Category: ERA

Happy New Year to All Gender Critical People Everywhere!

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Here we are on the brink of a New Year and though worries abound, it is good to reflect on some of the year’s accomplishments, one of the main ones being gender critical people waking up around the globe and daring to come out publicly.  We want to acknowledge GenderCriticalComingOutDay, a hashtag that trended on Twitter, and encourage anyone who can safely do so to join the chorus of tweets! While you’re on Twitter, follow us @feministstruggl.

To all the good actions outlined at the Gender Critical Coming Out Day website, we wish to add calling and writing in to news networks who push gender ideology and let them know you do not agree and that you want them to cover the other side of the story–the detransitioners, the desisters, the girls and women denied their athletic achievements by transgender athletes, the women and girls harmed by the invasion of safe spaces, all the ways in which women and girls are being erased and our rights denied by this dangerous ideology.

We need to arm ourselves for the fight in the New Year by continuing to fight for our sex-based rights by pressuring the Biden Administration to publish the Equal Rights Amendment and legislation to ensure that abortion remains safe and legal, and that WOMEN are acknowledged as the only people who get pregnant.

Please join us for our upcoming educational series and Feminist Forums!

Merry Yuletide and Winter Solstice All,

Feminists in Struggle

“On the Basis of Sex”: Why the ERA is still important for women and girls

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Why do women still need the ERA? Won’t the placing of the word “sex” in the U.S. Constitution and providing for legal equality between the sexes just be used against us and provide no real benefit? Some, like our sisters in WoLF, think so. We think they are dead wrong on this one.


First we need to understand our past. The eagerness and utter blindness in which so many progressives have betrayed their principles and sold out the interests of women and girls in favor of a sex-denying gender identity ideology is not unprecedented in history. After the Civil War, the Abolitionist movement, the male comrades of the early suffragists and First Wave feminists betrayed their sisters by insisting that women, both Black and White, wait for our rights, and that only Black males should have their rights recognized. They ended up putting the word “male” in the Constitution for the first time, in the Fourteenth Amendment. Women were now explicitly non-citizens.

This split the movement, weakened both the feminist and anti-racist struggles, and led to some feminists incorporating racist ideology into their campaigns and for the first time opposing universal suffrage. This betrayal also delayed the victory for women’s suffrage until 1920. But, guess what, the word “male” is still in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Amendment that provides due process and equal protection of the laws. The Equal Rights Amendment is in part about a long overdue correction, to treat sex discrimination with the same seriousness and status as race discrimination under the highest law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.

Race and national origin discrimination claims benefit from what is called “strict scrutiny”–it is far easier under the Fourteenth Amendment to challenge discriminatory laws and practices based on race than on sex–and to do so everywhere in the country. And women still suffer from a ton of such practices. One of the biggest aspect of female oppression is we are poor and grossly underpaid. Poverty means that women often are forced to stay with abusive male partners or are vulnerable to being prostituted in order for them and their children to survive. We still have a largely sex-segregated workplace, with “men’s” jobs having higher status and pay. Women who entered the trades in the late 1970’s, were forced out a few years later largely as a result of sexual harassment. White women who work full-time earn 78 cents to every dollar a man earns. For women of color it is far less. Women are over 62% of minimum wage workers.

And even in female-dominated professions, men make more than women do, with women nurses paid 10% less than the males, and women lawyers earning 83 cents on the dollar compared to their male colleagues. While we have laws against discrimination in employment and wage discrimination they have loopholes or may not be enforced. And these laws could be weakened or repealed at any time. A Constitutional Amendment has much more staying power.

Or take pregnant women workers. Despite the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, pregnant women, especially those in low paid physically demanding jobs, are routinely fired or forced off the job. They are treated far worse than employees covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act suffering from a variety of medical conditions. Putting sex in the U.S. Constitution would make it far easier for those women to make their case.

The Equal Rights Amendment would give women an additional hook to challenge male violence against women in the universities and in the military. And women being denied access to contraception could challenge the double standard that allows Hobby Lobby to refuse to cover contraception while covering Viagra. And can it not be argued that it is sex discrimination for vasectomies to be perfectly legal and funded while abortion is not funded and instead even treated as a crime as many states are trying to do?

