Raw Story is covering a Yahoo News interview that Katie Couric did with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There's video of the interview at the bottom of the story, but here's the gist of it:
I haven't read her Hobby Lobby dissent, to be honest -- I was more interested in the way the court split, with all the women lined up on the dissenting side. And not long after, one of them -- it might have been Ginsburg -- said publicly that she thought we needed more women on the Supreme Court (the implication being that it would keep the court from issuing more boneheaded decisions like Hobby LobbySpeaking with Katie Couric on Yahoo Global News, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that five of her male counterparts on the court have “a blind spot” when it comes to women’s issues.
After noting that all three female justices were in the minority in the recent Hobby Lobby decision, Couric asked Ginsburg whether she “believed the five male justices truly understood the ramifications of their decision.”
Following a long pause, Ginsburg said, “I would have to say, ‘No.’”
“But,” she added, “justices continue to think, and can change. So I’m ever hopeful that if the Court has a blind spot today, its eyes can be opened tomorrow.”
“But you do, in fact, feel that these five justices had a bit of a ‘blind spot’?” Couric asked.
“In Hobby Lobby?” Ginsburg replied. “Yes.”
“Because they couldn’t understand what it is like to be a woman?” Couric asked.
“They all have wives. They have daughters. By the way, I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers.”
Ginsburg went on to note that her opinions on these matters are contained in her dissents, and that there is a tradition of dissents becoming “unquestionably, the law of the land.”
In her scathing dissent in the Hobby Lobby case, Ginsburg noted that the majority’s willful misreading of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would have unintended consequences.
“Little doubt that RFRA claims will proliferate, for the Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood – combined with its other errors in construing RFRA – invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith,” she wrote.
Earlier this week, in fact, the Satanic Temple declared that it would use the majority’s interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act just as Ginsburg predicted groups would.
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