Our friend Cathy Young has a wonderful take in the Boston Globe on the Mainstream Media pundits who have labled Supreme Court nominee John Roberts a “woman-hater” because he opposes dingbat theories like “comparable worth”: the 1970s idea, since abandoned by all responsible feminists, that judges and government bureaucrats should set wages in order to ensure that no woman ever earns less than a man.
Here are some excerpts from Cathy’s column:
“Roberts’s other offenses? In 1983, reviewing a report on state-by-state initiatives to combat sex discrimination, he singled out several ideas as ”highly objectionable’ — among them, special tuition breaks for women at state colleges to compensate for their lower earnings (a scheme so harebrained and so blatantly discriminatory that it’s amazing it was seriously considered) and preferential treatment for women and minorities during layoffs. Looks like Roberts believed that equality actually means — well, equality. Oh, the beast….
“Then, there’s the controversy over a joke in one of the memos. Commenting on the recommendation of White House staffer Linda Arey for an award honoring women who had changed professions after 30, Roberts noted that Arey, a schoolteacher turned lawyer, had ‘encouraged many former homemakers to enter law school and become lawyers.’ He added, ‘Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good, but I suppose that is for the judges to decide.’
“This is obviously a jab at lawyers, not women — to be taken no more seriously than a line in another memo in which Roberts calls a Girl Scout who had sold 10,000 boxes of cookies and wanted to sell one to President Reagan ‘the little huckster.’ Unfortunately, some people seem anxious to validate the stereotype of feminists as humor-deprived. National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy told the Chicago Tribune that Roberts’s views were not conservative but ‘Neanderthal’….(Never mind that the Neanderthal is married to a woman lawyer.)…
“In Slate.com, legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick finds that even if the feminist ideas Roberts criticized were bad, it doesn’t get him off the hook because he criticized them in a disrespectful tone. In Lithwick’s view, Roberts may be nothing less than ‘a woman-hater.’ Her smoking gun? An article he once wrote opposing the sex-based integration of an all-boy Catholic school, which included a sexist joke about giggling and blushing blondes in the classroom. This article was written in 1972, when Roberts was a 17-year-old high school junior. Maybe some intrepid reporter will dig deeper and find out what he said about girls in kindergarten.”
Do read the whole witty thing.
Update: Cathy’s piece can now also be found on the IWF home page!