Mark in Mexico does a very good job of fisking the news coverage of the memo John Roberts wrote back in the 1980s about comparable worth legislation (i.e., the one in which he supposed called equal pay for equal work "radical"). (Ann Althouse pithily disposes of Kos' coverage of it as "tiresome exaggerations.")
In contrast, Kevin Drum says:
...the White House must consider the stuff they're holding back to be more embarrassing than a memo criticizing comparable worth as "radical." That's a scary thought.
Since it's anachronistic to judge a 20 year old memorandum by today's standards (and remember that comparable worth remains controversial even today), I did a quick Lexis search and kicked up the following samples of elite legal opinion from back in the 1980s:
"...comparable worth constitutes the cutting edge of an ideal of distributive justice. It betokens a radical reworking of our fundamental social and political principles. Elizabeth Fox- Genovese, Women's Rights, Affirmative Action, and the Myth of Individualism, 54 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 338, 369 (1986)
" ... a policy of comparable worth would require a radical reordering of the economic system inasmuch as courts and the government would be given greater power in setting wages. Such a policy would lead inevitably to governmental control of wages, as occurs in the Soviet Union, and a disruption of the free market." Christopher Osakwe, Equal Protection of Law in Soviet Constitutional Law and Theory -- A Comparative Analysis, 59 Tul. L. Rev. 974, 987 (1985)
"... the idea of equal pay for work done by women that is decreed to be of comparable worth to that done by men is a debatable social and economic policy to redistribute income -- a concept foreign to the meaning of civil rights as developed in the American tradition." Morris B. Abram, Affirmative Action: Fair Shakers and Social Engineers, 99 HARV. L. REV. 1312 n.53 (1986)
"The reduction in GNP associated with comparable worth is fairly small as compared with its redistributive impact. For s = 1, for example, GNP falls by 0.3% -- about $ 12 billion in 1985 terms. The real incomes of holders of men's jobs and of all holders of women's jobs also fall by 0.3%. The important effect of comparable worth is a redistribution of income from workers in the women's job 2 to those who are lucky enough to obtain a covered women's job." George E. Johnson and Gary R. Solon, The Attainment of Pay Equity Between the Sexes by Legal Means: An Economic Analysis, 20 U Mich JL Ref 183, 203 (1986).
In context, Roberts' actual statement - "I honestly find it troubling that three Republican representatives are so quick to embrace such a radical redistributive concept" - thus was consistent with a broad swath of conventional opinion at the time. Even liberals like Fox-Genovese (she's been called "a renowned scholar who spent most of her life promoting the radical feminist agenda in the academy," at least prior to her late 1990s conversion to Catholicism), recognized that comparable worth was radical in its redistributive implications. In sum, this is a tempest in a MSM teapot.
