Think I'm kidding? What kind of man goes after a 14 year old girl like this just because she's wearing a t-shirt?
Sen. John McCain, at a town hall event held Wednesday in Michigan, singled out a girl wearing a t-shirt critical of him and challenged her to ask him a question. She asked about the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would have corrected the Supreme Court's destructive ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear: "I was wondering Senator McCain why you had the opportunity to vote to give equal rights to women equal pay [but] you didn't show up to vote and you said that if you did you wouldn't support it."
"This question should be on the minds of millions of working women who may face pay discrimination during their careers," said Kathryn Kolbert, president of People For the American Way. "Senator McCain had the perfect opportunity to embrace equal pay for equal work, but he instead parroted talking points fed to him by corporate lobbyists. It's pretty clear from his response that he's more concerned about the rights of big corporations than those of everyday Americans."[..]
On Tuesday, Sen. McCain came out in full support of President Bush's right-wing Supreme Court nominees, the very justices who found in Ledbetter that employees must file a complaint within 180 days of first falling victim to pay discrimination in order to be compensated. "But that's unrealistic and unreasonable," said Kolbert. "Employees who receive discriminatory pay typically don't learn about it until many months or years later, if at all. And a single discriminatory act can have repercussions that last years - throughout a career and into retirement."
"John McCain says the Fair Pay Act wouldn't help women," said Kolbert. "I'd like to see him tell that to Lilly Ledbetter. And I'd like to commend that young woman for standing up to John McCain at such a young age and asking the kind of substantive question that the media so rarely does."
