A Brief Return to Last Week's Class

• My desire: To make Steinem's point that pornography is a violence against women ;
• My surprise: I did not anticipate the cross-talk that evolved from the article with which I began to make Steinem's point;
• My profound regret: Caught by surprise, I responded badly to the cross-talk. At least three problems remain to be addressed from this end-of-class rupture:
  • First, my apology. The class ended as a rupture was opening up, and I regret not knowing how to respond and hence leaving the rupture with you. At the end of class, I asked "How would you feel" if you were the person in the excerpt of pornography we looked at -- I asked this trying to make a personal connection, trying to ask us to see the pain that the article was pointing out. What I wish I had said: "Wait -- pause here. How is it that our talking is missing the point the article is making about violence?"
  • Second, a redirect: we still need to address this point about violence:
    • From Cruel Edge, Dr. Robert Jensen, Ms. Spring 04: "This culture struggles unsuccessfully with prognography because it is also about men's cruelty to women, and about the pleasure that men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for everyone to face" (p. 55)
    • "When I critique pornography, I am often told to lighten up. Sex is just sex, people say, and i should stop trying to politicize pornography. But pornography offers men a politics of sex and gender -- and that politics is patriarchal and reactionary" (p. 58).
  • Third, community -- This is from my heart, reaching for your heart: when we talk about the violences to which women have been subject, we are talking about people sitting here, in this class.
    • I begin by asking: what have I overlooked, failed to see, forgotten, not paid attention to, about the people in this room with me?
    • Did some take the excerpt about pornography as an accusation?
    • Did some hear it like it was a violence happening to them?
    • What do we need to understand about each other, about this moment?
    • SART brochures -- and I will be available after class for anybody that needs me
  Resources:
  • Interview with Gloria Steinem http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/interviews/gloria.htm
  • Gloria Steinem's opposition to pornography stance http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/media/flynt.htm
  • PBS Interview with Gloria Steinem on violence agasint women http://www.pbs.org/kued/nosafeplace/interv/steinem.html
  • Violence Against Women in the United States http://www.now.org/issues/violence/stats.html
  • Center for Disease Control Sexual Violence Fact Sheet http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/svfacts.htm

And, really, this is all about the Equal Rights Amendment. Equal Rights Amendment Homepage

THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

• The ERA was written in 1923 by Alice Paul, suffragist leader and founder of the National Woman's Party.
• She and the NWP considered the ERA to be the next necessary step after the 19th Amendment (Woman Suffrage) in guaranteeing "equal justice under law" to all citizens.
• The ERA was introduced into every session of Congress between 1923 and 1972, when it was passed and sent to the states for ratification.
• The seven-year time limit in the ERA's proposing clause was extended by Congress to June 30, 1982, but at the deadline, the ERA had been ratified by 35 states, leaving it three states short of the 38 required for ratification.
• It has been reintroduced into every Congress since that time.
• In the 108th Congress (2003 - 2004), the Equal Rights Amendment has been introduced as S.J. Res. 11 (Sen. Edward Kennedy, MA, chief sponsor) and H.J. Res. 37 (Rep. Carolyn Maloney, NY, chief sponsor). These bills impose no deadline on the ratification process in their proposing clauses. The ERA Task Force of the National Council of Women's Organizations supports these bills and urges groups and individuals to advocate for more co-sponsors and passage.
  • Remember last week's discussion about the relationship between civil rights and women's rights and the historical context of WWII: African American and women ini the military, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html, the GI Bill -- all of this came together in the 70's to finally pass the amendment and ask for states' ratification. The Thirteen states that have NOT ratified the ERA: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia

1. The Equal Rights Amendment affirms that both women and men hold equally all of the rights guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution. It would provide a remedy for sex discrimination for both women and men, and give equal legal status to women for the first time in our country’s history.
2. The most important effect of the ERA would be to clarify the status of sex discrimination for the courts, whose decisions still show confusion about how to deal with such claims. For the first time, “sex” would be a suspect classification like race. It would require the same high level of “strict scrutiny” and have to meet the same high level of justification – a “necessary” relation to a “compelling” state interest – as the classification of race.

