Alito

I'm amazed and distressed by so-called conservatives who want to turn back the clock to the 50s. So is Kate Michelman as she explains in an article entitled, "Alito's Fantasy World":

In the 1998 movie ''Pleasantville," Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon play typical '90s kids who are inadvertently transported into the unreal reality of a 1950s sitcom. They use their '90s values to teach the sitcom world some lessons about diversity and tolerance.

Today many people have a stylized, ''Pleasantville" vision of the pre-Roe era in which I grew up. They imagine fondly that almost all families had a Daddy at the office and a Mommy in the kitchen; that almost all family relations were well-ordered and unthreatening; in short, that life looked like ''Leave It to Beaver" -- and that, with a few legal adjustments, it could do so again.

The conservative movement has spent the last 20 years working to roll back social progress and make this fantasy a reality. It is time to stop seeing the fate of Roe as a Beltway parlor game. What really hangs in the balance in the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito are the fundamental rights to privacy, dignity, and autonomy -- rights that transcend partisan politics, shape the course of our daily lives, and lie at the heart of who we are as Americans.

Conservative ideologues are simply wrong about the 1950s. Fans of the decade seldom mention that, with women's autonomy and earning power severely limited, poverty was a constant threat. According to the Census Bureau, in those days almost 20 percent of American families lived in poverty, as did more than 40 percent of families headed by women -- in both cases, roughly double today's rates.

Doctors and social workers were reluctant to report child or spousal abuse, and many women died from unsafe abortions each year.
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Samuel Alito's public record shows unequivocally that he is out of step with Americans on each of those fundamental issues -- that he has chosen to reside in a 1950s that never really was, rather than the new century in which the rest of us live.

He believes that the state needs to assist women in recognizing the moral dimensions of their decisions -- not only abortion but the forms of birth control, such as the Pill and the IUD, that are the most effective ways to prevent unwanted pregnancy. He sought to uphold abortion restrictions that would have treated a grown married woman no differently from a child, forcing her to notify her husband in all circumstances, including abuse and rape, before obtaining an abortion.

As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her decision overturning these restrictions, ''Women do not lose their constitutionally protected liberty when they marry." Judge Alito seems not to have grasped this fundamental fact of modern American life.

Alito seems as well not to think much of women's constitutionally protected right to equality in the workplace -- a right that women today take for granted.

He has repeatedly sought to limit women's right to fight employment discrimination in the courts, even in the most extreme cases, intervening where juries had already found in favor of a woman. He has opposed the affirmative action initiatives that opened the doors for a generation of women and minorities. He seems not to have believed women and minorities deserved equal access to his own educational institution, Princeton University.

The thought of Alito being confirmed for the Supreme Court is very disturbing. As a woman I find the prospect truly alarming.