Gender Bender

    Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.
    Why that wording?  They meant gender and they should have said gender. It was that poor choice of words that hobbled passage.  By replacing the meaningful word "gender"  with the word fraught with meaningless meaning "sex", they opened the door to the positively goofy shenanigans of Schlafly and the rest.
    Schlafly was able to conflate unisex bathrooms and gay rights into an opposition of what was obvious common sense. In point of fact most of the things Schlafly and her ilk railed against have become common sense features of society. Women serve in combat.  If a draft is reinstated  most are in agreement women should be conscripted as well.  Gay marriage became the law of the land  because it was hard to find someone who cared.  You could say we matured into the society certain people feared forty years ago.  Those appealed to fears have been found to be baseless in the intervening years. There is this thought about unisex bathrooms: Wash your damned hands.
    The primary issue remains. Equal pay for equal work.  Schlafly was primarily funded by the corporations who were the largest employers of women.  The only goal was to suppress wages.  Any well documented wage/gender discrimination case wins but it takes time and money to fight thru the courts.  The Equal Rights Amendment would have short cut that court fight.  As always, follow the money.
    Words mean things.  The Equal Rights Amendment was first drafted in 1923.  The words "sex" and "gender" must have been much more interchangeable then in the popular mind.  It's interesting that as we have become so much more open about sex the word itself has become so much more salacious in perception.
    In refreshing my memory of this debate I was struck by it coinciding with the debate about the Panama Canal Treaties. The same tactics of total nonsense were employed in both debates.  I can't think of a time before that when total irrationality was employed as a public position.  Now it is commonplace. Time put the lie to those efforts.
    Well, the ERA is reintroduced with each new session of Congress.  Change the wording.