But what of the downside, that women-only spaces and programs might be eliminated? First, this is already happening under Title IX and in other areas of civil rights law, and through regulation, without the ERA. Should we then repeal Title IX or Title VII because the sex discrimination provisions can be used to eliminate the separate spaces and programs that women need? No, we need to fight against the use of “gender identity” to remove sex-based rights and we need to do so with or without the ERA.


Strict scrutiny doesn’t mean no distinction is possible. There is extensive case law holding that distinctions meant to address past discrimination of a historically disadvantaged group are allowed, or where there is a compelling reason to treat the groups differently. Female-only spaces and programs, including women-only scholarships, colleges, shelters, clinics, and training programs have compelling reasons justifying them, based on privacy, male violence, addressing past discrimination and other grounds. Same goes for women’s sports programs. The fight to defend affirmative action, for example, has been going on for decades and this is an area where men of color and women’s interests as a sex coincide.


It is quite telling that President Biden is all-in for eroding sex-based rights through support for an un-amended Equality Act and issuing Executive Orders that would have gender identity override sex, but can’t manage to tell the Archivist to publish the ERA. Women must expect and demand more.


It has been nearly one hundred years since the first version of the ERA was introduced in Congress in 1923 as the Lucretia Mott Amendment.  A century is too long to wait for equal rights based on sex under the Constitution. EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT NOW!

URGENT ACTION RE ERA

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It has been nearly a century since the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment, known as Lucretia Mott Amendment, was introduced in Congress, and almost 50 years since it finally was passed by both houses in 1972.  Many of us marched in support of the ERA and our hope was renewed in recent years when groups like Equal Means Equal joined the fight to get it ratified by the remaining three states.  Nevada ratified in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020, finally giving us the 38 states needed to ratify a constitutional amendment.
Then Trump’s Attorney General William Barr sent a memo to the National Archivist, David Ferriero, telling him not to publish the ERA to the Constitution, and though Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both claimed they support the Equal Rights Amendment and many women voted for them expecting them to act, the Biden Administration has made no effort to revoke this egregious abuse of authority or direct the Archivist to publish the ERA. Biden should have done this his first day in office and today he has now been in office for 3 months and he still has not done so.
Therefore, we are asking that you help us exert pressure on Biden and Harris for the next 30 days to honor a century of struggle for equal rights for women by publishing the ERA.  Here is what we’re asking you to do:
1) Send a postcard every day for a month to the White House demanding that they REMOVE the Barr memo and direct the archivist to publish the ERA (stamped postcards=$12 for 30. One trip to the Post Office; 29 trips to one’s mailbox) with the message: WOMEN HAVE WAITED NEARLY A CENTURY FOR OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS.  REMOVE THE BARR MEMO AND DIRECT THE ARCHIVIST TO PUBLISH THE ERA NOW!!  The address is:  President Joe Biden/Vice-President Kamala Harris, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20500.2) Call 2-3 female Senators per day (18 Democrats; 2 moderate Republicans), 3 times (10 days to go through the list at 2 per day) and urge them to demand that the White House publish the ERA.  Here is a list of women senators and their phone numbers to call.  They are all Democrats who should definitely support the ERA except for two moderate Republicans (Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska) whom we believe are in favor of equal rights for women. We have included their states as well–if you are a constituent of theirs, please emphasize that; let them know you are contacting them because as women you hope they care about women’s rights as much as you do and let them know that you are calling on behalf of all the women in your state and the U.S.

3) Join us on social media–especially Twitter @FeministStruggl (follow us and retweet)–as we can directly tweet to @WhiteHouse, @POTUS, @KamalaHarris @VP @JoeBiden to call out the Biden Administration on their neglect of women’s constitutional rights and obstructionism and demand that they remove the Barr memo and direct the Archivist to publish the #ERANow!!

4) Go to May Day for the ERA at Equal Means Equal and sign up for the livestream to hear Wendy Murphy’s legal argument on May 5th.

