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Thursday, July 5, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
OPINION

420 Maynard St. 
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at 
the University of Michigan since 1890.

Y

ou 
know 
that 
episode 
of “Barbie: Life in the 
Dreamhouse” where Malibu 
has a glitter shortage and all hell 
breaks loose because Barbie is 
supposed to attend a Hollywood 
premiere that night and she doesn’t 
want her fans to see her without 
any glitter? I feel like that’s a pretty 
accurate depiction of how my 
summer’s gone so far. 
My 
“dreamhouse” 
is 
a 
little 
apartment on Central Campus, and 
toward the end of the school year, 
my roommates and I began to allow 
ourselves to consider the prospect of 
summer. Summer. The word itself 
drips with glitter. We all have jobs and 
internships, of course, but we’re used to 
being at the library until the early hours 
of the morning every single day. When 
you can’t remember the last time you 
got seven hours of sleep without feeling 
guilty about it, the idea of having 
nights and evenings completely void of 
homework sounds like something out 
of a fairytale.
But now summer’s here. We’re 
almost two months in, actually. And 
though our shoulders are tanner and 
our living room is packed to the brim 
with box fans we bought from CVS, 
it doesn’t really feel like summer. 
Day-to-day life doesn’t live up to the 
anticipation that the word “summer” 
carries.
Why? My theory is that the 
University of Michigan has a glitter 
shortage.
When I was in seventh grade, my 
mom told me I could practice wearing 
makeup. I couldn’t wear it to school, 
but I could wear it around the house. 

Naturally, I spent hours at the family 
computer watching tutorials from 
girls with usernames like juicystar07 
and itsbl0ndie. When my mom went 
grocery shopping, I tagged along to 
journey through the cosmetics aisle. I 
used crumpled $5 bills I’d earned from 
babysitting to pay for pink lipstick and 
blue eyeliner.
The first time I was finally allowed 
to wear makeup to school, I covered my 
eyelids with silver glitter, just like I’d 
practiced so many times before. I felt 
glamorous all day. I wasn’t just another 
gangling, awkward middle schooler. I 
had created art on my face that showed 
I was a stylish, dazzling it-girl.
Well, last night, I sat cross-legged 
in front of the full-length mirror 
in my bedroom and listened to my 
roommates laughing and singing as 
I put on my makeup. Foundation. 
Concealer. Blush. Eyebrow gel. Black 
eyeshadow to create the illusion of 
longer lashes. Thick, dark mascara 
that my mom got me for Christmas. No 
glitter. Not even a drop.
I’m finally old enough to wear 
whatever I want and I don’t even wear 
any glitter? Come on. Adulthood is a 
total rip-off.
During our walk down South 
University Avenue on the way home 
after our glitterless night out, my 
roommate, Shannon, and I asked 
ourselves why it doesn’t feel like 
summer yet.
“It feels like we’re just waiting for 
summer to start,” she said. “Like it’s 
going to be fun and exciting and full of 
adventure, but it just hasn’t happened 
yet.”
“I think we’re still trying to figure 

out who we are beyond homework,” I 
said. “’Cause during the school year, all 
we did was study and go to class and we 
never had to figure out who we were 
and what we wanted to do. And now 
that we have the time to do that, we’re 
just lost.”
I wouldn’t say that seventh grade 
was the highlight of my existence, but 
that may be the last time my identity 
came from myself and not from my 
grades or my job or my resume. I knew 
what I wanted. I wanted more followers 
on my Justin Bieber fan account on 
Twitter and I wanted to wear as much 
glitter as humanly possible. Now, all I 
want is good grades, and when classes 
end and I no longer have an ability to 
earn good grades, I don’t know what I 
want. How sad is that?
The thing is, I’m not the only one 
who deep down inside is meant to 
be wearing glitter. How do I know 
this? Because if you walked down the 
hallways of Mill Creek Middle School 
in 2010, I wasn’t the only one with 
glittery eyelids. I wasn’t the only one 
whose first taste of independence was 
the ability to wear as much glitter as I 
wanted. Before we started spending 
every spare moment in the library, we 
all used to daydream about being glitzy 
and glamorous. When did we become 
so boring?
It doesn’t feel like summer yet 
because I’m glitter-deficient. That’s 
bad news. The good news? You can buy 
glitter eyeshadow on Amazon for $3. 
Anyone want me to order some for you?