• The 14th Amendment was ratified after the Civil War, in 1868, in order to deal with race discrimination. (Ironically, it added the word "male" to the Constitution for the first time in referring to the electorate.) It was first applied to prohibit sex discrimination in 1971, in the Supreme Court decision Reed v. Reed, but it still allowed legal differentiation by sex to stand in many cases. Several subsequent Supreme Court decisions (Craig v. Boren in 1976, United States v. Commonwealth of Virginia in 1996) have raised the standard of protection against sex discrimination under the 14th Amendment, but sex discrimination claims still do not get the highest level of judicial scrutiny ("strict scrutiny") that race discrimination claims get. If ERA opponents believe that women already have the full protection of the Constitution through the 14th Amendment, they should have no objection to clarifying that guarantee through the specific wording of the ERA.

• A “three-state strategy” for ERA ratification was developed after 1992, when the “Madison Amendment” to the Constitution was ratified 203 years after its passage by Congress. Acceptance of this ratification period as “sufficiently contemporaneous” led ERA supporters to argue that Congress has the power to maintain the legal viability of the ERA’s existing 35 state ratifications. The ERA’s time limit is open to change, as Congress demonstrated in extending its original deadline. Precedent holds that rescission votes are not valid. Therefore, Congress could accept state ratifications that occur after 1982 and keep the existing 35 ratifications alive. A bill in the 108th Congress (H.Res.38) stipulates that the House of Representatives shall take any necessary action to verify ratification of the ERA when an additional three states ratify.
• The legal analysis for this strategy is outlined in “The Equal Rights Amendment: Why the ERA Remains Legally Viable and Properly Before the States” (William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, Spring 1997). The Congressional Research Service has concluded that acceptance of the Madison Amendment does in fact have implications for the three-state strategy premise. Since 1995, ratification bills have been introduced in six of the unratified states: Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Virginia.

• Cases in states with state ERAs show that the ERA would not invalidate state laws on abortion which are otherwise constitutional. The constitutional principles by which reproductive laws are upheld or struck down are primarily the right of privacy and equal protection. At present, 19 states have state ERAs or equal rights guarantees in their constitutions, yet many of these states, such as Pennsylvania, still enforce significant restrictions on abortion. Missouri has an equal protection clause similar to the ERA in its state constitution, but this clause has never been used to argue against the state’s abortion restrictions and has not invalidated them. States like Connecticut and New Mexico that have applied a state ERA to an abortion funding decision have required public funding only of medically necessary abortions, not of all abortions. The status of abortion rights in such states has more to do with the progressive nature of their state courts and state politics than with the presence of a state ERA. In fact, most state cases are argued under a combination of privacy, equal protection, and equal rights claims, and the presence of a state ERA is not necessarily the determining factor in those court decisions.

• ERA opponents’ claim that the amendment would require states to allow same-sex marriage is false. The state of Washington rejected such a claim under its state ERA in the 1970s. The state of Hawaii, which considered such a claim under its state ERA, recently amended its constitution to declare marriage a contract between a man and a woman. The legislative history of the ERA shows that its intent is to equalize rights between women and men, not to address issues of discrimination based on sexual orientation.

• The ERA would not make all single-sex institutions unconstitutional – only those whose aim is to perpetuate the historic dominance of one sex over the other. Single-sex institutions that work to overcome past discrimination are constitutional now and are likely to remain so.

• The second section of the ERA, "The Congress shall have the power, by appropriate legislation, to enforce the provisions of this article," has been called a "federal power grab" by opponents. In fact, that clause with some variation of wording appears in eight other amendments, beginning with the 13th Amendment. The ERA would not transfer jurisdiction of domestic laws or other laws to the federal government. It would simply be one more element in the Constitution by which the constitutionality of state laws is judged. The ERA would not in itself void any laws. It would give legislatures two years to adjust laws which treat people differently on the basis of sex, either by including the other sex or by using a legal category other than sex (e.g., "chief caregiver" instead of "mother") to achieve the objective of the law.
  

The following factors have been identified as increasing the risk that a man will commit rape. These factors relate to individual attitudes and beliefs as well as social conditions (Krug et al. 2002):

• Coercive sexual fantasies
• Preference for impersonal sex
• Hostility towards women
• Strongly patriarchal relationship or family environment
• General tolerance of sexual assault within the community
• Weak community sanctions against perpetrators of sexual violence
• Societal norms that support sexual violence
• Societal norms that support male superiority and sexual entitlement
• Weak laws and policies related to gender equity