Legal Issues

President Obama issued an executive memorandum yesterday ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to write new rules that will mandate equal visitation rights for all hospitals that participate in Medicaid or Medicare.

In the memorandum, Obama writes that the new rules must require that "participating hospitals may not deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability."

The enduring European gender imbalance has led Norway to mandate that 40% of directorships go to women — a legal quota that other governments also are rolling out. It's not going to happen organically. A comparison of surveys indicates that women make up less than 9% of boards in France's leading firms, compared with about 12% in the U.K., 13% in Germany and 8% in Spain. E.U.-wide, women made up less than 10% of top boards in 2009. That trails the 15% figure in the U.S. — where a quota is a nonstarter — and drops to just over 9% once Norway's female board members are factored out.

Rumor has it that President Obama’s current shortlist of three potential nominees includes two women – Solicitor General Elena Kagan and appellate court judge Diane Wood.  This hope of a more just representation on our national bench is welcome news.

But if Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation taught us anything, it is that President Obama will meet special opposition in nominating a woman.  Last year, media commentators voiced their opposition to the first Latina nominee with a slew of sexist and racist comments.

This week I was invited to a lunch at which former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the Supreme Court was the speaker.

On the issue of needing more women on the court, O’Connor said: “Our nearest neighbor, Canada, has four women on its nine-member court, and one is their chief justice. And they’re a great group. Now what’s the matter with us? You know, we can do better.” Indeed, we can and should.

We don’t need more women because legal outcomes necessarily would be different, but specifically because they wouldn’t. The question isn’t why more women, but rather why not?

A fundamentalist Christian political party led entirely by men was told by the Netherlands' Supreme Court on Friday that it must accept women in leadership roles.

The Political Reformed Party, known by its Dutch acronym SGP, has consistently held two or three seats in the country's 150-member national parliament since the 1920s but has never had a female candidate at any level.

"People say it's only a small party, so why bother?" said Kathalijne Buitenweg, chair of the women's rights organization that brought the case challenging SGP policies.

"But can you imagine the outcry there would be in this country if a party with these principles had been organized by Muslims?"

The SGP, which says it draws its inspiration from the Bible, has argued that restricting leadership roles to men is justified by religious freedom.

A ban on the full veil in the United States would be unthinkable. This is in significant part owing to America's relatively small Muslim population, and its history of successfully assimilating generations of immigrants who have come to her shores determined to learn English and succeed on America's terms. But it is also because a ban would represent an unprecedented infringement of religious freedom. In America, the separation of church and state is designed to protect the state from religious interference and to protect religion, which always has a public component, from government interference.

France is different. It is home to approximately six million Muslims. That's more than in any other European state and represents almost 10% of France's population. Significant numbers of these relatively new immigrants are poor, confined to low-income and violence-prone neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris, inclined to anti-Semitism, sympathetic to political Islam, and alienated from French social and political life.

In addition, the doctrine of laïcité—which is inscribed in Article 1 of the French Constitution and proclaims France a secular republic—separates church and state differently than in America. For many French, laïcité, roughly translated as national secularism, has acquired a militant meaning, according to which government must confine religion to the private sphere. This sensibility undergirded the ban on headscarves in schools.