RIP RBG

 

    From the Los Angeles Times:

... Ginsburg became a counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, and by 1972 led its Women’s Rights Project. She set out to change the court’s view of gender bias and its impact on women and men.

n. She did not rely on grand pronouncements about inequality or take on hot controversies such as abortion. Instead, she planned a careful, step-by-step approach to undercut sexist laws. She pressed a series of seemingly minor cases — often on behalf of men — that demonstrated gender discrimination hurt both men and women.

For example, the Social Security Administration at the time paid a survivor’s benefit to a widow after her husband died, but not to a widower whose wife had died. This might have been seen, at first glance, as a gender preference in favor of women. Ginsburg did not think so. When Stephen Wiesenfeld’s wife died during childbirth in 1972, he had to raise his son alone, and sued to obtain a survivor’s benefit from Social Security.

Ginsburg took the Wiesenfeld case to the Supreme Court and won a unanimous decision in 1975 holding this discrimination against widowers was unconstitutional. It was unfair to the surviving husband, but it was also unfair to the wife who had paid Social Security taxes at the same rate as men, but could not pass on the benefit to her surviving family. And it was unfair to their baby, who needed all the support his widowed father could obtain. ...