John Roberts Hates Women (again!)

Here is another offering from The Washington Post -- blaringly headlined "Roberts Resisted Women's Rights."

The paragraph attempting to explain just how is as follows:

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 he was right on all counts. Thanks in overwhelming part to the single-handed efforts of Phyllis Schlafly (quoted later in the piece), the Equal Rights Amendment was shown to have a host of unintended consequences that would have been highly unpopular -- not to mention undesirable (e.g. requiring that women be drafted into the military). The whole comparable worth canard is discussed here (opposing comparable worth isn't anti-woman; it's pro-market economy). Whatever the "state initiatives to curb workplace discrimination against women" were (the Post doesn't tell us, of course), given the militant feminist tone of the times, it's not a leap to conclude that Roberts was probably 100% right in deeming them "highly objectionable."

Funny, isn't it, how "women's rights" as defined in this article are only those remedies for discrimination conferred by the government? The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were vital to ensuring that everyone would receive a fair shot. But here, the Post seems to confuse "women's rights" with radical remedies for unequal outcomes. And if John Roberts opposed them, in that view, he must oppose women's rights.

Simple. But wrong.