Misread Misogyny

In the most blatant case of deceptive advertising since my lawsuit against the movie The Never-Ending Story, the Washington Post runs with the headline "Roberts Resisted Women's Rights" for a piece about Bush's Supreme Court nominee.

One such instance of "resistance" was to the concept of "comparable worth" compensation, which Michael Lind at TPM Cafe justly skewers as "an idea so hare-brained it would have delighted Bugs Bunny" that has been "buried and forgotten even by the radical left." The idea, in a nutshell, was that since women often ended up in less remunerative types of jobs than men, the government (or perhaps federal judges) would decide when a job frequently taken by women was of "comparable worth" to a different job more often held by men, and mandate wage parity. In other words, Lind is being generous.

The other scandalous tidbit in this vein is a joking aside in which he wrote:

Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good, but I suppose that is for the judges to decide.

Maybe I'm crazy or excessively charitable, but that sure sounds like a tongue-in-cheek poke at lawyers, rather than as some kind of troglodytic wish to keep women barefoot and pregnant. There may be other things about Roberts to raise an eyebrow at—other things in that very Post article, even—but this seems like a thin reed to hang opposition on.