perfidy

A headline in today's Washington Post informs that Roberts Resisted Women's Rights. On reading the story, these horrific facts were made evident:

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."

...

Covering a period from 1982 to 1986 -- during his tenure as associate counsel to Reagan -- the memos, letters and other writings show that Roberts endorsed a speech attacking "four decades of misguided" Supreme Court decisions on the role of religion in public life, urged the president to hold off saying AIDS could not be transmitted through casual contact until more research was done, and argued that promotions and firings in the workplace should be based entirely on merit, not affirmative action programs.

In October 1983, Roberts said that he favored the creation of a national identity card to prove American citizenship, even though the White House counsel's office was officially opposed to the idea. He wrote that such measures were needed in response to the "real threat to our social fabric posed by uncontrolled immigration."

Now, as a side note, much of this wasn't news to me, as I'd already heard it during the breathless expose on NPR's All Things Considered, the night that 5,000 pages of records had been made available, and all the progressives ganged up looking for instances where Roberts had called someone a homo or some other such disqualifying action.

However, when put in context, like the WaPo did for me, uh, wait a minute. Even in context, the only thing I see there that's even worth a raised eyebrow is the silliness about AIDS transmission. I was around in the early 80s, but can't recall how institutionalized that sort of scientific ignorance was at the time, so I don't really take it all that seriously.

(If you don't already think me an intemperate red-neck, see the rest below the fold)

As for the rest, I read it a bit differently. Roberts didn't want to create women's rights out of whole cloth, and as one who remembers the idiocy that went under the name "comparable worth", he was utterly correct - it was staggeringly pernicious and anti-capitalist. Pernicious because it involved a whole bunch of folks, outside the free market, enforcing decisions about who got paid what, and anti-capitalist for the same reason.

And before anyone says "Hey, anti-capitalist is a good thing", I'd first say "Kiss my ass, Fidel, you ignorant socialist bastard, and keep doing so until you can find a single case where socialism actually worked", but after I'd calmed down, I'd further point out that "capitalist" isn't shorthand for some fat-ass sitting in the corner office smoking a cigar and repressing the working class, it's a concise description of simply allowing the free market to determine worth of various positions. Insisting that women not be paid less due to their lack of Y chromosome was and is an absolutely good thing. Insisting that there be a command economy, in which the Collective makes all wage decisions, would be an absolutely bad thing.

Roberts has suggested that promotions in the workplace should be based on merit rather than affirmative action programs, and this is somehow controversial? Only to ostriches and retards. As an example of why that is and what's wrong with continued over-emphasis on the race wars, particularly in the present day, consider the always-articulate thoughts of Dr. Walter E. Williams, and this excerpt:

When I think of the behavior of today's civil rights organizations, I often think of the March of Dimes. In 1938, President Roosevelt helped found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to fight polio, an epidemic that crippled thousands of Americans. The name March of Dimes was coined by Eddie Cantor in his fundraising effort asking every American to contribute a dime.

Since 1970, polio has been eradicated in the U.S., but the March of Dimes lives on, and they're asking for more than dimes. When they accomplish their mission, most organizations don't fold the tent; they simply change their agenda. The March of Dimes now raises money to fight against birth defects, premature birth and other infant health problems. We'd probably deem them stupid if they continued their battle against polio in America. Why? Because polio has been eradicated.

...

Like the March of Dimes' victory against polio in the U.S., civil rights organizations can claim victory as well. At one time, black Americans did not enjoy the same constitutional guarantees as other Americans. Now we do. Because the civil rights struggle is over and won doesn't mean that all problems have vanished within the black community. A 70 percent illegitimacy rate, 65 percent of black children raised in female-headed households, high crime rates and fraudulent education are devastating problems, but they're not civil rights problems. Furthermore, their solutions do not lie in civil rights strategies.

Civil rights organizations' expenditure of resources and continued focus on racial discrimination is just as intelligent as it would be for the March of Dimes to continue to expend resources fighting polio in the U.S. Like the March of Dimes, civil rights organizations should revise their agenda and take on the big, non-civil rights problems that make socioeconomic progress impossible for a large segment of the black community.

So there's that.

And the latter item, identity cards? Aside from the fact such cards already exist, even if only in the ineffective form of the Social Security number attached to every friggin' trail of American life, the Post talks about his aversion to illegal (otherwise known as "uncontrolled") immigration as though that's a bad thing. I'm all for immigration, done properly. But the apologists who'd pretend that illegal immigrants should just be allowed to stream over the borders are either intentionally deceptive or criminally naive. I'm now officially a minority in my home state of Texas (being a person of pallor), and there's a decent chance that I'll be in another minority soon, as a person actually legally authorized to be here.

That first part doesn't concern me, but the second concerns me greatly - in addition to the drain on resources, paid for by legal citizens but consumed by others, there's the bit about this becoming Mexico, which, well, if I wanted to live in an opportunity-bereft shithole, I could just move there myself. They don't have to bring it to me. And when they do bring it, I'd prefer that they at least bring it in the language of the land, a/k/a English. The fact that they don't is but one of the reasons for lack of assimilation, and the core reason which causes an otherwise mild-mannered and open-minded guy like me to wonder how long before I am a de-facto Mexican.

Don't get me wrong - Mexican-Americans are cool, but Mexicans who seek a better life, and do so by simply transplanting themselves here to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Braves are missing the point. What's right about America is the vast melting pot that it's been for the last couple hundred years. And what's wrong about Mexico is the ineptly governed, economically unbalanced, insular, congealed, undifferentiated mess that it's become over those same couple hundred years. No wonder they want out. But don't congeal our melting pot, is all I'm saying. Well, that and if you're coming, come legally, please?

So, back from my rant to my actual point - I'm supposed to be inclined against Roberts because he seems to have, at least 20 years ago, held a bunch of intelligent positions? Not bloody likely.

But then I've never been overtly progressive like that.

Oh, and regarding whether turning homemakers into lawyers is a good thing?

Roberts's comment about homemakers startled women across the ideological spectrum. Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the conservative Eagle Forum who entered law school when she was 51, said, "It kind of sounds like a smart alecky comment." She noted that Roberts was "a young bachelor and hadn't seen a whole lot of life at that point."

Schlafly said, "I knew Lyn Arey. She is a fine woman." But she added, "I don't think that disqualifies him. I think he got married to a feminist; he's learned a lot."

Lighten up Phyllis. A smart lady like you should be able to tell he was ranking on attorneys, not homemakers or women. See? Even right-wingers can get a periodic case of humor constipation.