Patty Sacheen Littlefeather Arquette

The Academy Awards show has become unwatchable. They need four hours to recognize the best sound mixing, costume design and documentary short subject? I think not. And there were constant references to social justice themes. Neil Patrick Harris, from what I saw, added nothing entertaining. He was just visual reference to the gay rights movement.

What passes for the civil rights movement was a dominant theme. John Legend made a reference to Ferguson and told the crowd, "there are more black men incarcerated in this country now than there were under slavery in 1850." I won't even fact-check this one. It's a false equivalence. Those incarcerated men were subject to due process of law.

Patricia Arquette stole the show by delivering an acceptance speech in the finest tradition of Vanessa Redgrave ("Zionist hooligans") and Sacheen Littlefeather. Unfortunately this year, there was no Paddy Chayefsky to give a rebuttal. Chayefsky once rebutted Redgrave by saying, "I'm sick and tired of people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal political propaganda."

"To Miss Redgrave," he continued, "her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple 'thank you' would have sufficed."

Arquette's missive at this year's ceremony was about economic justice, saying "It is our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America!"

I can't help but think of the irony of this demand coming so close to the heart of Hollywood, which experiences sex discrimination several orders of magnitude worse than the real world. Prediction: Patricia Arquette will spend years in the wilderness, hoping her phone will ring, but it won't.

This is all just battlespace preparation for the Hillary 2016 campaign. The New York Times is advancing the concept of the so-called motherhood gap. Juliet Lapidos used Arquette's speech as justification for an article entitled Patricia Arquette and the Motherhood Gap.

Lapidos used cherry-picked statistics offered up by Third Way. Third Way is a think tank that describes themselves as moderate and centrist but is actually made of of former Clinton staffers, former Obama staffers, and Democratic lawmakers. The statistics purport to show that "women with children are paid less, on average, relative to men than women without children."

This is a statistic that should surprise no one.

One flaw in this statistic is that it measures the total aggregate income of women with children, and compares it to the total aggregate income of men with children. Women with children are likely to form households with a male wage-earner. Why not compare relative household incomes?

Another thing these statistics ignore is the prevalence of choice and opportunity costs. Women by and large choose careers that offer flexibility, in fields that interest them. Let me know when there are more women plumbers than male, and when male social workers outnumber female.

Opportunity Cost acknowledges that resources are limited and finite. A person going to college and majoring in Gender Studies is paying a hidden cost in future earnings that will never be realized had they majored in Chemical Engineering. And a woman choosing to have children and bond with them is also paying this hidden cost. The time she spends raising her child is time that she may not be able to use to further her career. That's how gender roles work; that's how we evolved.