RBG Didn't Want to Lower Age of Consent
The Claim
Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted to lower the age of consent for sex to 12 years old.
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Emerging story
Following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020, an Instagram post reprised an old claim that stated she wanted to “lower the age of consent for sex to 12.” The rumor is based on a falsification of a report she co-authored in the 1970s on sex bias in federal laws.
The misinformation spread across multiple users on Twitter.
Misbar’s Analysis
The Misbar team has determined that this claim is false as it stems from work Ginsburg did in the 1970s regarding sex discrimination in federal law.
During Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings in 1993, Susan Hirschmann, the then-executive director of Eagle Forum, a national conservative group, read a statement that posed numerous questions, including, “Do you still believe, as you wrote in 1977, that the age of consent for sexual acts should be lowered to 12 years?”
The statement made reference to “Sex Bias in the U.S. Code,” a 1977 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that Ginsburg had helped draft as a Columbia University law professor. The claim then resurfaced in 2005 when Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham referenced it during a Senate confirmation hearing on Justice John Roberts, saying, “She wants the age of consent to be 12.”
The 230-page report does not contain arguments for changing the consent age.
The report actually discusses how federal provisions relating to rape “clearly fail to comply with the equal rights principle. They fail to recognize that women of all ages are not the only targets of sexual assault; men and boys can also be the victims of rape. In the case of statutory rape, the immaturity and vulnerability (sic) of young people of both sexes could be protected through appropriately drawn, sex-neutral proscriptions.”
The report also suggested the U.S. should “eliminate the phrase ‘carnal knowledge of any female, not his wife who has not attained the age of sixteen years’ and substitute a federal, sex-neutral definition of the offense patterned after S. 1400 §1633.”
As such, we label the claim that Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted to lower the age of consent for sex to 12 years old to be taken out of context, and as a result, we label the claim as false.
