HARRIET MIERS: FEMINIST MOLE?….Jeez, it sure doesn’t take much to get the wingnuts excited. It turns out that in the late 90s, Harriet Miers, a pioneering woman in Texas law, pushed to establish a lecture series at SMU named after Louise Raggio, an earlier pioneer woman in Texas law. Here are the seven speakers in the Raggio Lecture Series so far:
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Gloria Steinem (a feminist!)
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Patricia Schroeder (a Democrat!)
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Susan Faludi (another feminist!)
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Gwen Ifill (liberal media star!)
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Geraldine Laybourne (Oxygen Media magnate!)
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Ann Richards (another Democrat!)
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Colleen Barrett and Herb Kelleher (um….)
Now I don?t think this necessarily establishes Miers as a closet feminist….The charitable view is that Miers was willing to see left-leaning feminists take advantage of the donation in a spirit of intellectual fairness, and because her larger concern was to honor her predecessor and to encourage young women lawyers….In any case, I find this disturbing, especially because it happened in the late nineties, by which time Miers was well into her conservative phase….I must say that this report worries me.
It doesn’t take much to get Stanley Kurtz upset, does it? In any case, last year’s lecture featured a couple of Southwest Airlines luminaries, surely acceptable figures in the conservative pantheon. We can rest easy now.
