as if we NEED ANOTHER slap in the face

Judge Roberts's Slap at Women The accusation that someone is “on the wrong side of history” is tossed around too freely in Washington debate, but it is relevant in assessing John G. Roberts Jr.’s disdain for women’s rights and thus his fitness to become a key swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.............. ..................Which brings us to two little-noticed memos penned by Roberts when he was a young lawyer helping to shape legal policy in Ronald Reagan’s White House from 1982 to 1986. One of the women’s rights issues at the time was whether women should get equal pay for comparable work, and a Washington state “equal worth” case was winding its way through the federal courts.
Three Republican women in the House of Representatives – Olympia Snowe of Maine, Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island and Nancy Johnson of Connecticut – implored the Reagan administration to accept a U.S. District Court ruling in favor of the principle. They wrote that “support for pay equity … is not a partisan issue.”
As the issue heated up in early 1984, Roberts wrote two tartly worded memos, which showed which side he was on.
The first – to his boss, Fred Fielding, on Feb. 3, 1984 – denounced the notion of equal pay for comparable worth, saying “It is difficult to exaggerate the perniciousness of the ‘comparable worth’ theory. It mandates nothing less than central planning of the economy by judges.”
Roberts returned to the issue in a second memo on Feb. 20, 1984, again using language that compared an approach toward rectifying wage discrimination against women to Soviet-style policies, the ultimate insult in the Reagan administration.
Roberts expressed annoyance that three Republican members of Congress would favor what he called “a radical redistributive concept.” He also cited possible justifications for paying women less than men for comparable work, such as the female tendency to lose seniority by leaving the work force for extended periods, presumably for child-rearing..................