Thank you very much for doing all you can for women to finally achieve equality under the law.  We are tired of being second-class citizens and demand our full constitutional rights!!

The Killing of the Equal Rights Amendment

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The amazing lawyer from Equal Means Equal, Wendy Murphy, sent FIST the article below on the killing of the ERA by an Obama-appointed Judge and the Biden Administration. She also links the fight for the ERA to the overall struggle to defend women’s sex-based rights against our threatened erasure by transgender ideology. We need to unite and organize even harder as feminists to turn around these attacks on our rights.

 

WHY DID AN OBAMA-APPOINTEE JUDGE KILL THE ERA?

By Wendy Murphy

March 15, 2021 

An Obama-appointee federal judge killed the ERA during Women’s History Month. Let that sink in.

It was a monumental decision that had many scholars scratching their heads trying to understand why a liberal judge with the power and opportunity to establish women’s constitutional equality for the first time in history, would instead rule against women. 

On March 5 Judge Rudolph Contreras from the United States District Court for the D.C. District, determined that the Equal Rights Amendment was invalid because it was not ratified in time. He said that a congressionally imposed ratification deadline had expired decades ago, which rendered recent ratifications by several states meaningless. His ruling killed the ERA, though some women’s groups think the ERA can be revived by having Congress pass a law removing the deadline. A hearing in the House of Representatives on a bill to do just that is scheduled for the week of March 15, but scholars uniformly agree that Congress has no authority to retroactively fix or remove a deadline that no longer exists. In 1978 when the first ERA deadline was about to expire, Congress proposed a law to extend it for three more years. During hearings on the bill, all the scholars who testified said Congress had to take action before the deadline expired or they would forever lose authority to affect the deadline. In other words, Congress has no power to change a law that no longer exists.

Even if Congress passes such a law, it will be voided by another federal judge before it leaves Capitol Hill. Judge Contreras stated in his ruling that he was expressing no opinion on how he might rule if Congress were to pass a law removing the deadline, but he was very clear that the validity of such a law would be decided by the courts, not Congress. Judge Contreras’ anti-ERA ruling leaves little doubt the judge who rules on the deadline removal bill will quickly rule that expired deadlines cannot be revived by an act of Congress.

Neither party supports women’s equality, but the Democrats fake it better. If Democrats actually supported the ERA, Judge Contreras would have validated the ERA simply because he could. At a minimum, he could have included in his opinion a discussion of why women need equality, and how not having full equal protection rights causes women to suffer high rates of violence, etc. Having a federal judge acknowledge the purpose of the ERA and the suffering women endure because they are unequal would have been helpful. But he said nothing.

Judge Contreras wasn’t required to discuss much less rule against the ERA. He had determined at the outset of his decision that the Plaintiffs – Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia – had no standing to file a lawsuit. When a judge finds no standing, there is no reason for that judge to then discuss the merits of the case, but he gave us his opinion on the deadline anyway. In other words, Judge Contreras went out of his way to invalidate the ERA when it would have been easy for him to say nothing at all or uphold it. Here’s why.

The Plaintiffs argued that the ERA deadline was not valid because it was placed in the ERA’s preamble (introductory section) rather than the text of the ERA itself. This is important because Congress only recently started putting deadlines in preambles. For a very long time in this country there were no deadlines in any amendments, and when Congress started imposing deadlines, they placed them in the text because the States have a right under Article V of the Constitution to participate as equals with the federal government in deciding whether to amend the Constitution. The States cannot participate as equals when amendments contain important language in preambles because the States can only ratify amendments; they have no authority to vote on language in preambles. Only if a deadline is placed in the text can States decide for themselves whether they want their equal ratification rights restricted by a time limit.

When deciding whether the placement of the ERA’s deadline in its preamble rendered the deadline unconstitutional, Judge Contreras analyzed whether Congress itself had doubts about the constitutionality of placing the deadline in a preamble. If they did have doubts, Judge Contreras could have invalidated the ERA deadline on the grounds that its constitutionality was not clear at the time it was imposed. But Judge Contreras said Congress had no doubts. 

