[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
By Mary Margaret Olohan
The Daily Signal
Female leaders and commentators are warning that the Equal Rights Amendment is a Trojan horse of left-wing ideological goals, masquerading under the banner of equal rights for women.
Lawmakers will hold a hearing Tuesday, Feb. 28, on how Congress can “enshrine equality in our constitution” through the ERA. Advocates of the amendment have praised it as an opportunity to “affirm women’s equality” and heralded the ERA as a “new tool” for the government to advance LGBTQ ideological interests.
“As the 28th Amendment, the ERA would serve as a new tool—for Congress, for federal agencies, and in the courts—to advance equality in the fields of workforce and pay, pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment and violence, reproductive autonomy, and protections for LGBTQ+ individuals,” the office of Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., said in a press release. “Enshrining this protection in our Constitution also ensures enduring protections for all Americans across the country.”
Conservative female leaders are sounding the alarm, however. Independent Women’s Forum senior policy analyst Inez Stepman shared with The Daily Signal that the ERA would make “the law intentionally blind to the biological differences between men and women.”
“We’ve already seen the consequences of that ideology in the transgender context: Women’s safety, privacy, and opportunities are put in jeopardy,” Stepman warned. “The ERA would expand these consequences by requiring that the law allow all males, not just those who ‘identify’ as women, access to single-sex spaces, competitive events, prisons, and programs.”
Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest women’s public policy organization, was founded specifically out of concerns about the ERA and its impact on women and the unborn, Concerned Women for America President Penny Nance told The Daily Signal on Wednesday.
Nance predicted that the ERA’s supporters would use it to constitutionalize both abortion and gender ideology.
WND is now on Trump’s Truth Social! Follow us @WNDNews
“Today’s ERA would have the same damaging effect on women’s progress today that it [would have had] 40 years ago,” Nance said. “Women don’t need the ERA to make advances and achievements in every aspect of life.”
Marjorie Dannenfelser is the president of the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an organization devoted to protecting the unborn. She similarly emphasized that Democrats’ ERA push is “about enshrining abortion on demand until birth in the U.S. Constitution—the opposite of equal rights.”
“During past attempts, abortion advocates repeatedly rejected language to make the ERA abortion neutral,” she said. “Ever since it became clear that the Supreme Court might finally restore the right to protect unborn children to the people, they explicitly argue the ERA is necessary to block pro-life laws that could otherwise save more than 125,000 lives in the first year after Dobbs alone.”
“Numerous authorities confirm that the ERA deadline expired long ago and its proponents must start over,” Dannenfelser added. “Ignoring the process for amending the Constitution to install a ‘right’ to abortion is radical and would have enormous harmful consequences for the unborn and women.”
The ERA’s language, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex,” would erase all legal distinctions between men and women in the very name of eliminating discrimination, according to Emma Waters, research associate with The Heritage Foundation’s Devos Center for Life, Religion, and Family. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Removing the legal distinctions between men and women would allow men who identify as women to access women’s spaces, like locker rooms, prisons, bathrooms, or athletic teams, Waters said. Denying a man the ability to use these spaces would be considered a form of discrimination.
Why are Democrats reviving the ERA at this point in time? Waters suggests it is a response to the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
“If the ERA was ratified in the Constitution, it would provide a constitutional basis for abortion,” she explained. “Democrats argue that if a man has the right to not be pregnant, then women should also have the right to not be pregnant through abortion. This way, they could argue that the ERA ensures a constitutional right to abortion.”
Should Republicans choose to support the amendment, conservative organizations and their leaders will be paying attention.
Dannenfelser told The Daily Signal that Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America takes the matter “very seriously.”
“Votes will be reflected in members’ profiles on our Scorecard,” she promised.
Waters emphasized that Republicans who value the unborn, women’s sports, and the safety of women in private spaces “cannot support the ERA.”
“The ERA expired in 1982, over one and a half decades before Gen Z was born,” she said. “It’s an outdated talking point that would not provide any needed rights to women; it would only empower men and ideologically motivated actors to neglect, harm, or take advantage of women.”
“We’ve passed countless laws to protect the distinctions between men and women since the ERA was first introduced,” she added. “If we passed the ERA today, it would undo years of hard work. Conservative organizations across the nation are paying attention. Gen Z, in particular, is opposed to these outdated, anti-woman efforts and will hold Republican leaders accountable.”
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
EDITOR’S NOTE: Long the world’s most Christian nation, America today is being taken over by a new “official” national religion, one being imposed on the entire populace by every major societal institution, from government, media and big tech, to academia, entertainment and business.
This new state religion is Wokeism. “Going woke” conjures up visions of someone claiming to be acutely sensitive (“awake”) to “systemic social and political injustice.” And not just alleged bigotry against blacks, but toward every other “minority” as well, from LGBT folk – especially everything transgender and “nonbinary” – to “undocumented immigrants.” All of them, being VICTIMS, intrinsically more virtuous than the shameful oppressor class: primarily heterosexual white males.
This new “woke” consciousness has turned America upside-down – from the nationwide Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, to tearing down of historic monuments, to demanding multi-million-dollar reparation payments for blacks, to appointing transgenders as top government officials, to rampant reverse discrimination in every area of life, to the U.S. military imposing mandatory “diversity training” and transgender pronoun use on all personnel, causing recruitment to disastrously plummet.
Yet there is hope. Being “saved” – which in Wokeism is called being “woke” – is largely a matter of worshipping victimhood by becoming an “ally” and “defender” of all the many victim classes, and a determined enemy of the straight white male oppressor class. Thus, “joining the righteous” as an ally – even if one is cursed to be a straight white male – opens the door mercifully for salvation, even to the most wretched.
That is the power of the religion of Wokeism. And it’s explored as never before in the February 2023 issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine. If you’ve ever wondered, for example, exactly how the most radical elements in American society are successfully pressuring the biggest corporations into adopting the most outrageous and immoral policies imaginable, even when doing so permanently damages and devalues the company, the stunning answers are in this issue of Whistleblower, titled “WOKEISM: AMERICA’S OFFICIAL STATE RELIGION.”
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
