Answers to Some Accusations

With this nomination, the Administration has effectively said, 'Goodbye, we don't need you.' " That was the angry complaint of Mrs. Connaught Marshner, head of the National Pro-Family Coalition, at a Washington press conference, where luminaries of the New Right launched an all-out attack on Ronald Reagan's first nominee to the Supreme Court. Armed with accusations against Sandra O'Connor's record in the Arizona state senate--some of them gleaned from records, others based on insinuation and surmise--the critics charged that she is soft on touchstone social problems like abortion.

None of the charges have anything to do with O'Connor's suitability for a seat on the Supreme Court; by the standards of the New Right the seven Justices who recognized the constitutional right to an abortion in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade case would be disqualified for their decision. Moreover, it is unlikely that the New Right accusations will influence many Senators.

The New Right's complaints against O'Connor center on four issues:

Abortion. Right-to-lifers have attacked O'Connor for votes she cast as a state legislator on several separate bills. In 1973 she co-sponsored a measure that would make "all medically acceptable family-planning methods and information" available to anyone who wanted it.

These "methods," her critics contend, might be interpreted to include abortion.

In a vote of the Arizona senate's judiciary committee the following year, O'Connor reportedly opposed a "right-to-life memorial" that called upon Congress to extend constitutional protection to unborn babies, except where the pregnant mother's life was at stake. Also in 1974, she opposed a University of Arizona stadium bond issue after a rider had been attached banning state abortion funding to the university hospital.

O'Connor does not recall her vote on the pro-life memorial (it was not officially recorded). She has solid, if legalistic, explanations for her other two votes. A strict constructionist, she does not believe that her family-planning measure could be interpreted to include abortion. The bond-issue rider, she believed, was not germane to the bill and O'Connor as Arizona senator therefore violated the state constitution.

Equal Rights Amendment. O'Connor, as her critics accurately charge, favored passage of the amendment by the state legislature in 1972, and two years later attempted to put ERA before the voters in a referendum. But she did not subsequently press for its passage. Her critics fail to note that other conservatives favored ERA at first and later changed their minds. In any case, Arizona is one of the states least likely to ratify ERA.

Pornography. Charges that O'Connor is soft on pornography are soft indeed.

Principally, they stem from what New Rightists call her "drastic amending" of a bill that would have banned adult bookstores within a one-mile radius of schools and parks. O'Connor altered the restriction to 4,000 feet, but she clearly had no desire to corrupt youth. One possible motive: getting state law to conform with federal statutes, thus reducing the possibility of court challenges.

Drinking. In 1972, according to O'Connor's critics, she challenged a Democratic Senator who sought to remove the right to drink alcoholic beverages from a bill that would grant 18-year-olds all the rights of adulthood. The implication of the criticism is that O'Connor was soft on booze. The implication is wrong. O'Connor's point was that the proposed amendment was far too vague and a bill that included it might not withstand a challenge from the courts.

Apart from the disclosure by the White House that she described abortion as "personally repugnant," O'Connor remained silent last week about all of the New Right charges. Her suitable explanation: she would reserve her statements for the Senate confirmation hearings.

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