DURHAM, NC–Speaking before an audience at Duke University School of Law, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg welcomed the court’s recent embrace of gay rights, telling the law school last week that in the past few years, the high court has used lofty language about the bedrock values of “liberty and equality” and “equal dignity” when it comes to same-sex marriage, relationship, and family issues. According to a report in the New York Times, Ginsburg is less enthusiastic about the Supreme Court’s recent history with gender issues, including equal pay, abortion and contraception, and medical and family leave.

The high court, and especially its current all-male five-justice conservative majority, has never fully embraced “the ability of women to decide for themselves what their destiny will be,” Ginsburg told her audience. The conservative wing has especially “ventured into a minefield” with its Hobby Lobby ruling, positing, “What of the employer whose religious faith teaches that it’s sinful to employ a single woman without her father’s consent or a married woman without her husband’s consent?”

Reporter Adam Liptak at The New York Times, hazarded an explanation: “Many forces are contributing to this divide, but the most powerful is the role of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court’s swing vote,” Liptak wrote. “Legal scholars say his jurisprudence is marked by both libertarian and paternalistic impulses, ones that have bolstered gay rights and dealt setbacks to women’s groups….

“Justice Kennedy is the product of a placid middle-class existence in which most women stayed within traditional roles. Some of his judicial writing, Justice Ginsburg once wrote in dissent, reflected “ancient notions about women’s place in the family.” But Justice Kennedy, 78, has long had gay friends, and his legal philosophy is characterized by an expansive commitment to individual liberty.” [The New York Times]