He was wrong.

Judge Contreras said Congress “did not expect that changing the location of a deadline [from the text of an amendment to its preamble] would affect the deadline’s effectiveness.” Op. p.31.

In fact, Congress did have doubts because no court had ever before ruled that Congress could place a deadline in a preamble. It was an issue of first impression, which means the judge had enormous leeway in deciding whether to uphold the deadline because there was no binding precedent forcing him to rule a certain way.

This is exactly the type of case where a judge’s values make a difference. A judge who sincerely believed that women deserve constitutional equality would have seized the opportunity to rule against the deadline simply because no existing law or court ruling compelled him to rule otherwise.

Here are the facts Judge Contreras ignored – that he could have and should have relied on to rule that the ERA deadline is not valid because Congress was not confident that placing a deadline in a preamble was constitutional.

Imposition of ratification deadlines began relatively recently with the 18th Amendment in 1917 and have been imposed only a handful of times. Most of our amendments had no deadline at all. A deadline was imposed on the 18th but not the 19th Amendment. And the placement of deadlines has been inconsistent. Some were placed in preambles, while others were placed in the text.

When Congress was proposing to add a deadline to the preamble of the 20th Amendment in 1932, some members of Congress objected on the grounds that placing it in a preamble would be “of no avail” as it would not be “part of the proposed constitutional amendment.” 75 Cong. Rec. 3856 (1932). Congress thus placed deadlines only in the text of the next three amendments.

It was not until 1960 that Congress first placed a deadline in a preamble, claiming a need to “declutter” the text. But if decluttering the text were truly the goal (rather than limiting States’ rights by restricting the time they have to ratify) why would Congress have “cluttered” the text of the ERA with procedural matters such as delaying the ERA’s effective date for two years after ratification? It makes no sense that the States were able to vote on whether the ERA should have a two-year delay in enforcement after ratification because that language was in the text, but States were not able to vote on whether their Article V rights should be restricted by a congressionally imposed ratification deadline because that language was in the preamble.

As recently as 1978, Congress placed a deadline in the text and the preamble of an amendment, indicating they remain dubious about the constitutional legitimacy of placing deadlines in preambles. 92 Stat. 3795 (1978).

All these facts were excluded from Judge Contreras’ ruling killing the ERA. Women have a right to know why a judge would ignore such important information in a case of monumental importance to half the population in America.

Judge Contreras justified his decision by saying that “if Congress can dictate the mode of ratification” in the preamble, “then it should be able to dictate a ratification deadline in the same fashion.” This makes no sense. “Mode of ratification” refers to whether the ratification process occurs by State conventions or State legislatures. Congress may dictate which of these modes is used because Article V of the Constitution explicitly gives Congress this power. Article V does not give Congress the power to restrict States’ rights by limiting the time they have to ratify an amendment. To the contrary, the Framers were clear that amendatory powers must be shared equally between the national and state governments and allowing Congress to dictate how long the States have to ratify an amendment is tantamount to giving Congress sole authority to decide when our Constitution is amended – in blatant derogation of Article V.

This was one of the most important women’s rights legal controversies ever, yet a judge who easily could have declared women fully equal persons under the law declined to do so, and he based his decision on incorrect facts. His ruling prevented women from achieving equality and effectively changed Article V by stripping the States of their vital right to participate in the amendatory process as equals. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a judge willing to disregard women’s equal rights was willing to disregard States’ equal rights, too.

That Judge Contreras was appointed by President Obama matters because a judge women would expect to uphold the ERA and condemn our Constitution’s pervasive and embarrassing subjugation of women, did the opposite. The good news is women can now see that our only hope for fixing the Fourteenth Amendment and achieving full equal protection rights is the establishment of our own Women’s Party – or similar form of union-like organization whose sole purpose is to give women the leverage they need to force one party or the other to do the right thing. This is how women won the right to vote. They formed their own political party and established their own newspapers because neither the media nor either political party supported them.

