Is it just me, or did Romney just come out for affirmative action in his "equal pay for women" tap dance? I know the "binders full of women" quote is basically getting all the attention right now, but to me the bigger story is that Romney basically articulated his support for affirmative action... in this case for women. Here's the quote:
Thank you, and, uh, important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men. And I went to my staff and I said, "how come all the people for these jobs are all men?" And they said, "these are the people who have the qualifications,"and I said, "gosh, can't we find some women who are also qualified?" And, uh, so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.
Link to the video after the break...
Sounds a lot like affirmative action to me. From Wikipedia:
Affirmative action refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group "in areas of employment, education, and business", usually justified as countering the effects of a history of discrimination.
You would think that Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing blogosphere would be having a complete meltdown over this, especially with the Supreme Court taking on a high-profile case which could effectively overturn affirmative action, (a Republican wet dream), but so far... crickets. Perhaps we should bring it to their attention?