Audio version

4 • COGNOTES 2015 ANNUAL HIGHLIGHTS ISSUE

Auditorium Speaker Haifaa al-Mansour Embraces Life

By Rachael Wettenstein, Student to ALA

Award-winning Saudi film director and screenwriter ,Haifaa al-Mansour took the stage on June 27 welcomed by great applause. Her film, “Wadjda,” was screened earlier in the day as part of the Now Showing @ ALA Film Program. She emphasized the importance of bringing as much authenticity to the film as possible, i.e., shooting in Saudi Arabia — which no one had ever done before — and where cinemas are outlawed.

The audience was treated to clips during the making of “Wadjda,” which captured the innumerable restrictions the production crew had to navigate, such as, men and women being unable to work together in public, often resulting in al-Mansour having to direct her actors and crew from remote locations. The short sequences also touched upon the initial culture clashes between the Saudi and German production crews.

Ultimately, al-Mansour said “Wadjda” seeks to spark a dialogue about the balance of modernity in the face of an ultra-conservative society. She spoke poignantly about how we often need to step away from tradition in order to move forward, stressing the urgent necessity to provide girls with opportunities to rise to their full potential.

“Wadjda” seeks to spark a dialogue about the balance of modernity in the face of an ultra-conservative society.

The film has become the basis for her

» see page 10

Steinem: Libraries Important to Community and Conversation

By Talea Anderson, Washington State University

Speaking to a full auditorium on June 27, writer and activist Gloria Steinem praised libraries for helping to democratize knowledge. “Librarians saved my life,” she said, “They saved my internal life ... and I'm here to say thank you.”

Steinem emphasized that free access to knowledge profoundly impacted her childhood and inspired her career in writing and activism. In particular she noted that librarians encouraged her to read widely — not just Nancy Drew, but also the Hardy Boys; not just books for children, but grown-up novels as well.

Pointing to tragedies like the Charleston shootings, Steinem suggested that librarians have a pivotal role to play in combatting patriarchal power structures. Libraries, she noted, could remind people of forgotten histories — how the Second Amendment had ties to white supremacists, how transgender identity once held honored status in indigenous societies. “We do our best to democratize the knowledge we have,” she said, reflecting on her own reluctant transition into the public sphere. Steinem only took up public activism after finding that journalism could only do so much to support her vision for social justice and gender equality.

Steinem has recently completed a memoir, Diary of a Nomad: My Life on the Road, which recounts her peripatetic childhood as well as the past 20 years of her career in activism. She encouraged others to take up her work in public speaking, noting that something special — empathy — happens when people meet in the real world rather than on the page. “We understand each other in physical space,” she said, remarking on the importance of libraries as places for community and conversation.

Concluding on a hopeful note, Steinem urged the audience to regard today as the “first day of a new era” — a post-racist, post-monotheistic, post-nationalist era of peace and understanding. Libraries, she suggested, would be crucial to bringing about this new world.

Kaplan Opens Conference with DOMA Case Insight

By Brad Martin, LAC Group

On the same day the United States Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal in all 50 states, attorney Roberta Kaplan was full of pride on June 26 as she celebrated the victory. She told of how her personal struggles as a gay person led to her successful litigation of another important gay rights case involving the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Kaplan is a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School and a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. According to ALA Immediate Past President Courtney L. Young in her introduction, Kaplan is a “litigation superstar,” and earned the 2014 Litigator of the Year award. In her forthcoming book, Then Comes Marriage: United States V. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA, Kaplan tells the story of how she successfully argued the case before the Supreme Court that resulted in the DOMA defeat.

Kaplan described her first meeting with defendant Edie Windsor in an apartment near Washington Square Park in New York City. Thea Spyer, Windsor’s longtime partner, had passed away, and the federal government refused to recognize their marriage, which left Windsor with a huge estate tax problem. Kaplan said she realized she had met Spyer years before when looking for help in dealing with her own issues of being gay and the complications of coming out.

When she met Windsor, Kaplan said, “All I could think of was that I would do this for Thea.... I honestly felt at the time as if God had dropped the case in my lap as a way to pay Thea back for helping me so much through some of the darkest days of my life.”

The early ‘90s was a much less enlightened time concerning gay rights, and when Kaplan came out as a lesbian, her mother reacted “by literally banging her head against the wall.”

Kaplan said, “As a closeted lesbian high school student in Cleveland, as a closeted lesbian college student at Harvard, and as a slightly less-closeted lesbian law school student at Columbia, if you had told me that I would marry a woman, have a child, and then win a landmark civil rights case before the United States Supreme Court, I would have told you that you were going to far too many Grateful Dead concerts.”

She added that if anyone had told her back in the ‘80s that the Supreme Court would make the ruling they did this week, striking down state bans on gay marriage, “I would have told you that you were certifiably insane.” Kaplan, referring to both the most recent Supreme Court case and the one decided two years ago, said that these cases can be seen as an “antidote to cynicism” that is all too common today.

“What these cases mean is that the courts matter,” she said. “What these cases mean is that the Constitution matters, and what these cases mean is that what we do as lawyers every single day, as a part of what I still believe is a noble profession, really, really matters a lot.”