Isn’t
Turnabout Fair Play?
Liberal
commentators and U.S. senators, who are salivating at the upcoming interrogation
of Roberts, never asked Ginsburg about her extremist views
spelled out in her lengthy paper trail. The senators didn't
have to do much research; I made it easy for them by publishing
her words in my July 1993 Phyllis Schlafly
Report.
I
quoted extensively from her 230-page book called "Sex
Bias in the U.S. Code," published in 1977 by the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights. The purpose of this book was
to show how the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (for which
she was an aggressive advocate) would change federal laws
to make them sex-neutral and "eliminate sex-discriminatory
provisions…"
She
called for the sex-integration of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts
because they "perpetuate stereotyped sex roles."
(Page 145)
She
insisted on sex-integrating "college fraternity and
sorority chapters" and replacing them with "college
social societies." (Page 169) She even cast constitutional
doubt on the legality of "Mother's Day and Father's
Day as separate holidays." (Page 146)
Ginsburg
called for reducing the age of consent for sexual acts to
people who are "less than 12 years old." (Page
102) She asserted that laws against "bigamists, persons
cohabiting with more than one woman, and women cohabiting
with a bigamist" are unconstitutional. (Page 195)
She
objected to laws against prostitution because "prostitution,
as a consensual act between adults, is arguably within the
zone of privacy protected by recent constitutional decisions."
(Page 97)
On
the other hand, her view of the traditional family was radical
feminist. She said that the concept of husband-breadwinner
and wife-homemaker "must be eliminated from the code
if it is to reflect the equality principle," (Page
206) and she called for "a comprehensive program of
government supported child care." (Page 214)
Ginsburg
wrote that the Mann Act (which punishes those who engage
in interstate sex traffic of women and girls) is "offensive."
Such acts should be considered "within the zone of
privacy…" (Page 98)
An
indefatigable censor, Ginsburg listed hundreds of "sexist"
words that must be eliminated from all statutes. Among words
she found offensive were: man, woman, manmade, mankind,
husband, wife, mother, father,
sister, brother, son, daughter, serviceman, longshoreman,
postmaster, watchman, seamanship, and "to man"
(a vessel). (Pages 15-16)
She
even wanted he, she, him, her,
his, and hers to be dropped down the memory hole. They must
be replaced by he/she, her/him, and hers/his, and federal
statutes must use the bad grammar of "plural constructions
to avoid third person singular pronouns." (Page 52-53)
Not
only did Ginsburg pass former President Bill Clinton's litmus
test of being pro-abortion, but she was also on record as
opposing what was then settled law that the Constitution
does not compel taxpayers to pay for abortions. In her chapter
in a 1980 book, "Constitutional Government in America," she condemned the Supreme Court's ruling in
Harris v. McRae and claimed that taxpayer-funded abortions
should be a constitutional right…
It's
too bad that Americans were denied the entertainment value
of a C-SPAN broadcast of a Senate Judiciary Committee interrogation
of Ginsburg about her out-of-the-mainstream views. But Republicans
rolled over and Ginsburg was confirmed 97 to 3…
Tim
Russert posed the pertinent question
on Meet the Press, after showing a clip of Clinton saying
he would appoint only Supreme Court justices "who believe
in the constitutional right to privacy, including the right
to choose." Russert asked:
"Doesn't George Bush, as a Republican, have the same
opportunities as Bill Clinton, the Democrat, to put people
on the Court who share his philosophy?"
Phyllis
Schlafly
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/ps20050823.shtml
--
Comparable
Worth
Two
decades have passed since feminists lost their battle for
"comparable worth," a bureaucratic scheme that
would have replaced the free market in determining wages.
But recent headlines on the John Roberts nomination make
it seem like the mid-1980s all over again. "Roberts
Resisted Women's Rights: 1982-86 Memos Detail Skepticism"
inveighed the Washington Post; "Critics Say Women's
Issues Could Be Pitfall for Roberts," intoned the Chicago
Tribune. USA Today weighed in with "Roberts Joked about
Equal-Pay Request."
