Wednesday, April 30, 2008

follow-up to ledbetter, or, mccain and the high road not taken

Yet another reason to be afraid of John McCain, especially as a woman, isn't so much that he didn't even bother to vote on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act but that his reasons for opposing it if he had bothered to vote are just so awful.

First, he's afraid that legislation such as the Fair Pay Act "opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems." But if the problems are discriminatory, then there should be lawsuits. I mean, if people couldn't sue for discrimination we'd still be living in the Jim Crow era. The argument that it's better to allow injustice to continue than to allow more lawsuits challenging said injustice is morally reprehensible.

Second, he doesn't seem to get that cases like this are speaking to the injustice of unequal pay for equal work. His solution to the problem, which makes no sense at all in this context and demonstrates his utter inability to grasp the reality of the injustice, is to suggest that women get themselves trained better. Seriously. Because if a boy and a girl both polish widgets for a living and the boy gets paid more, clearly the only fair solution is to teach the girl to make the widgets in order to earn as much as the boy polishing them.

I'm not saying that we women shouldn't look out for ourselves and get the training and education we need in order to survive and prosper in the world, because clearly we do. I'm just saying that this is an entirely different problem from the one at hand, and will require entirely different solutions.


tidbits worth reading, if you're interested:
Go Back to School
McCain's Compassion Tour
Ginsburg's dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear

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