., as a result of complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer. 

Ginsburg was five feet tall and weighed only 100 pounds, leaving her looking fragile.  But in her role as Supreme Court Justice, only the second woman to hold that position, Ginsburg was anything but fragile. She was a force to be reckoned with.  A story by NPR describes her as “a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.”  https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/100306972/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-champion-of-gender-equality-dies-at-87

Ginsburg served for a time with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired from the court in Januaary 2006.  She was the sole woman on the bench until then-President Barack Obama named Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010.  At the time of her death, Ginsburg had been on the court for 27 years.

“After the 2010 retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, whom Justice Kagan succeeded, Justice Ginsburg became the senior member and de facto leader of a four-justice liberal bloc, consisting of the three female justices and Justice Stephen G. Breyer,” says a story by Linda Greenhouse, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/ruth-bader-ginsburg-dead.html the longtime Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times. “Unless they could attract a fifth vote, which Justice Anthony M. Kennedy provided on increasingly rare occasions before his retirement in 2018, the four were often in dissent on the ideologically polarized court.”

Ginsburg’s stands on women’s rights issues made her the idol of young women. Her story was told in book, “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” by Irin Carmon and Ms. Knizhnik, that became a best-seller shortly after its publication in 2015.  The Notorious RBG was a play on the name of the famous rapper the Notorious B.I.G. and made Ginsburg ever more popular among young Americans.