Oh this is rich. The GOP is now making a big fuss about Sonia Sotomayor being a member of a women's networking group and calling it a discriminatory club:

"You state that you are a member of an organization, the Belizean Grove, that discriminates on the basis of sex," Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote in a letter to the White House last week.

Noting that the Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits membership in organizations that "invidiously discriminate" on the basis of sex, race and national origin, the lawmakers wrote, "Please explain the basis for your belief that membership in an organization that discriminates on the basis of sex nonetheless conforms to the Code of Conduct."

A Republican member of the group came to Sotomayor's defense, but until the hearings start, Sotomayor can't really respond to this new allegation.

Is this really the best the GOP can do?

As noted in the Washington Times piece cited above, groups like Belizean Grove were set up in response to the old boys club as a place where women could network together and support each other. If men didn't exclude women from networking arenas, we wouldn't need to create our own.

Ms. Stautberg said women looking to succeed have often been shut out of the networks of power and have had to seek nontraditional networks for support. She pointed to a Harvard study that said women on Wall Street developed networks outside their firms because they had trouble cracking the fraternal networks inside their companies.

Since news of the club hit the press, two men have applied to join. Chances are that they will be welcomed with open arms, but I doubt that they will actually attend. I've met men like that far too many times in my life. They do things in a failed attempt to prove that the group is discriminating against men. It's a far cry from the Brady Bunch episode where Peter & Marcia join each other's scouting troops. Although I'd pay money to see Rush Limbaugh on a women's retreat and watch him have to sit through discussions of family-life balance AND adhere to the "safe space" rule many groups have.