A new Women’s Party or like organization need not focus on the ERA per se. Indeed, in light of recent efforts to change the meaning of the word sex and erase the very idea of women’s existence as a biological and political class by collapsing sex and gender, and making gender mutable, militates in favor of focusing energy instead on initiatives and laws to affirm the definition of sex and the reality of womanness. Without sex there are no women, and without women there can be no political activism on behalf of women. This is not complicated. The fight for equality is now a fight against women’s invisibility. We cannot play by the rules when we don’t exist in the rules. Most mainstream women’s groups are proxies for the Democratic Party; they will never protect sex and sex-based rights. We need a new movement with incorruptible nonpartisan leadership and a laser-focus on maintaining and growing the enormous potential and power of biological and political sex.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY March 8, 2021

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International Women’s Day marks the second anniversary of the founding of Feminists in Struggle.  We have accomplished a lot in two short years, despite living through a pandemic this past year.  We have connected with other radical feminists, grown our organization and our network, and raised awareness and educated women with our Feminist Forums on topics such as defending women’s spaces from male violence, the ERA, the Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act, reproductive rights, and women’s sports.

We face more challenges ahead, fighting to preserve female-only spaces and programs that are our lifeline, demanding that the Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act be adopted; working to get the ERA finally enshrined into the Constitution; defending abortion rights against the forces of the Religious Right and a conservative Supreme Court which is on the precipice of reversing Roe vs. Wade; fighting against pervasive male violence and the exploitation of our bodies and the glorification of prostitution and commercial surrogacy; dealing with the desperate poverty and greater burdens imposed on more and more women; and defending our right to think, speak, and organize as a sex without being threatened with violence or being fired from our jobs.

The good news is that we women, half the human race, the mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters of all of humanity, subordinated by males through many millennia, are beginning once again to awake from slumber.  And once we open our eyes and find our voices, no one can shut our eyes or silence us.

The radical feminist movement that FIST is building along with many others is still small but we are now everywhere, in every corner of the globe. We are growing, and compared to a few years ago, more and more of us, despite the threats against us, are speaking out. Today there was a protest in Washington DC against Biden’s female-erasing Executive Order and to demand our sex-based rights. FIST was there, carrying our banner.  There are weekly international seminars by the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (of which FIST is a proud member) every single week, drawing 400 women from many countries; the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights now has over 15.600 individual signatories, from 129 countries, in collaboration with 314 organizations; the ERA was ratified; the LGB Alliance was launched; Argentina legalized abortion; legislation protecting women’s sports is being introduced in legislatures; and lawsuits are beginning to be filed by de-transitioners like Keira Bell.  The tide is beginning to turn.

And while it is not surprising that many of us are feeling battle weary, overwhelmed by the seemingly endless reach of our two enemies–those who would erase us and those who would enslave us, or feeling deeply saddened and demoralized by the sight of so many young girls mutilating their bodies and denying their sex, we need only remember that we stand on the shoulders of giants, suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Christabel Pankhurst, and Alice Paul; and our sisters of the Second Wave, some we have lost like Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Shulamith Firestone, and the many others still marching shoulder-to-shoulder with us.  They never gave up. Neither should we!

FIST reaches our hands across generations and in solidarity with all women fighting for our liberation, so we no longer feel so alone.

Please join us! We can do this, sisters!

Feminists in Struggle responds to Biden’s Executive Order

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Feminists in Struggle (FIST), a national feminist organization, denounces the subjugation of female rights to those of transgender rights in the executive order signed by President Biden on his first day in office.

Women’s rights are included in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act because female people have been and continue to be discriminated against on the basis of our sex.  We are disadvantaged in employment; we do not receive equal pay as compared to males for the same or comparable work; we are discriminated against in education and in sports.  Indeed, females have long been treated in patriarchal societies as lesser human beings because of our sex.  Every advance we have made has been on the basis of sex, NOT “gender identity.”

Of course, as feminists, we wholeheartedly agree that, “Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love,” and that people should not be “fired, demoted or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes.”  However, we cannot possibly achieve equal rights for everyone by taking away the rights of some, in order to enhance the rights of others. “Gender identity” should not be used as grounds for eroding the sex-based rights of those of us born female since we have not yet achieved full equality.

