In Their Own Words: Right-Wing Women's Groups Claim Roberts "Firmly in the Mainstream"

On August 24, a collection of women billing themselves as “Women for Roberts” held a press conference organized by a PR firm responsible for the disgraced “Swift Boat” attack ads.

Brigida Benitez of the Republican National Lawyers Association said at the press conference, “No one has raised a single fact to show why John Roberts should not be confirmed. Assumptions or speculations are not facts, and those are not the standards by which nominees to the Supreme Court have been nor should be evaluated.” Yet “assumptions” and “speculations” were all that was offered by “Women for Roberts,” a group sponsored by the right-wing Committee for Justice and a Republican PR firm.

As serious concerns over a John Roberts confirmation escalate, the desperate damage-control strategy of these groups lies in stark contrast to the fact-based report from People For the American Way methodically outlining the case against the confirmation of John Roberts. In fifty pages, with over one hundred footnotes, the report examines Roberts' record in Republican administrations and documents his ideological activism that would undermine legal protections and progress in a variety of constitutional areas, including women's rights.

“Radical proposals”

Linda Chavez of the so-called Equal Opportunity Foundation, which has received over $4 million from right-wing foundations such as Scaife and Bradley and spends it fighting against programs such as bilingual education, referred to her own acquaintance with Roberts to assert that he was “firmly in the mainstream,” and that the programs he actively opposed in the 1980s were “radical proposals that never held sway with the American public.”

While it's not clear which “radical proposals” Chavez is referring to, they apparently include his opposition to affirmative action programs, which, Roberts said, were bound to fail because they required the “recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates” and his opposition to comparable worth proposals - designed to ensure that women who do work of comparable value to an employer as that done by men are paid comparable wages.

And one wonders whether Chavez considered other positions harmful to women taken by Roberts that many would regard as “out of the mainstream” including:

•  Roberts' support for a new, narrow interpretation of Title IX that undercut congressional intent and sharply limited Title IX's application, effectively gutting the statute. This interpretation was overturned by the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, which was passed by a large bipartisan majority of Congress over Ronald Reagan's veto. More than thirty years later, the vast majority of the American public still supports the law: in a recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, seven out of every ten people surveyed who were familiar with Title IX wanted to maintain or expand it.

•  Roberts' mocking the idea that Americans have a fundamental right to privacy, referring to the “so-called 'right to privacy'” and as Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in 1990, his co-authoring a brief urging the Court to overturn Roe. A Pew poll last month found that 65% of Americans oppose the Supreme Court's overturning Roe v. Wade, and only 9% would accept a ban on abortion. Moreover, a recent Harris poll found that more than 80% of Americans believe that states should be prohibited from interfering in the right of adults to engage in private, consensual sex.

“Legislating from the bench”

Mary Ellen Bork cites her marriage to rejected Supreme Court nominee and extreme right wing ideologue Robert Bork as adequate “personal experience” to allow her to evaluate John Roberts' so-called “quality” and accuses critics of trying to “take his record and distort it, twisting the truth” in order to “enact their agenda” through the courts “instead of going through the legislative process.” Similarly, business lobbyist Karen Kerrigan warned against “judicial activism” asserting that Roberts would “restore balance.” Connie Mackey of the Family Research Council contributed her personal testimonial to the mix and parroted the right-wing refrain against judges who “legislate from the bench.”

Yet it was the Reagan Administration that used the courts to reinterpret Title IX in a narrow manner that effectively gutted the statute, an interpretation -- supported by John Roberts -- contrary to the legislation's meaning as understood since its passage. Congress itself refuted these novel efforts by overwhelmingly passing the Civil Rights Restoration Act to return to the commonsense understanding of the statute. One would think that Connie Mackey would be concerned by these facts.

During the first Bush Administration, in a case heard by the Supreme Court when Roberts was the politically-appointed Principal Deputy Solicitor General, he asked the Supreme Court to interpret Title VII, a federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in employment, in a manner that would allow an employer to deny certain jobs to fully-qualified, fertile women of childbearing age because the jobs could be harmful to fetuses. One woman who worked for the company involved in the case chose to be sterilized so she could keep her job. The Court rejected Roberts' interpretation as being contrary to the language of the statute and its legislative history. (See PFAW's report.)

And in another case involving Title IX, Roberts, as Principal Deputy Solicitor General, tried to limit remedies for discrimination against women, urging the Supreme Court to hold that victims of sex discrimination in violation of Title IX cannot obtain monetary damages. This out of the mainstream interpretation of the law was rejected by a unanimous Supreme Court, including Justices Rehnquist, Thomas and Scalia.

“Real women or radical women?”

Jennifer Braceras of the Independent Women's Forum asserted that critics of Roberts were merely defending the “radical initiatives” of “radical feminists.” And Connie Mackey of the Family Research Council, the group that created “Justice Sunday,” accused Roberts critics of being “far leftist organizations consumed with only one agenda, the pro-abortion agenda.” Mackey claimed to “represent the mainstream of women in America,” and she asserted that “real women” want a rapid confirmation free of nettlesome questioning.

How “mainstream” are these right-wing groups? In the most recent article featured by the Independent Women's Forum, founded to “combat the pro-big-government ideology of radical feminism,” Carrie Lukas supports Roberts' mockery of efforts to achieve equal pay for women for comparable work by asserting, “Women tend to want flexible employment arrangements” and they “willingly trade higher pay for the ability to leave each day at 4 p.m. to pick up the kids from school.” Its questionable how many “real women” would accept such a cavalier dismissal of the gap between genders in the levels of payment for comparable work.

And the Family Research Council, a far-right think tank with significant political influence represented by Mackey at the press conference, recently organized the “Justice Sunday” and “Justice Sunday II” rallies, televised to churches across American in an attempt by some to intimidate senators from questioning Bush's nominee too thoroughly.

Mackey and the FRC have targeted Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) for her commitment to consider the interests of all women when voting on John Roberts' confirmation. Feinstein, in recent public speeches discussing her role on the Judiciary Committee, has correctly stated: “As the only woman on the committee, I have an additional role to play in representing the views and concerns of 145 million American women during the hearing process.” An email from Tony Perkins quotes Mackey saying at the press conference: "Senator Feinstein, for too long, far leftist organizations concerned with only one agenda, the pro-abortion agenda, have claimed they represent all women in general." [WATCH THE VIDEO]

Perkins concluded his email saying that Senator Feinstein “tends to speak for liberal groups like NARAL and People for the American Way” and declaring that FRC's Vice President for Government Affairs, Connie Mackey “spoke for everyone else.”

If you don't think Connie Mackey and the radical right-wing FRC speak for you, call Senator Feinstein at (202) 224-3841 and voice your support today (if you are from California, you can send an automated email with your message).