Even in the information age, it seems that some of our senators are still getting their 'facts' from Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh. Little wonder the Republican party is the party of 19th century men and their work wives.
The attacks on Ginsberg were, in my view, one of the more surreal aspects of the Roberts confirmation process. It was hard not to cringe at the insulting slurs falling out of the mouths of the 'distinguished' Republican gentlemen of the senate.
Next time around, the lying 'gentlemen' should be challenged.
To hear some Republicans tell it, letting Ruth Bader Ginsburg onto the Supreme Court was a tough pill to swallow. She was an ACLU-loving, bra-burning feminazi, but they supported her anyway, dutifully respecting the president's right to put his own stamp on the high court. Therefore, Democrats now owe President Bush the same deference when weighing his choice of Samuel Alito.
Ginsburg had "supported taxpayer funding for abortion, constitutional right to prostitution and polygamy," Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R) said at the confirmation hearings for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. "And she opposed Mother's and Father's Days as discriminatory occasions. But nevertheless, Republicans . . . put that aside and supported her nomination because she had terrific credentials, and because President Clinton was entitled to nominate someone to the Supreme Court of his choosing."
Ginsburg, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), "said the age of consent for sexual activity for women should be 12. In her writings she said we need co-ed prisons because separate prisons are discriminatory against women. . . . Where I come from in South Carolina, that's about as far out of the mainstream as you can get, but it wasn't about whether or not . . . the Republicans agreed with her philosophy."
Strong argument -- if only it had happened that way. . . .
In fact, then-Judge Ginsburg was a consensus choice, pushed by Republicans and accepted by the president in large part because he didn't want to take on a big fight. Far from being a crazed radical, Ginsburg had staked out a centrist role on a closely divided appeals court. Don't take it from me -- take it from Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). In his autobiography, the Utah Republican describes how he suggested Ginsburg -- along with Clinton's second pick, Stephen G. Breyer -- to the president. "From my perspective, they were far better than the other likely candidates from a liberal Democratic administration," Hatch writes.
Ruth Marcus points out that the supposedly crazy leftwing radical Ginsberg won five of her six cases before the Supreme Court.
In her younger days, Ginsberg headed the ALCU's Women's Rights Project. In other words, she has a well-documented feminist past. That's all some of our Republican defenders of yesteryear need to start churning out the anti-feminist propaganda. In the view of some senate patriarchs, anyone who advocates women's rights is a radical femnazi man-hater. If only Ginsberg had spent her life defending the entrenched rights of old rich white men, they'd have nary a complaint.
But the rich white patriarchs in the senate have a point about the radicalness of Ginsberg. In a country with a Congress comprised of 15% women and 85% men, and a Supreme Court that has seen only two female justices in its entire history, women's rights is, indeed, a very radical concept.
Matching shirt coming soon.
Supreme Court Alito Ruth Bader Ginsberg ScAlito Feminism Reproductive Rights Abortion Regulating Women Bush
