The story of Lilly Ledbetter is one bound to resonate with any woman who knows or suspects that she is being paid less than male colleagues for doing the same work. But the principle of equal pay for equal work is one that ought to be embraced by every American, regardless of sex or economic status or political persuasion.

When Ledbetter was nearing retirement after 19 years as a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Ala., she discovered that male colleagues were making far more than she was. A jury found the company guilty of pay discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the case.

The justices, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that she should have filed her suit within 180 days after Goodyear first paid her less than her peers. Courts around the country subsequently cited that decision hundreds of times in rejecting out of hand lawsuits alleging various kinds of discrimination.

Congress subsequently moved to redress this manifest injustice. The first piece of legislation signed into law by President Obama, on Jan. 29, 2009, was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which expanded the right to sue in such cases. Now the six-month window that employees have in which to bring a pay discrimination claim reopens with each paycheck issued.

This is such a matter of fundamental fairness that it is too bad, though entirely understandable, that Ledbetter’s visit last week to Lebanon, N.H., took place in a political context. She is campaigning for the re-election of President Obama, but as she herself said, “I’m talking about what’s right for women and their families. What I talk about has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans.”

True enough. Equal pay for equal work is important for both women and men, not to mention their children. Women head many single-parent households, of course, and their children’s prospects depend in many ways on the earning-power of their mothers. And in an economy where it is common for both spouses to work outside the home, husbands have every bit as much at stake in equal pay as do their wives.

More than that, any society that aspires to be a meritocracy, as ours does, must insist that men and women be compensated equally when they perform equally in comparable jobs. This is obviously an idea that should appeal to conservatives, with their traditional concern about stable family life and individual initiative, as much as it does to liberals.

But it doesn’t. They hate the Fair Pay Act, arguing that it is leading to an avalanche of frivolous lawsuits. And the issue apparently wasn’t even on the radar screen of the Romney campaign until recently. When surrogates for the putative Republican presidential nominee were asked by a reporter during a conference call last month whether he supported the law, the answer was, “We’ll get back to you on that.”

After they had thought it over, the answer was a tepid embrace: Romney “supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law,” the campaign said in a statement.

But as Ledbetter pointed out in Hanover, Romney has been unfaithful to many a position over the years and the fact that he declines to say whether he would have signed the legislation had he been president at the time speaks volumes by its silence. Thus does a nonpartisan issue become partisan.

— The Valley News of Lebanon (N.H.)