This morning’s Boston Globe has an article entitled In Custody case, Clinton took the side of a father. When she was a thirty year old lawyer Clinton represented a father in a custody case and she won. For that era, it was quite a feat. I didn’t do much family work back then, but I know that in those years it was almost an automatic thing that mothers got custody of minor children. But the article implies, if it doesn’t outright state, that there is something hypocritical going on here:
Hillary Rodham — as she was known at the time — was building her legal case with an argument that runs counter to a central theme of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign nearly four decades later: Now billed as an unwavering advocate for women, she then argued that a father should be granted full custody of his 6-year-old-daughter over the objections of the mother.
Umm, no. By no means does her advocacy for a man run counter to any theme of her campaign. Clinton has been an unwavering advocate of equal rights for women. It is not by any means the case that equal rights implies that a woman should always be granted custody of her children, just as it was not the case, as it was the custom many many years ago, that a man should automatically get custody. We call what Clinton was advocating “judging each case on its merits”. It is a highly fallible system, but overall it works better than one that works by irrefutable presumptions. The above quoted paragraph implies that an advocate for the rights of women should maintain that a woman who wants custody of her children should always get it, the relative parental qualifications of the parents be damned.
The article goes on to describe a fairly routine custody battle, remarkable only for the outcome, which was rare at the time. Yet, we are invited to believe there is a whiff of impropriety here. Clinton, we are told, argued that men are entitled to equal protection under the constitution, which means she “played what now could be called “the man card’”. No, she was just pre-riffing on Kramer vs. Kramer (see below) and making a perfectly legitimate argument on behalf of her client.
The press has long been frustrated by its inability to take down the Clintons, and maybe this is just another somewhat feeble and halfhearted attempt to do so, though to give it its due, the Globe has never been as single mindedly focused on such a takedown as some other publications one might mention (cough, cough, the New York Times, cough cough Whitewater).
But I have to ask, so far as this story goes: So what? There’s nothing to see here except a competent lawyer doing her job.
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