RBG is not Pro-Woman

She’s pro-equality and that’s what makes her indispensable

In 1996, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (that’s Notorious RBG to you and me) wrote the majority opinion in U.S. v. Virginia, in which she told the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) to knock it off and stop excluding women. And then Scalia lost his mind.

Up until then, VMI had been whining that women couldn’t handle the “adversarial method” they employed to create “citizen soldiers.” RBG was like Bitch, please. Of course they can totally hack it.

Although she didn’t say it that way. What she actually said was “[n]either the goal of producing citizen-soldiers nor VMI’s implementing methodology is inherently unsuitable to women.” You can feel her rolling her eyes that she even had to explain this.

RBG goes on to point out that despite this dumbass excuse, which everyone who’s ever seen a man faint when his wife is giving birth knows is total bullshit, VMI “has elected to preserve exclusively for men the advantages and opportunities a VMI education affords.” Translation: You dudes know perfectly well women can do well at VMI, but you want to hoard this good education all for yourself so you don’t lose your power.

Time’s up, indeed.

VMI was so hell-bent on preserving their sausage party that they tried another excuse: diversity. Yep, you read that right. Diversity. Virginia tried to argue that having single-sex education furthered the state interest of diversity throughout the entirety of the public school system, I guess by…well, I really don’t know what they meant.

RBG again called bullshit. “A purpose genuinely to advance an array of educational options…is not served by VMI’s historical and constant plan — a plan to afford a unique educational benefit to only males. However liberally this plan serves the Commonwealth’s sons, it makes no provision for her daughters. That is not equal protection.”

BOOM.

A few years before, Virginia had tried to avoid all this by establishing an all-female military college, the “Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership.” There was teeny tiny problem though — the new school’s curriculum was based on so-called “developmental differences” between men and women. RBG wasn’t into that either and said: Hi, remember when Texas set up a separate law school for black students? This is kinda like that. Do I have to do everything around here?

RBG then sums up by calling out a few other things, like the idea that admitting women would somehow change the caliber of education at VMI, or that women wouldn’t want to attend anyway. She pointed out that yeah, I bet a lot of men don’t want to be screamed at in the morning and go through boot camp either, but that’s not the point here. She also basically owned all the “expert” witnesses who testified that men and women have meaningful developmental differences.

And that was that. VMI had to start admitting women.

Then Scalia basically burst a blood vessel and had a complete meltdown. In his dissent, he wrote “Today the Court shuts down an institution that has served…Virginia with pride and distinction for over a century and a half.” Dude, the school didn’t shut down. It just had to start admitting women. Relax and enjoy it.

He then quotes a poem about being a gentleman from the cadet handbook and says “I do not know whether the men of VMI lived by this code; perhaps not. But it is powerfully impressive that a public institution of higher education still in existence sought to have them do so. I do not think any of us, women included, will better off for its destruction.”

Hi, but did anyone tell him the school wasn’t actually destroyed? It was just going to have ladies in it now.

Twenty-four years later, VMI is ranked fourth as one of the top public schools in the country. Its female graduates are doing pretty great. As are its male students. It’s all fine, just like RBG knew it would be.

But the reason it’s fine is that RBG flat out rejected the notion that men and women are fundamentally different. The VMI case was not about righting the wrongs women suffered when they didn’t have the right to vote or own property or have their own credit card. It was, in the end, much more elegantly simple: people are the same, you must treat them as such.

RBG has always walked the walk on this issue. In 1977 she represented a widower named Leon Goldfarb who had been denied social security survivor benefits under the Social Security Act, because he couldn’t prove that his late wife had provided over half his financial support. Widows didn’t have to prove the same thing, and that didn’t sit right with RBG. She pointed out what seems obvious now: the statute was based on tired stereotypes that women can’t be breadwinners. Or as she put it, “assumes gainful employment as a domain in which men come first, women second.”

RBG represented the guy in this case, because to RBG gender-based discrimination was gender-based discrimination. Period. End of story. She also filed a brief in Craig v. Boren, helping to strike down an Oklahoma statute that said women could buy beer with an alcohol content of 3.2% at 18, but men had to wait until they were 21. I’m assuming frat boys fist-pumped everywhere.

So don’t let anyone pigeonhole RBG as simply “pro-woman” because she is so much more than that. She pro equal protection for all, or as she so elegantly put it, “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

You can read the entire U.S. v. Virginia case, here.

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