At
issue were comments in a memo Mr. Roberts wrote while a
young White House lawyer in 1984. Asked to recommend whether
the Reagan administration should remain neutral on comparable
worth, he called the idea "staggeringly pernicious"
and "anti-capitalist." He was right. Nonetheless,
comparable worth, repudiated by policy makers and courts
20 years ago, has been revived as a stick with which to
beat a seemingly invincible nominee.
Comparable
worth was intended to eliminate the gap between the earnings
of men and women. Feminists argued that only hidden discrimination
could explain the relatively lower wages in female-dominated
occupations, like librarians, compared with male-dominated
jobs, like electricians. Under comparable worth, employers
would be required to rate jobs according to abstract notions
of intrinsic value based on years of education required
for a given job, the level of responsibility it entailed,
and working conditions involved. In a free market, however,
wages--like prices--are set primarily by supply and demand.
Diamonds are not intrinsically more valuable than water
(which is necessary to sustain life). But diamonds are in
short supply relative to demand, which is why a one-carat
solitaire costs a whole lot more than a bottle of Evian.
Similarly, it may seem "unfair" that tree-trimmers
earn more than day-care workers, but the relative supply
of the former compared with the latter explains the differential.
Comparable
worth is no mere variant of equal pay for equal work, which
has been the law since 1963. It is illegal for an employer
to pay a woman less than a man to trim a tree or to hire
a male day-care worker at a higher salary than a female;
it is also illegal to bar women from tree-trimming or men
from day-care work. Yet for complex social and historical
reasons, men and women still tend to do different jobs,
although this is less true today than it was in the mid-'80s.
In 1983, fewer than 6% of employed engineers were women;
by the late '90s, that number had almost doubled to 11%,
still far short of parity.
The
"remedy" is not to pay less for jobs that are
dominated by men but to encourage more women to become electricians
or tree-trimmers. This was the conclusion of the U.S. Commission
on Civil Rights after extensive research and public hearings
in 1985 when I directed the agency. We opposed comparable-worth
legislation and lawsuits, arguing that such efforts would
actually discourage women from breaking out of sex-stereotyped
roles and undermine the free market system.
Linda
Chavez
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007168
--
Abortion
Distortion
Abortion,
as we all know, is one of the most scrutinized issues in
American politics. The mainstream media is always eager
to detail the positions of various candidates, document
platform fights, and analyze the views of prospective Supreme
Court nominees. However, despite this, the media have only
granted scant coverage to the consistent decline in the
abortion rate since the early 1990s. Even worse, the only
occasions when the media has used,
or in some cases misused, these numbers is to advance liberal
political objectives…
In
May the Alan Guttmacher Institute
(no pro-life outfit) released a comprehensive
survey which found that abortions had actually decreased
in both 2001 and 2002. Considering the attention that Stassen’s
faulty analysis received in both the
mainstream media and the blogosphere,
one would hope that media organizations would be interested
in correcting this misinformation that Stassen
and others disseminated during the 2004 election.
Unfortunately,
though, the Guttmacher study has
been largely ignored by the mainstream media. Almost no
major newspapers reported on the findings. The Buffalo
News made a brief reference to the study in an editorial
criticizing Howard Dean and The Boston Globe mentioned
the decline in an article about welfare. However, no other
major news organizations reported on the study in the weeks
after it was released.
To
its credit, the Washington Post did recently run
an
article about the long-term decline in the abortion
rate, citing the Guttmacher figures. However, this article was somewhat disappointing.
It did not explicitly correct Stassen’s
misinformation and no one representing a pro-life organization
was quoted in the article.
Even
worse, no one cited legislation as a potential reason why
abortions have declined. This is despite the fact that increasing
numbers of states enacted partial-birth-abortion bans, parental-involvement
laws, waiting periods, and informed-consent laws during
the 1990s. Furthermore, a sizeable body of social-science
evidence, including my
2004 Heritage Foundation study, finds that state-level
legislation is effective at reducing the number of abortions
that occur.
Michael
J. New
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/new200508240826.asp
