In "Gone With the Wind," Scarlett O'Hara asks Rhett Butler, if he goes, where shall she go, what shall she do? And the romantic rogue famously replies: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. is no Rhett Butler, no romantic hero with a colorful turn of phrase, just a dry character with the finicky attitudes of a patent clerk. Lilly Ledbetter is no Scarlett O'Hara, just a woman who for many years was discriminated against by her employer because of her gender. She was left wondering what she should do when fairness had gone.

She got her answer last week from Justice Alito, who wrote the opinion for a majority of the Supreme Court that included Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. As restrained and technical as the opinion's language was, Justice Alito's reply can be read as essentially the same as Rhett Butler's, but without the charm. He and the others couldn't give a damn.

Ms. Ledbetter was a woman in a mostly man's world employed as a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Ala., from 1979 until her retirement in 1998. She started off being paid pretty much the same as men in similar positions but ended up being paid much less. She charged discrimination the same year she retired. While Goodyear claimed that her pay was based on performance evaluations, a jury sided with her and awarded her damages and back pay.

That award was overturned by a federal appeals court because she hadn't filed her claim within 180 days, as required by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While she was denied pay raises in 1997 and 1998, she couldn't prove that they were the result of discrimination at that time, even though her lower pay scale, compared with male workers, was the result of years of past discrimination -- discrimination, by the way, that she did not know about at the time because salaries of employees were kept confidential.

In backing the appeals court, Justice Alito was like a building inspector who couldn't find fault with a new tower despite it being built on a rotten old foundation. Conservatives are supposed to dislike technicalities. Here Justice Alito and his colleagues seized upon technicalities to neuter a law and scorn a jury's finding.

In a great logical and persuasive dissent she read orally as an apparent rebuke to her myopic colleagues, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the majority's reading of Title VII "parsimonious."

Another word could have been "activist," given that the conservative majority read the law only as far as it conformed to their prejudices and certainly not far enough to respect the intent of Congress to remedy discrimination. Now Congress needs to repair the damage done to the law here. In this saga, it was clearly the liberals in the minority who gave a damn.