This executive order does just that, by erasing females as a distinct class of people who are still oppressed and discriminated against in our society based on our sex and in need of legal protection. We continue to need programs for women and girls under Title VII and Title IX to redress past wrongs and level the playing field, so that those of us born female have an equal opportunity to develop ourselves and pursue our dreams. We need female-only spaces and refuges for reasons of dignity, privacy, and safety, especially because male sexual and physical violence against women and girls remain pervasive.  Therefore it is crucial that “sex” remains a distinct category and that it is not conflated with “gender identity.”

We demand an executive order and an Equality Act that will protect everyone’s rights and not pit one group’s rights against another’s. FIST’s legal committee has drafted a model bill that incorporates Feminist Amendments into the Equality Act. Our Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act preserve women’s sex-based rights including the right to female-only spaces and programs while adding strong prohibitions against discrimination based on sexual orientation and sex stereotyping, Such provisions will fully protect lesbians, gay men, bisexual individuals, those who identify as transgender, and all gender non-conforming people without weakening the rights of females.

In addition, President Biden can make great strides toward equality for half the population born female by instructing the archivist to publish the Equal Rights Amendment (already ratified by the requisite 38 states) into the U.S. Constitution.  We urge that he do so immediately.

A CENTURY AFTER WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ERA

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Don’t miss this special Zoom event on Sunday, August 30th at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time.


Feminists in Struggle hosts:

A CENTURY AFTER WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ERA

This event will be a discussion and update on the struggle to enshrine the Equal Rights Amendment into the U.S. Constitution. This special centennial program celebrates the 100th anniversary of the winning of women’s suffrage with a special forum on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

Get your tickets here – only $5!

The ERA was introduced by Suffragist Alice Paul in 1920 to establish constitutionally protected sex-based rights of women against discrimination. It says simply “Equal rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex.”

100 years later, the ERA has been ratified by the 38 states required and feminists are fighting a court battle against the archivist of the U.S. Constitution seeking that the ERA be certified and officially added to the federal constitution.

Speakers:

Kamala Lopez is an award-winning filmmaker, actress and activist.  Kamala co-wrote and produced the documentary, “Equal Means Equal” that documented sex inequality in the U.S. and the need for the ERA. The film won Best U.S. Documentary and was a New York TImes Critics’ Pick. The film was the catalyst behind a national movement resulting in the ratification of the ERA. Kamala is a recipient of the Woman of Courage Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Natalie White is a provocative and progressive feminist and artist and a crusader for women’s rights. In 2016 she led a 250 mile march from NYC to DC to raise awareness of the Equal Rights Amendment. The day after the march, she was arrested for painting “ERA NOW” on the U.S. Capitol steps. She is co-director of Equal Means Equal Organization with Kamala Lopez.

Ann Menasche is a civil rights lawyer. radical feminist and founding member of Feminists in Struggle. She marched in NYC on August 26, 1970 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage, an event that marked the beginnings of the Second Wave of Feminism. She is dedicated to preserving and expanding the sex-based rights of women and girls.

JOIN US FOR THIS IMPORTANT EVENT ON FINALLY WINNING CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN!!

ERA NOW!! FIST SUPPORTS EME’S LAWSUIT

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Even though the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified by the required 38th state on January 15, 2020, the Trump Administration’s justice department is holding it up from being recorded by the archivist so it can become part of the U. S. Constitution. To quote EME’s statement:

The lawsuit filed in January in U.S. District Court in Boston argues that congressionally imposed deadlines for states to ratify the ERA are unconstitutional and called on the courts to compel the Archivist of the United States to officially record ERA as the 28th amendment to the Constitution. The complaint also calls on the courts to reject any attempts by states to rescind their prior ratifications of the ERA. It is the first lawsuit regarding the newly ratified ERA to arrive in court, and the only ERA lawsuit brought entirely by women.

We at Feminists in Struggle support the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment because women are discriminated against because of our sex.  We endure sexual assault, harassment, domestic abuse, job discrimination, and unequal pay simply due to being female, We are the only group that is not recognized in the federal constitution, and the only remedy to all of the assaults on women’s reproductive rights, bodily sovereignty, agency, freedom, and dignity is to record the ratification of the ERA into the U. S. Constitution so that it can finally become the law of the land.

