Below the Law

Dear Stephen Dunne:

This is the kind of thing that always happens to me. Where in the name of heaven were you when I needed you, man?

I recently read about your misfortune with the state's bar examination. As you obviously noticed, gay people can get married these days here in the Commonwealth. Anyway, it seems that the exam asked a legal question about this, and that you refused to answer it, arguing that the question was "morally repugnant and patently offensive." The question was about a gay couple and property rights, which means you might have been morally repug-ed by two people fighting over the lawn mower. Good lord, man, haven't you ever been to Home Depot? At least partly because you declined to answer the question, you flunked the exam, which you now see as a "disguised mechanism to screen applicants according to their political ideology." Moreover, and this is where I admire your pluck, you're asking for $9.75 million for not doing what was expected of you, which would make you the J.D. Drew of legal studies.

Again, though, I could have used you back in ninth grade, when Brother Rosarius was trying to club algebra into my head. I once solved a quadratic equation three times, and my answers were that X equaled, in order: five, breadfruit, and the Treaty of Ghent. How much easier it would have been if I could have argued that I found the whole equation morally repugnant because it was, after all, a triple-X equation, the hardest of the hard-core, and what were they trying to foist on me, anyway? My fragile young mind might never have recovered.