Friday, August 19, 2005

"The 'W' stands for Women."

Remember that ridiculous sticker from the GOP convention? Would that explain why Bush is replacing the first woman on the Supreme Court with someone who thinks like this:
Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. consistently opposed legal and legislative attempts to strengthen women's rights during his years as a legal adviser in the Reagan White House, disparaging what he called "the purported gender gap" and, at one point, questioning "whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good."

In internal memos, Roberts urged President Ronald Reagan to refrain from embracing any form of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment pending in Congress; he concluded that some state initiatives to curb workplace discrimination against women relied on legal tools that were "highly objectionable"; and he said that a controversial legal theory then in vogue -- of directing employers to pay women the same as men for jobs of "comparable worth" -- was "staggeringly pernicious" and "anti-capitalist."
And this...
As a lawyer in the Reagan White House, John Roberts scoffed at the notion of elevating Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to chief justice as a way to close a political gender gap, calling it a "crass political consideration."
So wouldn't you just love to know what's in those files that went missing?

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not to make excuses for Roberts, but it is easy to imagine that his comment about homemakers becoming lawyers was intended as a joke about lawyers, not an attack on women's rights. That kind of humor would be consistent with many of his writings. Just a possibility. As for the rest of it . . . sigh.

4:58 PM  

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