We fully support Equal Means Equal’s Amicus Brief and the lawsuit filed in January calling on the courts to compel the archivist to officially record the ERA as the 28th amendment to the Constitution.  We need to finish the job of establishing equality under the law by finally ratifying the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) and CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women).

FIST and Equal Means Equal on Joy of Resistance Radio Show

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Our own Ann Menasche appeared on the Joy of Resistance show on WBAI hosted by Fran Luck talking about our Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act which make a distinction between rights based on sex and rights based on gender non-conformity and sexual orientation.  Ann articulated the reasons for the feminist amendments as many rights for which women have fought would be eroded under the Equality Act.

Another very important topic was covered on the show–the ratification of THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT BY BOTH VIRGINIA STATE HOUSES TODAY, January 27, 2020!!  Kamala Lopez of Equal Means Equal was interviewed on the show who explained that there is no need to pass legislation to do away with the imposed deadlines on the legislation because no deadline was included in the legislation, it was a separate bill on which the states did not vote, that Congress did its job in 1972, and we should not get mired down in more Congressional action, as some suggest, by pursuing the passage of legislation doing away with the deadline because the deadline does not matter.

She stated that the Alabama Attorney General filed suit asserting that the archivist should not record Virginia’s 38th state ratification, even though the same archivist recorded the last two states, Nevada (2017) and Illinois (2018). Equal Means Equal has filed suit to make sure the ratification is recorded and will be pursuing various cases across the nation to make sure it becomes part of the U. S. Constitution at long last.  It will be making a Federalist Originalist argument outlined in the Constitution, which will be very difficult for the conservative court to rule against.

Kamala Lopez explained that without the ERA, we will never have equal work for equal pay and that strict scrutiny regarding discrimination under the ERA will finally be required on the basis of sex as it has been for religion, nationality, and race.  She urged listeners to go to Equal Means Equal and sign up for their newsletter and to show up in Richmond, VA on March 8, 2020, International Women’s Day and the centennial of women’s suffrage, to march in the ERA Parade to celebrate it’s ratification.

The show also briefly covered the WoLF events which were scheduled at two public libraries, Seattle and NYC, and how NYCPL cancelled their event while Seattle has refused to cancel theirs.

More about this program at WBAI

A Guarded Thanks to Seattle Public Library

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Feminists in Struggle previously wrote the Seattle Public Library on behalf of the WoLF event, “Fighting the New Misogyny,” scheduled for February 1, urging the library to honor the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution and allow the event to go on despite attempts to shut it down by the trans community.  We have now written the library to thank them for going ahead with the event, but in view of the inordinate amount of time that it took for them to reach this decision, and their having had multiple hearings and events for this population, we thought we should remind them of the fact that women, adult human females, are still a marginalized group who need future events focused on the multiple ways in which we experience discrimination based on our sex.  See below for full text of our statement.

To:  Seattle Public Library

From:  Feminists in Struggle

 

While we’re gratified to learn that the Seattle Public Library has decided to honor free speech and allow women to speak in the “Fighting the New Misogyny” event put on by the Women’s Liberation Front scheduled for February 1, we wish to remind the library and its board that this is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution.  As such, there should have been no question whatsoever as to what the correct decision should have been, nor any delay in reaching it, particularly on behalf of a public institution such as yours.

We hope that future such events will not only be scheduled unimpeded, but that any opposition by those who think it is acceptable to deny women the right to speak will be firmly resisted by your board, your decision reached in a much more expeditious manner, and said events be allowed to go on with your unswerving public support.  Women, adult human females, are a marginalized group as well, are still second class citizens in 2020 with no standing in the federal Constitution, even though we are 52% of the population!  We deserve many more opportunities to speak not only on this topic, but many others such as #MeToo, ratification of the ERA, FGM, and male violence towards women to name a few. It is our sincere hope that you will readily give women the respect we deserve in the future.