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Home arrow Press Center arrow Linda Chavez Responds to John Roberts's "Homemakers" Jibe
Linda Chavez Responds to John Roberts's "Homemakers" Jibe PDF Print E-mail
Thursday, 18 August 2005
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"A Joke at the Expense of Lawyers, not a Sexist Slam"

(Washington DC): Yesterday, a number of internal memoranda written by John Roberts when he was a legal adviser in the Reagan White House were released. Many news stories have portrayed the memos as hostile to women’s rights. For example, the Washington Post’s front-page headline reads, “Roberts Resisted Women’s Rights.” One memorandum in particular, written in response to a inquiry by Linda Chavez--then Director of Public Liaison at the White House, now President of the Center for Equal Opportunity--has drawn much press attention. In response, Ms. Chavez today released this statement:

“John Roberts’s comment in one memorandum that ‘Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good,’ was obviously a joke at the expense of lawyers, not a sexist slam. It is ludicrous to suppose that Mr. Roberts would make a sexist remark to the person who was, after all, then the highest ranking woman on the White House staff--and a working mom to boot.

“Second, and more substantively, it is absurd for reporters to equate rejection of ‘comparable worth’ with opposition to ‘women’s rights,’ as a number of news stories implicitly or explicitly do. The largely discredited concept of comparable worth would ignore the marketplace and require employers to set wages depending on a bureaucratic calculation of a job’s worth. Mr. Roberts was not alone in rejecting such central planning. I opposed it when I was director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Commission itself recommended its rejection, as did the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit--probably the nation’s most liberal--in a decision written by Anthony Kennedy, now a Supreme Court Justice.”

The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization that focuses on civil rights, bilingual education, and immigration and assimilation issues nationwide.

 
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L-R: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Manhattan D.A. Robert Morganthau , Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, New Haven Firefighters Frank Ricci and Lt. Ben Vargas, attorney Peter N. Kirsanow, and Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity are sworn in before testifying on July 16, 2009 on the fourth day of confirmation hearings for US Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.