O’Connor: The Judge is getting Special Treatment because She is a Woman

Back to Sandra O’Connor. A number of my fellow conservatives remain unhappy about the lady’s Supreme Court nomination. They claim she’s soft on abortion and the F,qual Rights Amendment. I’m not going to belabor those issues. If I had been in the Arizona Legislature when she was, I might have tried to duck the abortion question, too. And as for the Equal Rights Amendment, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, so why get too upset? What strikes me about the O’Connor nomination.are two things: 1) the slipshod nature of White House preparation for coping with a breach of the 1980 Republican platform commitment to select judicial nominees on abortion-linked criteria (the breach itself was probably inevitable); and 2) the new male-female double standard that has been applied in the O’Connor selection process. Point one is Machiavellian. There are well-positioned people in the administration, mostly former George Bush campaign aides, who dote on seeing President Reagan sour his relations with the right-to-life crowd. The more they can widen the breach, the less influence the new right and right-to -lifers will have in the future to block a future Bush presidential nomination. Point two hasn’t received enough attention. The old male-female double standard is that a woman couldn’t be nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s gone, of course. The new double standard is that when a woman is nominated, she doesn’t have to meet the same standards of prior experience or undergo the same