Next Complaint: In 3rd Grade, He Pulled a Classmate's Pigtails

So far, the attacks on John Roberts have bordered on the absurd. From NARAL's patently false effort to paint him as a friend to abortion clinic bombers to the idiotic attacks on Roberts for fighting the absurd concept of comparable worth (see Ed Whalen's short and superb breakdown of the difference between the doctrine of equal pay and the doctrine of comparable worth), we've seen little in the way of legitimate criticism and more in the way of posturing. Hey, the New York Times apparently wants to investigate Judge Roberts' adoption of his two children -- this should provide plenty of good analysis of whether he's fit to be a justice. What the far left doesn't understand is that efforts to paint Roberts as "out of the mainstream" instead illustrate just how deranged the goofy left has become.

But our favorite attack is related to the comparable worth issue, and it comes from a memo detailed in the Washington Post...

Previously released documents, from slightly earlier in the Reagan era, when Roberts was a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, have established that the young lawyer was immersed in the civil rights issues of the time, including school desegregation, voting rights and bias in hiring and housing. The new batch provides the most extensive insight into Roberts's views of efforts to expand opportunity for women in the workplace and in higher education.

His remark on whether homemakers should become lawyers came in 1985 in reply to a suggestion from Linda Chavez, then the White House's director of public liaison. Chavez had proposed entering her deputy, Linda Arey, in a contest sponsored by the Clairol shampoo company to honor women who had changed their lives after age 30. Arey had been a schoolteacher who decided to change careers and went to law school.

In a July 31, 1985, memo, Roberts noted that, as an assistant dean at the University of Richmond law school before she joined the Reagan administration, Arey had "encouraged many former homemakers to enter law school and become lawyers." Roberts said in his memo that he saw no legal objection to her taking part in the Clairol contest. Then he added a personal aside: "Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good, but I suppose that is for the judges to decide."

After the White House, Arey went on to run for Congress, serve on presidential advisory committees, work as an attorney at a major law firm in the West, serve as vice president for congressional relations for a Washington lobbying firm, and was eventually appointed in 2002 as a senior associate commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. She has retired.

Roberts's comment about homemakers startled women across the ideological spectrum. Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the conservative Eagle Forum who entered law school when she was 51, said, "It kind of sounds like a smart alecky comment." She noted that Roberts was "a young bachelor and hadn't seen a whole lot of life at that point."

Schlafly said, "I knew Lyn Arey. She is a fine woman." But she added, "I don't think that disqualifies him. I think he got married to a feminist; he's learned a lot."

Kim Gandy, president of the liberal National Organization for Women, which already has opposed Roberts, reacted more harshly. "Oh. Wow. Good heavens," she said. "I find it quite shocking that a young lawyer, as he was at the time, had such Neanderthal ideas about women's place."

I don't want to play on stereotypes, but it appears these accomplished feminists (both right and left) can't understand a simple joke -- an anti-lawyer joke! Roberts is questioning whether the world really needs more lawyers. I'm guessing that very few people would fight him on this point. In fact, I'd question whether anyone who didn't get the joke should be taken seriously. At least Schlafly charcterized the line as "smart alecky"; Gandy's characterization of such a joke as "Neanderthal" demonstrates a glaring infamiliarity with the world as it exists.

If anything, Roberts is to be commended for recognizing that our shared profession isn't exactly the highest calling in the world. And in this belief, he's clearly in the mainstream.