NARAL, John Roberts and the Road to Confirmation

Posted on August 28, 2005

After NARAL got the smackdown over its aggressive anti-Roberts ad, it looked like women's rights groups were going to run crying home to hide during the confirmation hearings. But it looks like things are looking up. Salon has a great article which traces the history so far about the efforts of womens' rights groups to determine where exactly Justice Roberts stands on issues of concern to women. And after getting knocked around by the far right and the Democrats alike, it looks like women like Dianne Fienstein are determined to grill Judge Roberts over some of his outrageous statements that have turned up in his records.

What happened? In a nutshell, Roberts' record happened. The release of documents from the Ronald Reagan library have shed light on Roberts' time as associate counsel to Reagan and as deputy solicitor general under Kenneth Starr during the Reagan and first Bush administrations. We've now been able to read Roberts' writings on the subject of equal pay for women for jobs of "comparable value," which he called in a 1984 memo "a radical redistributive concept." There is his repeated use of the term "so-called" with regard to the right to privacy. He also writes of the "purported gender gap," and "perceived problems of gender discrimination." In the early 1990s, Roberts voluntarily argued for the government in front of the Supreme Court on the side of abortion clinic protesters in the Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic case. And in a 1985 memo he made a crack about housewives becoming lawyers that may have been a housewife joke, or may have been a lawyer joke, but either way was not a knee-slapper.

To refer to the rights of women to control what happens to their own bodies a "pet cause" is the first step down the road to ensuring that American women have the same rights as women have under Sharia law: little to none.