# LR Editorials (Aug. 1981) **URL:** **Published:** August 1, 1981 --- “Selling arms isn’t the same as selling Coca-Cola or farm equipment.” ## More forced equality The June 22, 1981 issue of _Newsweek_ called equal pay the “Women’s Issue of the ’80s,” and since the Equal Pay Act, which was passed in 1963, has had no effect (women’s wages are now slightly lower than they were in 1963 relative to men’s), feminists are trying a new tack. The Equal Pay Act has not been effective, argue feminists, because working women are still concentrated in “pink collar ghetto” jobs—teaching, nursing, secretarial work—where equal pay/equal work rulings do not apply, because the entire field is underpaid. The latest weapon in the struggle is called equal pay for comparable work, and a mid-June decision by the U.S. Supreme Court may have opened the door for future legislation on the issue. The ruling stated that a group of women guards at a county jail in Oregon had the right to sue for sex discrimination because they were paid less than male guards, even though their jobs were not identical. Judge William H. Rehnquist stated in his dissent that “there can be no Title VII claims of sex-based wage discrimination without proof of ‘equal work,’” and that the majority was “trying to usurp Congress’s role and impose its views on society no matter what the law said…” because they think that “…there simply must be a remedy for wage discrimination beyond that provided in the Equal Pay Act.” Many other people agree with the majority’s implication that there is a need for a remedy to force employers to pay women more money, according to impossibly difficult guidelines that have not yet been worked out. Why for instance, goes the argument, should a highly-trained nurse get paid less than a truck driver? One answer being given is that a truck driver will demand more money than a nurse will. As the _Newsweek_ article quotes Ronald C. Pilenzo, President of the American Society for Personnel Administration, “If a secretary will work for $200, pay that, and if you can’t get a mechanic for less than $300, you have to pay $300.” Women have traditionally settled for less, preferring a low-paying job to none, but today they want and need more: one out of every seven American households now has a woman as its sole support, and inflation is making the two paycheck family a necessity rather than an option. Another consideration makes competition difficult for women in the job market. Free market economist Thomas Sowell has demonstrated (in _Affirmative Action Reconsidered_) that the difference in wages between men and women may not just be the result of discrimination, but may instead result from the disproportionate burden for household and child care placed on married women. Single female academics, according to Sowell, make, on average, 104 percent of what single male academics do. Married women in academia make less, married men more. When working couples learn to share household burdens, working wives will no longer be at such a disadvantage, because they will have more time to devote to their careers. But there are more causes of wage differentials than women’s lower expectations and greater burdens; the old prejudices — that men should get positions because they are able to perform functions that women cannot, or because they are the ones with families to support, or because women will just get pregnant and quit —are dying but not quite dead. The one way women entering the labor market can overcome the prejudice barrier and get the jobs anyway is by working for less. Economic incentives can overcome bigotry. Just as minimum wage laws prevent teenagers, especially black teenagers, from getting jobs at all, it is to be feared that forced compliance with equal pay for comparative work standards will prevent some women from entering the job market in both traditional or non-traditional fields. In the “pink collar ghetto,” employers might replace women with men if they are forced to pay the same wages, they will be obliged to reduce the number of jobs available since their costs will be increased, and in male-dominated fields there will be little incentive to risk hiring women. Besides, do we really want to create the immense bureaucracy — imagine thousands of lawyers and accountants computing the millions of variables involved in the relative worth of one job over another — which would be necessary to devise and administrate new legislation? Especially when “equal pay for comparative work” would most likely have the same effect on women that minimum wage laws have on minority teenagers and other groups consisting mainly of unskilled workers: it would reduce their opportunities and create a permanently unemployable underclass which would be called by an old and familiar name — “housewives.” —VV ## Reagan’s China gamble > “Communist China . . . should, before too long, be obtaining military and economic aid from the U. S....” So predicted Roy A. Childs, Jr. in his article, “Playing the China Card” (_LR_, January 1979), shortly after President Carter had announced “normalization” of relations with the People’s Republic. Two and a half years later, the prediction has come true; this June Alexander Haig (that archdeacon of anticommunism) visited Peking and announced a U.S.-China agreement on improved trade relations and the sale of weapons to China. As the parties work out the details of the sale of what the news media persisted on calling “lethal” weapons (presumably as opposed to plastic bats or water pistols), it’s a good idea to recall the role which China has played in the American State’s policy of interventionism since World War II. Communists under Mao Tse-tung took control of the Chinese mainland in 1949, pushing the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek onto the island of Taiwan, and precipitating a crisis in the U. S. State Department which has never been totally resolved. The American debate over “who lost China?” fueled the outrages of McCarthyism, breaking and destroying the careers of State Department officials who had believed that China was never “ours” to lose. The Communist takeover was a major motivation for American involvement in Vietnam in the early ’60s, as President Kennedy’s coterie of “the best and brightest” were determined not to lose another Asian country to the Communists. But disputes, and even armed clashes, between the People’s Republic and the Soviet Union cracked the Communist monolith wide open, permitting American attitudes toward China — once the most feared of all Communist powers — to change. President Nixon led the way with his historic visit to Peking in 1971, and Carter’s extension of full recognition in 1978 