and he says, i m not going to shake your hand. i want to know why you re here and why you decided to ruin my school. i know that there were some people who did that react well to the change, and my response to this was, wait and see. you will be proud of the women who become graduates of vmi. it wasn t just about vmi. it was about the notion that you cannot exclude women just because they re women. you cannot say categorically they can t handle this. it s way beyond vmi. way beyond. and she pulled some of the justices of that court over to see that you start, you start with an assumption that you have got to treat both genders equally.
that majority opinion was the culmination of ruth s dedication to the concept of equality for women. those are current cadets. one went on to be a nuclear scientist, the others engineers. all very well-adjusted to life at vmi. so you can see many varieties. there are more up on top. this is the latest one i ve gotten. so people just send them to you? yes. what s in this one? oh, this one was given to me by the university of hawaii, with french lace and the beads are from the beach.
the president issues an executive order that is in conflict with the constitution, the constitution must prevail. vmi was a 150-year-old all-male military college. it had a tremendous endowment, well-connected alumni, four-star generals. when you came out of vmi, that was something. the virginia military institute was the last all-male state-supported school in the country. 157 years of school tradition as an all-male military academy. boys can be troublesome, full of hormones and so forth.
i don t mean to make general gender characteristics or generalizations here, but for some young men at that time of their life they need discipline and vmi provided that. look at the men that stand before you. they represent the essence of vmi! a female high school student wanted to attend vmi, so she brought a case against virginia claiming that the all-male admissions policy violated equal protection. it actually went from the district court to the appellate court before it came up to the supreme court. this was an extremely important case for justice ginsburg. it was her first women s rights case on the supreme court. the honorable, the chief justice and the associate justices of the supreme court of the united states. i was very much aware of justice ginsburg s history with
women from an institution, i was very much aware of that. and i was trying to fashion an argument that would penetrate that. mr. chief justice and may it please the court, educators are virtually united that many young men and young women significantly benefit from a same sex education. the curiosity is you re defending single-sex education when virginia abandoned single-sex education in all schools but one. there are a number of women only schools in virginia that chose themselves to go to coeducation because of demands that occurred demands from whom? the trends that were away from single-sex education. i was dealing with a very worthy and formidable force at the other side of that bench. to clarify, you are defending vmi for all males and no public program for women. the effort by virginia is to promote diversity by creating opportunities for people of both