John Roberts Does Not Heart Women:
Young John Roberts, fresh, clean, Ivy-League anus scrubbed and tight, seems to have had a problem with women's rights, across the board, while he worked under Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese. (Full disclosure and fun story: the Rude Pundit was once nearly dragged out of a Meese talk about civil rights in the wake of the Rodney King beatings. Meese danced around and wouldn't answer the Rude Pundit's question. The Rude Pundit demanded that that bejowled fuck answer. Meese just danced. Security approached the Rude Pundit. Nat Hentoff, also speaking that night, intervened before the Rude Pundit was shown just what civil rights meant in the Bush I era.)

Yes, John Roberts, who has no problem giving the right hand of love when it comes to gay rights, just seemed to burn with Scalia-like visceral hatred of the goals of the feminist movement. Like a patrician at a 1964 regatta, wearing a yachting jacket and joking about the little women with the other patrician men in yachting jackets, Roberts wrote of the notion of equal pay for comparable work in response to the concerns of three Republican women: their letter "contends that more is required because women still earn only $0.60 for every $1 earned by men, ignoring the factors that explain that apparent disparity, such as seniority, the fact that many women frequently leave the work force for extended periods of time."

And then, in a line that could easily start with "Well, Trent and Drake," Roberts added, "I honestly find it troubling that three Republican representatives are so quick to embrace such a radical redistributive concept. Their slogan may as well be, 'From each according to his ability, to each according to her gender.'" And, oh, ho, oh, ho, how Trent, Drake, and John would have laughed at the Buckley-esque allusion to Marxism before downing their gins and tonics and turning, seething with repressed anger, towards their wives who now dared to wear pants to the yacht club.

We're told again and again on every shred of evidence the Bush adminstration drools out: don't look at these documents to understand how he might vote on any case. Problem here is that in his Reagan-era memos, Roberts goes above and beyond the call of White House counsel duties. Take the memo above. Roberts could have stopped with the legal argument. Instead, he pushes further, to mocking the women for their silly socialism. It's like if Donna visits the porn set where her girlfriend Wanda is "acting" in her latest opus, Fistings of Fury VI, and Donna watches Wanda getting roundly fisted by Shaun but Wanda seems to be enjoying it just a little more than necessary, moaning more loudly than even the director tells her, coming earlier than she was supposed to. If later Wanda tells Donna that she shouldn't read anything into it and, by the way, does Donna mind if she meets up with Shaun later, is Donna supposed to just forget about it? Only if Donna's an idiot.

But we're supposed to think that Roberts' memo in support of funerals for fetuses, calling it "an entirely appropriate means of calling attention to the abortion tragedy" is insignificant. We're supposed to overlook his ability to somehow separate women from pregnancy in his brief supporting Operation Rescue's blockading of women's health clinics, that it was not discriminatory behavior by the crazed Christian nutzoids because it was protecting the fetus, which may, you know, be male or female.

This is the ever-focusing picture of John Roberts: a man who gives his pro bono time to support gays, who wrote brief after memo aggressively shooting down women's rights, who didn't marry until he was in his forties, who played Peppermint Patty in the school play. All that and he looks like Jeffrey Dahmer on Prozac. C'mon, this is a guy with skulls in his freezer and maybe a Gannon in his closet. And if they're found, the women-hating, gay-bashing right will teeter like an earthquake's hit it.

Is this a baseless pseudo-accusation? Is it a stretch of the facts to fit a predetermined enmity towards John Roberts? Fuckin' a, yeah, it is. And it's no worse than what the right is doing to Cindy Sheehan. And she ain't up for a lifetime appointment that'll affect us all for the rest of our lives.