ETHAN KESSLER | COLUMN

 EMMA CHANG
Editorial Page Editor
EMMA RICHTER
Managing Editor

Emma Chang
Joel Danilewitz
Samantha Goldstein
Elena Hubbell
Emily Huhman
Tara Jayaram

Jeremy Kaplan
Sarah Khan
Magdalena Mihaylova
Ellery Rosenzweig
Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury
Alex Satola
Ali Safawi
 Ashley Zhang
Sam Weinberger

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 
All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

ASIF BECHER
Editor in Chief

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

HANNAH HARSHE | COLUMN

We have a glitter shortage

Hannah Harshe can be reached at 

hharshe@umich.edu.

Protect and serve
T

he 
Supreme 
Court’s 
latest 
term 
recently 
concluded 
with 
a 
slew of divisive decisions on 
several crucial issues, as well 
as groundbreaking news over 
Justice 
Anthony 
Kennedy’s 
departure 
from 
the 
Court. 
Overshadowed 
by 
these 
developments, 
however, 
was 
the 
decision 
handed 
down 
by the Court in Masterpiece 
Cakeshop 
v. 
Colorado 
Civil 
Rights 
Commission, 
a 
case 
whose implications were eagerly 
anticipated when the Supreme 
Court heard arguments late 
last year. The Court’s 7-2 ruling 
in favor of baker Jack Phillips 
of 
Masterpiece 
Cakeshop, 
who in 2014 refused to serve 
a same-sex couple, failed to 
produce a conclusive standard 
for 
the 
balance 
between 
religious freedom and anti-
discrimination protection.
Regardless of future action, 
there 
remains 
an 
issue 
of 
greater 
interest 
that 
goes 
beyond the Colorado cakeshop 
and the gay couple to whom it 
denied its services: that even in 
Colorado – one of only 20 states 
that protects LGBT citizens 
from discrimination by public 
accommodations – a couple like 
Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins 
could be so plainly deprived 
of their civil rights and then 
be rejected after taking their 
case to court. Following the 
progression (or lack thereof) of 
the litigation, it soon becomes 
impossible to dismiss the great 
injustice of the status quo. More 
than anything, the Masterpiece 
Cakeshop case demonstrates the 
need to define sexual orientation 
as a federally protected class.
Conflict ensued shortly after 
Craig and Mullins, a same-sex 
couple seeking a cake that would 
suit their marriage ceremony, 
found themselves at the counter 
of Masterpiece Cakeshop. The 
bakery was headed by Phillips, 
a devout evangelical Christian 
who refused to make the couple 
one of his bespoke wedding 
cakes on the basis of Craig and 
Mullin’s sexual orientation.
Namely, 
Phillips’ 
counsel 
sought 
to 
obfuscate 
his 
impropriety 
by 
framing 
the case as one of stifled 
personal 
expression, 
with 
Phillips as a victim at the 
hands of the Colorado Civil 
Rights 
Commission. 
The 

Court’s 
conservative 
justices 
generally concurred, judging 
the 
Masterpiece 
Cakeshop 
incident along the lines of a 
similar Colorado case wherein a 
customer brought a cake design 
bearing 
an 
anti-homosexual 
message to a bakery, but baker 
Marjorie Silva’s refusal to fulfill 
his order was upheld.

The 
justices’ 
cry 
to 
the 
supposed 
double 
standard 
the 
Silva 
case 
presents, 
however, 
amounts 
to 
little 
more than conservative self-
pity. The Colorado Civil Rights 
Commission sided with Silva 
precisely because she would 
have refused the customer’s 
same design request to any 
customer. It is not relevant that 
the man requesting the cake’s 
message was doing so in light of 
his own religious beliefs – it was 
the simply the content of the 
message, not the identity of the 
customer, that disgusted Silva, a 
characterization proven by the 
fact that she offered to sell him a 
plain cake and icing bag later so 
he could implement the design 
himself.
Phillips, on the other hand, 
based his refusal to serve Craig 
and Mullins solely on the basis 
of their identity. As dissenting 
Supreme Court Justice Ruth 
Bader Ginsburg pointed out, 
Craig and Mullins were not 
even able to arrive at their 
proposed design before Phillips 
rejected them. This proves that 
Phillips’ rationale lay with the 
identity of his customers and 
not with the content of any 
services they had requested of 

Continue reading on page 5.

“Regardless 
of future 
action, there 
remains an 
issue of greater 
interest that 
goes beyond 
the Colorado 
cakeshop.”

