In the television series Mrs. America, which dramatizes Phyllis Schlafly’s fight against the so-called Equal Rights Amendment, one character sneers that Mrs. Schlafly doesn’t know what is actually in the proposed amendment, that she is making exaggerated claims about what it would do if enacted. Another sneers that Schlafly has no legal education, treating her as a simpleton housewife. In fact, Schlafly already had a master’s degree from Radcliffe — Harvard, not having yet caught up socially to Hillsdale, was still excluding women when Schlafly was in graduate school — and after the ERA fight she went on to earn a law degree at age 54. By my count that puts her two graduate degrees ahead of Gloria Steinem, whose lack of a formal legal education does not seem to have been counted against her in public life.
Of course Hollywood is wrong about Phyllis Schlafly. But was Phyllis Schlafly wrong about the ERA?
Nobody knows. Except maybe Neil Gorsuch.
If some conservative critic had said in 1964 that the civil-rights bill then under consideration would outlaw discrimination against men who wish to undergo voluntary genital amputation in service of a persistent fantasy that they are in some transcendent sense female, Lyndon Johnson would have looked at him a little funny. Even Barry Goldwater did not think such a thing. There is not a word about sexuality, homosexuality, or the contemporary phenomenon politely known as transgenderism in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The law does forbid discrimination based on “sex.” From that modest material, a Supreme Court majority, led by Justice Gorsuch, has constructed a vast new edifice of civil-rights law under which a man’s desire to wear a dress (I am not being snarky — the issue in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc. v. EEOC was an employer’s maintenance of separate dress codes for male and female employees) is protected by the same law, to the same extent, and under the same principles as African Americans seeking to maintain their political and economic rights after centuries of chattel slavery and ruthless official repression.
[Interesting Read]
See Also:
(1) The Supreme Court Just Turned A Law To Protect Women Into A Weapon Against Them
