In her Boston Globe column yesterday, Ellen Goodman asks “how come the ERA is still hibernating?”
“For one thing,” she posits, “many of the more radical feminists, including some law professors, started to emphasize gender differences over equality.”
Let me suggest another reason: many people came to suspect, with good reason, that the “equality” demanded by ERA advocates would immediately morph into demands for special treatment and preferences, which is what happened almost overnight after the ink dried on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required colorblind equal treatment.
Dammit, this thing ate my comment.
I had some “new” objections to the ERA. But let me just make a general objection: having just given birth this year, the difference between men and women is pretty clear to me.
There are many repercussions of the possibility of pregnancy for women and impossibility for men. Repercussions that involve insurance, work patterns, legal protections, custody decisions, family law in general — even the draft.
Pregnancy isn’t like menstruation (a relatively minor thing). Pregnancy makes profound changes to a person. Do people =really= want to institute something that prevents making distinctions based on this possibility? Perhaps there would be a way around this amendment (such as laws that pertain only to pregnant women, or fertile women, rather than women as a whole), but considering how discrimination cases have been decided in the past, I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
Well, the problem with many ERA proponents is that they want the law to be gender blind on the basis that women are better than men. You can’t have it both ways, chicas!
Watch any television commercial with a woman and man interacting. The woman is always smart and right and the guy is always a lazy goof.
I realize that has nothing to do with women’s rights but just something I find mildly offensive…..oh wait, I can’t be offended, I’m a man.