[Mb-civic] Feminists have fixed the 'woman-hater' label to Roberts - Cathy Young - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Feminists have fixed the 'woman-hater' label to Roberts

By Cathy Young  |  August 29, 2005

JOHN ROBERTS, the Bush Supreme Court nominee who has received the 
highest possible rating of ''well-qualified" from the American Bar 
Association, seems to have a unique talent for driving the feminist 
establishment to distraction.

First, there was the appalling ad by NARAL Pro-Choice America, charging 
that Roberts had filed court briefs supporting abortion-clinic bombers 
because he once argued that a federal law against conspiracies to deny 
equal rights to certain groups could not be used against nonviolent 
protesters at abortion clinics. (The Supreme Court eventually agreed, 
6-3). Even most abortion rights advocates were dismayed by this smear, 
and NARAL quickly withdrew the ad.

Then, after the National Archives released the memos Roberts wrote as a 
legal adviser in the Reagan White House in 1982-86, there were new 
discoveries of Roberts's crimes against womanhood. Horror of horrors, he 
opposed measures to promote equal pay! It turns out, though, that what 
Roberts actually opposed was ''comparable worth" -- a briefly popular 
doctrine which proposed equalizing pay in female-dominated jobs (e.g. 
laundry worker) and supposedly comparable male-dominated ones (e.g. 
truck driver).

In a letter to three Republican congresswomen who had backed this 
proposal, Roberts quite correctly characterized it as a ''radical 
redistributive concept" that ''mandates nothing less than central 
planning of the economy." The idea that bureaucrats, judges, and 
''experts" can determine fair pay is absurd -- particularly, as liberal 
commentator Michael Lind has pointed out on the TPMCafe website, in an 
ever-shifting job market and in an era of constant technological 
revolutions.

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.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/08/29/feminists_have_fixed_the_woman_hater_label_to_roberts/
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