WASHINGTON -- A disgruntled Justice Department official who worked on the administration's project to eliminate sexually discriminatory laws resigned Monday, a day after blasting President Reagan's commitment to women.
Barbara Honegger, a $37,000-a-year special assistant at the Justice Department, said she realized a month ago that 'Ronald Reagan never intended to enforce equal rights for women.'
'The president made a promise to the American people on Dec. 21, 1981, in an executive order he signed with force of law that he would identify and correct every single remaining sexually discriminatory federal statute.
'To date, not a single statute has been corrected,' Ms. Honegger said on NBC's Today show, where she announced she was resigning.
In Los Angeles, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said Ms. Honegger's suggestion that Reagan is not committed to rooting out discrimination 'was just not true.'
'The impressions were more erroneous than the facts,' Speakes said.
Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds, Mrs. Honegger's boss as head of the department's civil rights division, said, 'I don't think even now she thinks it's a sham.'
'Barbara is someone who was preoccupied with how many titles she had behind her name,' Reynolds said in an interview, adding that she had 'expectations for herself that never really came to fruition in terms of places in the administration she would like to have gone.'
'A lot of what we are seeing now are some of those frustrations,' Reynolds said.
He also said Ms. Honegger misidentified herself as head of the attorney general's gender discrimination agency review. He said she was one of a number of people working on the project.
'I think to suggest she was in a leadership role ... is somewhat misleading,' Reynolds said.
Ms. Honegger, a special assistant in the department's civil rights division, was on an 18-month contract to work with the presidental Task Force on Legal Equality. Her contract expires at the end of September.
The task force was set up to ensure 'the systematic elimination of regulatory and procedural barriers that have unfairly precluded women from receiving equal treatment from federal activities.'
Reagan has long advocated such refroms to ensure sexual equality as an alternative to ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
In her television appearance Monday, Ms. Honegger said, 'I have heard through the grapevine ... that the (administration) has no intention of firing me. But I'm jumping the gun on them. I have resigned as of this morning.'
In a lengthly article in Sunday's Washington Post, Ms. Honegger charged the administration is doing the 'minimum possible' to rectify laws that discriminate on the basis of sex.
She said her project was relegated to listing the questionable laws and she was told she had no authority to suggest changes.
In an interview Monday with the Post, Ms. Honegger said Reagan 'doesn't deserve loyalty because he has betrayed us. That is not too strong a statement.'
She said she went public with her criticism because, 'Somebody has got to tell the truth.'
Ms. Honegger's charges come at a time when Reagan is trying to repair his image on women's issues. Polls have shown there is a 'gender gap' in the degree of favor with which Reagan is viewed by men and women.
White House aides said Reagan may answer the criticism himself in a speech Friday to a Republican women's leadership group in San Diego.
