Romney: Forget equal pay, ladies. How about more time to cook dinner?

Mitt, you've had six months. You have an answer yet? Here's a question for Mitt Romney: Do you support equal pay for women?

This should be an easy question to answer, and the correct answer is "yes." Because this is America, and also the 21st century, and what kind of asshole actually says women don't deserve equal pay for equal work? Oh yeah. Right. The Republican kind.

During Tuesday's debate, Romney was asked about equal pay. But he never answered the question. Instead, in what has become typical Romney fashion, he explained what women really care about, because he's such an expert:

I recognize that if you're going to have women in the workforce that sometimes they need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can't be here until 7:00 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. at night; I need to be able to get home at 5:00 p.m. so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said, fine, let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.

There probably isn't a worker in America, man or woman, who wouldn't appreciate a flexible work schedule. Plenty of fathers would love to be home at night to care for their children. This is not exclusively a lady concern; it's a family concern. And not every woman in the workforce wants or needs flexibility so she can rush home to cook dinner. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a woman who would be content to have a 25 percent smaller paycheck as long as she can race right home after work to get in the kitchen.

But that's what Romney thinks is an answer to the question of equal pay: more cooking time.

Oh, it's not the only answer, of course. Romney said a "strong economy" is important too:

We're going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I'm going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers, they're going to be anxious to hire women.

Right. In other words, there will be so many jobs under President Romney that employers will even be willing to maybe, just maybe, give some of them to lady workers. You know, after all the menfolk get their jobs first. Never mind that those lucky ladies will be paid less than their male colleagues. That doesn't concern Romney. Women will get paychecks, he says. Who cares if they're smaller because there's a built-in lady tax? Certainly not Romney.

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