You may know that the Supreme Court recently ruled that a Goodyear employee, Lily Ledbetter, couldn’t sue her employer for paying her less than men doing the same work, because she didn’t find out until after 20 years with the company (apparently Goodyear, like a lot of corporations, doesn’t encourage people to discuss salaries). The court’s ruling was that based on current law, she had six months after the disparate pay started to file a suit, regardless of when she learned about it.

Congress is now looking at a bill to change the law. Sen. McCain, who skipped a vote on it, said that of course he supports equal pay but “this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.”

Some support. Apparently someone such as Ledbetter suing because she’s been discriminated against is worse than the actual discrimination in McCain’s view. How does he think these cases should be handled then? Have Ledbetter stare at her boss with sad puppydog eyes?

If McCain is the kind of elitist who thinks it should be legal to discriminate based on gender, fine, but spare me the crap about how he really, really supports equal rights.

That was Hannah Arendt’s phrase for the Nazis who (for example) could condemn thousands of Jews to the gas chamber without finding anything to object to except the amount of paperwork they had to fill out. People for whom running a death camp was as much a dull bureaucratic exercise as running a warehouse.

I was reminded of this by a story in The Nation about Dawn Leamon, a KBR employee in Iraq who alleges that in January she was sodomized and gang raped by coworkers and soldiers. She reported the incident to her supervisor (who told her to keep quiet about it–she didn’t go public until she was at another, larger base where she felt safer), then was told by an Army investigator that her supervisor had been in the room a couple of times during the night she was raped. And like the rest of the company, is insisting that nothing happened, there shouldn’t be any stories written about this, perhaps she’s making it up

Assuming her story is true, did Leamon’s boss know what was going down? If so, how did he walk away without stopping it? How do the corporate spokespeople writing to the Nation and telling them they shouldn’t be printing the story sleep knowing they’re covering up for rapists? Why is that a better solution than rooting out and punishing the guys who did this?

Even if her story isn’t true, there are countless identical, proven-true stories that are: People who saw a rape in progress and turned a blind eye. People who covered up for the boss, or the company or the community. And I suspect didn’t have any trouble sleeping soundly afterwards.

Sometimes our capacity for rottenness horrifies me.

•On New York Governor Elliot Spitzer hiring prostitutes, Dr. Laura Schlessinger weighs in — and blames the wife: “When the wife does not focus in on the needs and the feelings — sexually, personally — to make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like her hero, he’s very susceptible to the charm of some other woman. … The cheating was his decision to repair what’s damaged and to feed himself where he’s starving. But yes, I hold women accountable for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need.”

Quite aside from the general ridiculousness, I don’t think hiring a prostitute constitutes succumbing to “charm.”

•Monsignor Gianfranco Giotti of the Catholic Church on sexual abuse by priests and its coverups by the hierarchy: While admitting the “objective gravity” of abuse, he also stated that media coverage should be denounced because it “discredits the church.”
Because as we all know, doing bad things is not as big a problem as someone telling people when you’ve done bad things.

Charlotte Allen, writing in the Washington Post on female supporters of Obama: “I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, ‘we women,’ of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial.”

Allen then goes on to discuss women in general: “The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents — is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence … I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can’t add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own. … I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. … Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.”

In other words, the same thing the Independent Women’s Forum (from which Allen sprung) and other antifeminist groups always say: Women aren’t qualified to be the boss! Or to do anything other than stay home and bake cookies! They’re silly little emotional things, just like all the girls back on those old sixties sitcoms (Allen argues the old stereotype that women are innately worse drivers than men, even though men apparently–I don’t trust her figures–have three times as many fatal accidents)! Any woman who contradicts this theory is an “outlier” and an exception to the rule, so they don’t prove Allen wrong!

Of course, given Allen’s acknowledgement that she’s a moron, I suppose it’s silly to pay attention to her … except that she’s being published in a major national newspaper. And that they’d never publish a column rehashing old stereotypes that, say, Jews are greedy, money-obsessed and hate Christians or that African Americans really find it hard taking charge of their own lives and wish they had some white people to boss them around and tell them what to do.

Sexism, as I’ve noted before, is acceptable in ways no other form of bigotry is.