Equal Pay for Women Denied, Again

[groovedaddy]

The Supreme Court keeps finding ways to deny women equal pay and benefits.

In 2007, it denied a woman’s claim for equal pay because it thought she waited too long to file it. On Monday, the court sided against female retirees who get smaller pensions than their male colleagues because they got pregnant and took maternity leaves before Congress got around to outlawing discrimination on that basis.

The case involved four retired employees of AT&T who took maternity leaves between 1968 and 1976 — before the law required employers to offer pregnancy leaves on equal terms with other disability conditions. The women were denied full credit for those leaves.

Both sides of the 7-to-2 ruling, including the exasperated dissent signed by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, agreed that the sort of pay discrimination at issue is now illegal.

Nevertheless, a seven-member majority — including two generally reliable votes for equality, Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter — found AT&T’s continued shortchanging of the four women to be permissible. It reasoned mainly that the pregnancy leaves predated the 1978 law, and since the law was not retroactive, the discrepancy in benefits was the product of “past, completed events that were entirely lawful at the time they occurred.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/opinion/21thu3.html?th&emc=th

[Strong Atheist]

1. K&r.

[ensho]

2. k r

nt

[Captain Hilts]

3. Whew! A 'post-sexist' society is great! nt

[femrap]

4. Given the dire

state of the world's environment, the draining of all natural resources, and the economic calamity, maybe Women everywhere should just stop having babies.

Too bad Thomas, Alito, Scalia, and Robert's mothers didn't do that.

Diaper 'em, feed 'em, nurse 'em and they grow up to spit in your face. Mother Nature will get 'em....viagra will blind 'em all! lol.

[backtoblue]

5. "past, completed events that were entirely lawful at the time they occurred."

So much for justice.

If I had a joint saved from the 1800's and I decided to smoke it today, would I get to use that excuse because it was rolled before prohibition?

[TellTheTruth82]

6. Regrettable

but legally correct. The joint issue is not a good analogy. If you smoked it today, you would be subject to the law at the time you smoked it. If you smoked it back in the 1800s, the laws back then would apply.

[wan]

11. Re-regrettable

Yes, it sucks when we can't decide the way that makes sense in every case. We can't have laws that are only applied when we want them to, and the inverse of this principle leads to crap like this on occasion.

However, there is one exception to this rule that only applies to juries, even though lawyers and judges are generally precluded from informing the jury about it. It's called jury nullification. Some will argue that this is an abuse of the right to a jury trial. Yet If some DA wanted to convict a Dakota Indian for being in Minnesota would you convict on the fact alone? This is a case I would, as a jurist, partake in jury nullification:
www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/sodomy.html
An older case on the same law:
news.1918.com/article.php?article_id=6410&type=read

Then there are the dumb laws:
Ohio law: it's against the law to kill a housefly within 160 feet of a church without a license.
Cleveland, Ohio: It's illegal to catch mice without a hunting license.
Oxford, Ohio: it's illegal for a woman to strip off her clothing while standing in front of a man's picture.
The Ohio driver's education manual states that you must honk the horn whenever you pass another car.
{Note: I once took the Arkansas drivers test (~1997) and the same honking rule applied, and was included in the actual test.}
South Dakota: it is illegal to try to convince a pacifist to renounce his beliefs by threatening to arm-wrestle him.
Memphis, Tennessee: it is illegal for a woman to drive a car unless there is a man either running or walking in front of it, waving a red flag to warn approaching motorists and pedestrians.

These laws certainly warrant jury nullification if some DA attempts to convict on them.

"The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy."
--John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States

"It is not only his right but also his duty… to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."
--John Adams

[Chulanowa]

7. If you smoked the fossil doob, I doubt anyone would notice

Except you, of course, hacking and yacking on your mummy weed :D

[Wednesdays]

8. K&R

:kick:

[BlancheSplanchnik]

9. I just don't understand the law.....Well, I missed the Recommend deadline...

does that disqualify this Rec?

Or is the post itself still commendable because at the time it was written, the Rec timeclock had not yet started ticking?

this is also another reason that I just don't understand the law. The rigidity of upholding a decision based on a timeline, rather than on the grounds of righting an injustice just makes no sense to me.









Anyway, I Recommend this post, not because I commend the event reported on, but because PEOPLE NEED TO STAY AWARE that sexism is real and it still exists. Even though posts like this never get the eyes and mouths that bigotry against other groups gets. Maybe to sidestep the irrationality effect, we should do away with the word "sexism", since it just seems too loaded for many, and just call it Hate and Bigotry.

[question everything]

10. And a comment about it

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x451698

I admit, until I read this commentary, I was not aware of this decision. Shows how much our "24 media" covers topic of importance.