Fans of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg may be surprised to learn that, at least according to a post being shared widely on Facebook, she once advocated for lowering the age of consent to tween.
"The age of consent for sexual acts must be lowered to age 12 years old," reads the quote attributed to "Ruth Traitor Ginsburg" in 1977.
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The claim is an old one, raised back in 1993 during Ginsburg’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Susan Hirschmann, executive director of the conservative Eagle Forum, then said that among Ginsburg’s "extremist feminist concepts" was the belief that "the age of consent for sexual acts must be lowered to 12 years old."
Hirschmann cited "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code," a report co-authored by Ginsburg and published by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1977.
The report mentions "consent" in a few places.
On page 95, the report describes the current law at the time — "it is a crime for a person to have carnal knowledge of a female not his wife who has not reached 16 years of age" — and notes that rape was then defined as anyone "who commits an act of sexual intercourse with a female not his wife, by force or without her consent."