Regarding my old (and overly quick) post on the U.S. Senate’s vote on Ledbetter v. Goodyear, Charlottesville writer Dahlia Lithwick has a must-read piece in Slate. She sums up the opponents of the bill to overturn the Supreme Court ruling thusly:
"Many of the Republicans who blocked the vote to reinstate the original reading of Title VII claimed they were doing so to protect women—read ‘stupid women’—from the greedy clutches of unprincipled plaintiffs’ attorneys and from women’s own stupid inclination to sit around for years—decades even—while being screwed over financially before they bring suit. That means they were, in effect, just protecting us from the dangerous laws that protect us. Whew."
And as for Republican presidential hopeful Senator John McCain, Lithwick has this to say about The Maverick:
"All of which brings us to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who skipped the vote on equal pay altogether because he was out campaigning. (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both showed up to support it.) McCain’s opposition to the bill was expressed thusly: He’s familiar with the pay disparity but believes there are better ways to help women find better-paying jobs. ‘They need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else.’ As my colleague Meghan O’Rourke pointed out yesterday, all that is code for the obtuse claim that the fact that women earn 77 cents on the dollar for the same work as men will somehow be fixed by more training for women as opposed to less discrimination by men. Wow. Hey! We should develop the superpowers of heat vision and flight, as well."
All of this leads to this week’s cover story, "Playing Around with Sex Ed." If you haven’t, check it out, along with a sidebar I threw in the mix on McCain’s position on abstinence-only education and (!) Roe v. Wade.