In the last hours of the media debate about Justice William Rehnquist’s nomination to become Chief Justice of the United States, the Washington Post published a long editorial pleading for Senators to vote against him. The editorial’s impassioned rhetoric was exceeded only by its biased and distorted characterization of the Rehnquist record. The Post admitted that Rehnquist excels in intellect, education, professional experience, integrity, and moral character. But the Post urged a “no” vote anyway.
The Post was very selective in savaging Rehnquist’s Supreme Court opinions. The Post conveniently omitted Rehnquist’s majority opinion in Rostker v. Goldberg on June 25, 1981, one of the most important civil liberties cases of our times. Depending on your point of view, some would say it was THE most important. The Post doesn’t call this a civil liberties case. That’s because the Post chooses to define “civil liberties” in such a way as to promote the radical leftwing agenda.
Rostker was the case that upheld the traditional civil liberty of young women to be exempt from compulsory military conscription. If you are an 18-year-old female, hardly any other civil liberty would rank higher on your scale of priorities. The Post accused Rehnquist of having a “cold-blooded view of the role of government” in regard to civil liberties. On the contrary, in Rostker, Rehnquist manifested a most humane and compassionate understanding of women’s civil liberties when he refused to allow a cold-blooded government to trample on young women in order to achieve a mindless sameness of treatment with men.
The Post accused Rehnquist of an unvarying refusal to look beyond the consequences to see the impact on individual Americans. On the contrary, Rehnquist indeed looked at the consequences of imposing a new rule to conscript 18-year-old women. He evaluated how devastating those consequences would be to individual liberties, and he didn’t allow that tragedy to happen. The Post said that Rehnquist will not reach out to “vindicate the rights of individuals” even if his decisions “mean a continuation of second-class citizenship for some groups or an encroachment on the privacy of individuals.”
On the contrary, Rehnquist saved young women from the fate of the second-class treatment they would suffer if they were ordered to report to the combat infantry on an equal basis with men, and he saved them from the massive encroachment on their privacy that would result from conscription into the army. The Post accused Rehnquist of lacking “an acceptance of the court’s responsibility to protect individuals from the majority, and sometimes the majority from itself.” On the contrary, that’s exactly what Rehnquist did in Rostker. He protected the individual young woman from the majority which were then fatuously clamoring, through press and polls and pandering politicians, for equal treatment for men and women.
The Post complained that Rehnquist usually “voted against the civil rights complainant.” But the Post didn’t tell its readers that those whom the Post befriends as “civil rights complainants” included the cold-blooded complainants who requested the Court to order the heartless conscription of young women and their assignment to the battlefield just like men. The Post said, “Where the statute does not expressly vindicate the rights of individuals, neither will he.” But Rehnquist did. He vindicated one of the most precious rights of young women.
The Post accused Rehnquist of having a “doctrinaire quality of understanding and application of the law.” On the contrary, the doctrinaire orthodoxy of 1981 was to demand an irrational sameness of treatment for men and women. Led by the Carter Administration, the fad of feminism was then at its zenith. Nevertheless, Congress retained its sanity against the propaganda push to conscript women, and Rehnquist upheld the statute in Rostker. But in doing so, he had to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous onslaughts from the American Civil Liberties Union, which called the Rostker decision “tragic.”
What King Canute could not do, Justice Rehnquist did — he ordered the feminist tide to roll back to sea, and it did. He helped to hold the feminist fighters at bay until the age of feminist follies self-destructed and fell into decline and disarray. On behalf of the young women of 1981 and all the tomorrows, and their sweethearts and mothers and fathers, thank you, Justice Rehnquist for standing tall for women. You are the real champion of civil liberties for women.
