Weekend Reads: Elevating equality to a moral absolute

Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (HarperCollins, 2015) embodies a very different perspective on the culture wars than one ordinarily finds on this website. Its author, Linda Hirshman (who also wrote Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution), writes, “Since 1971, Justice Ginsburg’s real enterprise had been not just the achievement of formal legal equality, but the reconstruction of what it meant to be an authentic and honorable female person. … [L]egal rights were a means to a larger cultural and moral goal.” Call it the goal of absolutely equal rights and opportunities—or call it, as Hirshman describes Ginsburg’s goal, “An outright prohibition of all gender distinctions.”

Certainly, whatever your attitude toward the change perpetrated in the name of the moral demands of equality, Hirshman’s account of the process, as filtered through the lives of the first two female Supreme Court justices, is an engaging read. While Hirshman clearly respects O’Connor, Ginsburg is the real star of the book. But the treatment of both justices is well-balanced.

Hirshman keeps her large cast in good order, consistently reintroducing players who have been absent from the narrative for a few pages with some reminder of their important characteristic. You will never have say, “Who was that again?” My favorite tag: “Samuel Alito, the judge from Pennsylvania who had thought that married women should have to go to [i.e., get consent from] their husbands if they needed an abortion.”

Oddly enough, as Hirshman herself commented earlier in the book, “Ginsburg understood full well how destructive it was to assign the full burden of reproduction of the species to women.” Conservatives agree, of course. We call sharing the responsibilities of reproduction “marriage.” In Hirshman’s world of burden-sharing, why does a father’s opinion about his child’s life not matter?

For an account of the spectacular failure of socialistic egalitarianism, one need only turn to R.W. Johnson’s How Long Will South Africa Survive? The Looming Crisis (Hurst & Co., 2015). A Rhodes scholar from South Africa who spent his career as a professor at Oxford, Johnson returned to the country after the fall of apartheid. He chronicles at length, sometimes at repetitive length, the massive political corruption endemic to South African society. The ruling African National Congress party (ANC) does not govern badly, he says. Rather, it does not govern at all. Virtually everyone in political office is there for the purpose of enriching himself. Government employees make an average of 50 percent more annually than private-sector employees. President Jacob Zuma spent more than 200 million rand of state funds on his private home and faces some 700 counts of fraud charges.

The entire nation is subject to rolling blackouts (affecting stoplights too—imagine the chaos at multi-lane intersections!) due to a crippling electricity shortage. And one study found that South Africa has the worst public education system in the entire developing world. “The typical ANC excuse is to blame ‘the legacy of apartheid,’ but this makes no sense,” writes Johnson. “All these services worked far better under apartheid.”

Johnson campaigned against apartheid back in the 1960s, and he’s no racist. The problem is not black people; the problem is the ANC. Eventually, he says, South Africa will bankrupt itself. At that point, it can either accept an IMF bailout and shape up, or follow Zimbabwe into near-total chaos. Personally, he hopes for the former option.

Both Sisters in Law and How Long Will South Africa Survive? can be gloomy reading. Consciously or not, both books demonstrate that equality, when elevated to the level of a moral absolute, can lead to theft and murder.