sealed the deal, or, as foreign policy analysts called it, “played the China card.” Having open relations and extending diplomatic recognition — that is, acknowledging the control of a particular government over a given area — makes sense in a noninterventionist foreign policy, but to Nixon, Carter, and now Ronald Reagan, the protracted process of acknowledging the People’s Republic as a fact of reality has been a tool— a weapon really — for continued intervention and manipulation directed against the Soviet Union. When sophisticated U.S. fighter planes and ammunition start going to mainland China, the Reagan administration hopes that the Soviets will become sufficiently preoccupied with the military threat to the east that they will slacken their interest in supporting revolutionary forces in the Third World. This is quite a gamble for Reagan to take, for the Soviets’ reaction could turn out to be completely different, moving them to an acceptance of the need for detente with China rather than to heightened conflict. Reagan’s gamble, too, is on the continued stability of the Chinese leadership — now consisting of men in their 70s — who have opposed detente with the Soviets but who are under considerable pressure from younger men within the Chinese Communist Party to soften this antagonism. (Only days after Haig’s visit, this same leadership initiated conciliatory gestures toward the Soviets.) In a nation where intraparty factionalism, purges, rehabilitations, and repurges are the rule rather than the exception, Deng Xiaoping could be back in the provinces tending his backyard steel smelter in two weeks. What use, at that point would the Chinese make of American weapons? Another invasion of Vietnam, perhaps? It’s likely that Reagan hopes to use arms sales to the People’s Republic to “buy off” its opposition to American military aid for Taiwan. But if the mainland regime changes either its leadership or its attitudes, might we be treated to the spectacle of a war between Taiwan and the People’s Republic, each side using American weapons? Selling arms isn’t the same as selling Coca-Cola or farm equipment. Coming as it does from the U. S. Department of Defense and its contractors, an arms sale would amount to a multibillion dollar subsidy of the Communist Chinese military complex by the American taxpayers. The best they can hope for now is that, while Reagan holds his China card up for all, particularly the Soviets, to see, it doesn’t get trumped decisively by the unexpected actions of the other players in the game. —CH ## Catholics and conscientious objection With whatever alchemy is used to get the Archbishop of Boston to commit himself, somebody, or some-bodies, convinced Humberto Cardinal Medeiros to lend his sponsorship to a new movement to discover and aid Catholic young men who believe they are conscientious objectors. The Justice and Peace Commission of the Boston Archdiocese, which was established in 1978 and has since then actually taken positions on social issues not ordinarily associated with Catholic establishment activism, now intends to participate actively in a program that until very recently would have been unthinkable in this context. I talked with one of the board members of the Justice and Peace Commission, a committed young woman of, I should estimate with some certainty, left-liberal orientation. She acknowledged that Cardinal Medeiros was not exactly wildly enthusiastic about the idea and required a great deal of prodding. Nevertheless, the program now is in place and some as yet undetermined number of Catholic 19- and 20-year-olds are expected to make known their CO convictions. It should be remembered that during the Vietnam period, most draft boards wouldn’t accept the fact that Catholics could be COs, thus inspiring many such to flee the country entirely rather than serve in the military. Why move, now, to step up what amounts to a form of resistance to the draft? And from a legitimate commission of the Roman Catholic Church? The answer, I think the obvious answer, is that we are moving not so slowly toward reinstitution of the draft. President Carter’s dissembling notwithstanding, and President Reagan’s campaign rhetoric against the peacetime draft notwithstanding, many signs point in the direction of a new call to arms. Among the signs: the retreat by former President Nixon and by Senator Barry Goldwater from their previous commitment to the voluntary military. Moreover, we see in the new militancy on the Right, the aligning of God with whatever the self-proclaimed keepers of the conservative tablets want to accentuate, a simple and quite obvious forum for the development of a new draft. When people begin to associate the divinity with sabre-rattling, not an uncommon association in the past but somewhat trendy at the moment in America, the same people begin to associate opposition to compulsory military service with anti—anti-whatever, but in this case, anti-Americanism. We are already hearing quite enough blather from the extremists about just what a “true” American is, and before long—I’ll lay money on this if you like—we’ll be hearing from the TV evangelists and their acolytes the Good News that God has come out in favor of the draft. An objection based on the argument from personal choice won’t hold water with these people, since they have never heard or at least never liked what they’ve heard about the subversive notion that individuals must be free in America to choose their own lives and lifestyles. Nor will an argument from common sense make a dent in the new truculence: to tell these guys that the best defense for America isn’t likely to come from a couple million kids dragooned into service, well, it won’t wash. We shall in short order see a coalition in favor of the draft, which will look like this: 1) the demagogic politicians trying to be more militaristic than thou, will declare the voluntary military a failure and will insist that only selective service of some sort can remedy our deficiencies; 2) the evangelists will get the Word from On High and pass it on to the faithful, and it’ll sound like whatever the pro-draft people sound like in civilian talk; 3) the closet racists will remind us that the voluntary military is disproportionately nonwhite—so are the Boston Celtics, but never mind—and so we’ve got to have a draft, Or Else; 4) and selected military men will moan and groan about the inadequacies of those who choose to serve in the military and will pine for the days when those who didn’t choose to serve were made to serve. In the coming climate, the Catholics now settling in to aid COs will need lots of help, perhaps God’s, too. — David Brudnoy © Copyright 1981, by David Brudnoy