        |
Christine Littleton Christine Littleton comes pretty close to being all things to certain people. She’s a UCLA law professor, chair of the Women’s Studies Program, and the interim director of the Center for the Study of Women. Littleton is also part of a tightly interconnected cabal of feminist radicals (both lesbian and straight), who are current or past UCLA Law and UCLA Women’s Studies professors. Like her Women’s Studies (and Anthropology) colleague Karen Brodkin, Littleton is a militant late-life lesbian feminist. As would surprise no one, she teaches a narrow band of feminist-agenda courses: women and the law, sexual harassment, and feminist legal theory. Feminist professor Sondra Hale can’t be left out of this spider web; like Brodkin, she splits her time between the Anthropology and Women’s Studies departments. Another set of connections binds Littleton, Hale and (famously lesbian) UCLA alumna State Senator Sheila Kuehl. Kuehl and Hale were both part of the California State University, Long Beach Women’s Studies department in the early 1980’s, with Hale the department head and Kuehl part of the department faculty. CSULB’s Women’s Studies department was attacked in 1982 by the California chapter of the Eagle Forum group for allowing sexually deviant teaching and an overarching agenda of promoting lesbianism. The fallout from the episode saw Hale depart CSULB in 1987 for a job at California State University, Northridge, while Kuehl moved on to found, with none other than Christine Littleton, the California Women’s Law Center. Littleton, a 1982 Harvard law degree recipient, began teaching at UCLA as early as 1983 but was an active force at the Law Center (winning a case alongside Kuehl) as late as 1991. Kuehl, herself a 1978 Harvard law degree recipient, was an administration figure at UCLA beginning in 1969, and taught as a UCLA law professor in the mid to late 80’s. In 1994, Kuehl began a successful political career, winning a state Assembly seat in 1994 and advancing to her current Senate position in 2000. As noted, Littleton has made her academic bones through her work in feminist legal theory. Rather than present a dull description of what the occupants of this academic cubbyhole actually produce (mainly ideas, being that this is theory,) it’s more instructive to see what Littleton’s actions have meant on the ground. The California Women’s Law Center, represented by co-counsel Littleton and Kuehl, won a 1991 child custody case in Ventura County by convincing a judge to disregard as a factor in deciding which parent would win custody, the mother’s lesser wealth relative to the father’s. During her career, Littleton led a group (the Coalition for Reproductive Equality) which argued that, counter to an ACLU-dominated faction of feminists, women should receive special benefits when pregnant. The idea represented a split between the concepts of equality feminism (women should have exactly equal rights with men) and what might be called practical equality. This contrasting idea argued that, in certain areas like pregnancy, women would need special accommodations to retain an equal status with men. The 1987 Supreme Court case California Federal Savings and Loan v. Guerra, essentially decided this issue in favor of these “difference feminists.” Building upon this precedent, Littleton publicly suggested that year that the government should “pay mothers the same low wages and generous benefits as most soldiers.” Littleton’s concern for mothers and babies was less evident in 1993 when discussing the emerging case law about the murder of pregnant women, or criminal acts that lead to the death of an unborn child. Littleton archly informed The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, California, “The more you engage in this fantasy – and it is a fantasy – of thinking of the fetus as a separate person, then it’s possible to envision all kinds of horrendous encroachments on the woman.” Subtext: if we charge a pregnant woman’s killer with two murders, then that might give an inch to people who don’t like abortion. And then they might take it away. We must have the precious! Further cementing the impression of Littleton as a women-first, indeed, an only-women-first ideologue, were her dismissive comments about another emerging area of law. In 1991, when a California woman in an reciprocally abusive relationship murdered her husband, it sparked questions about the legal accommodations made for battered women: special rules of evidence, relaxed standards for admission of that special evidence, and more. In the California case, it was common knowledge that both husband and wife had been physically abusive of one another. This opened the door to a fair question: if the battering husband had killed his battering wife, would he have been granted the same evidentiary privileges as those his wife exercised? In the June 30, 1991 Los Angeles Times, Littleton practically sputtered with rage at the very idea. Noting that the spousal-battery evidence laws were “very recent,” Littleton bemoaned the fact that “people are already asking whether the law might be written too much with women in mind.” Warming to her theme, Littleton cast the question itself as “a more subtle form of sexism. Centuries of laws were written from men’s perspective and nobody paid any attention. A very few are written from women’s perspective and people are already worrying if it’s gone too far the other way.” Littleton’s argument was based on the grim philosophy of the lowest common denominator. We think you men got yours in the past, Littleton says, and now it’s high time for we women to take ours. This type of moral bankruptcy, each group grasping for all it can get, is depressingly familiar to anyone who, for example, has attempted to debate the issue of affirmative action with one of its beneficiaries. But there is a simple alternative to this depressing philosophy of all-against-all. If our nation’s laws are indeed so overwhelmingly male-centric, perhaps Littleton could direct a certain amount of her apparently prodigious energy toward altering them into a state of gender equality. Alas, the prospect of this looks dim. Rather than making things fair for everyone, Littleton endorses the idea of a legal code that pre-selects winners and losers. With very few exceptions, Littleton has never been involved with anything outside of her tight sphere of women’s, feminist, and lesbian politics and academics. Here and there, Littleton has signed radical petitions: one against the confirmation of now-Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and an earlier letter urging Senate Republicans not to exercise the ‘nuclear’ option of eliminating the right to filibuster judicial nominations. Littleton even signed a petition against the prospect of the first federal execution in decades. But these are exceptions. Littleton’s concerns and activism revolve almost exclusively around her lesbian feminist identity. To nobody’s surprise, Littleton supported a 2003 law professors’ letter against the proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriages. And in the area of racial preferences, she signed both an anti-SP-1/SP-2 resolution, and signed on to the 2001 BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) declaration in support of affirmative action. In fact, her ardor for preferential admissions even drove her to serve as co-counsel in the (thankfully) eventually unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn Proposition 209. You have to hand it to Littleton and her fellow travelers: they’re not afraid to do through the courts what they couldn’t manage at the ballot box. Then again, that’s the problem with much of the legal world today. The preeminent role of the judiciary is slowly making a mockery of elected officials’ actions, and worse yet, the specific the will of the people. Professor Littleton is unfortunately a leading practitioner and theorist of this new manner of conducting our nation’s business. As in the case of Littleton’s Law School colleague Gary Blasi, one presumes this is not the kind of leadership that Chancellor Albert Carnesale would want to mention in UCLA fundraising letters. |
