Justices’ Rulings Advance Gays; Women Less So

[sheshe2]

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2013. She says the court’s majority fails to understand what women face in achieving equality. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reflects on the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, she sees an inconsistency.

In its gay rights rulings, she told a law school audience last week, the court uses the soaring language of “equal dignity” and has endorsed the fundamental values of “liberty and equality.” Indeed, a court that just three decades ago allowed criminal prosecutions for gay sex now speaks with sympathy for gay families and seems on the cusp of embracing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

But in cases involving gender, she said, the court has never fully embraced “the ability of women to decide for themselves what their destiny will be.” She said the court’s five-justice conservative majority, all men, did not understand the challenges women face in achieving authentic equality.

snip

Justice Ginsburg, 81, was a prominent women’s rights litigator before she became a judge, overcoming obstacles related to her gender along the way. After attending Harvard Law School as one of nine women in a class of more than 500 and graduating from Columbia Law School, she was turned down by law firms and was refused judicial clerkships because she was a woman. When she became a professor at Rutgers School of Law, she was told she would be paid less than her male colleagues because her husband, also a lawyer, had a good job. She later became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School.

snip

Between 2006 and 2009, after the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and before the appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Ginsburg was the lone woman on the court, a situation she said she found isolating and disturbing. Now, with the addition of Justice Elena Kagan in 2010, there are three women, and they often vote together.

This needs to be read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/as-gays-prevail-in-supreme-court-women-see-setbacks.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Justice Ginsburg stands for our rights. She is an amazing woman. As an ally of LGBT, I am so happy, so very proud that our brothers and sisters rights are finally seeing justice. It is long overdue.

As a woman, I weep for us. We fight and will continue to, yet sadly we are left behind. We need the support of every man in our lives and strangers too. Please help us win our God given rights and stand with us. Equality for all.

[sheshe2]

1. Kick!

[redqueen]

2. K&R nt

[sheshe2]

3. Thank you redqueen. eom