How The Republican Party Began Their War Against Women By Defeating The Equal Rights Amendment

It isn't news that George Will is using his skills as a right-wing propagandist to try to undermine the work of the Senate's #1 proponent of individual liberty against the encroachments of the CIA and NSA, Mark Udall. It's no secret which side of that existential battle Will and his ilk are on. In a Washington Post column last week datelined Denver, no less, Will takes on Udall not because he's the Senate's champion of privacy rights, but because he's a champion of women's rights.

"One of the wonders of this political moment," Will asserts, "is feminist contentment about the infantilization of women in the name of progressive politics." And, the whole war on women is completely made up, he insists. "Access to contraception has been a constitutional right for 49 years (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965). The judiciary has controlled abortion policy for 41 years (Roe v. Wade, 1973). Yet the Democratic Party thinks women can be panicked into voting about mythical menaces to these things." Somehow Will forgot to mention that the Republican party has been working hard to overturn both and that his boy Cory has been a leader in that movement-- until he decided to run for statewide office. Now, says Will, Gardner is trying to make "amends for formerly advocating a state constitutional 'personhood' amendment (it is again on the ballot this year and will be decisively rejected for a third time) and for endorsing similar federal legislation that has zero chance of passage. By defining personhood as beginning at conception, these measures might preclude birth control technologies that prevent implantation in the uterus of a fertilized egg. On this slender reed, Udall leans his overheated accusations that Gardner is bent on 'trampling on women’s rights,' is on a 'crusade' for 'eliminating' reproductive freedoms and would 'outlaw birth control'.”

The Republican Party hasn't always been the bastion of fear and loathing for women that Will is trying to claim it isn't-- despite all the evidence that it is, like the GOP unending battle against equal pay for equal work and the pandering to primitive religionists-- like the Southern Baptists-- who insist that women are property. In his new book, The Invisible Bridge, historian Rick Perstein shows how the Republican Party didn't launch its War Against Women until Richard Mellon Scaife's pet project, ALEC, and Phyllis Schlafly figured out how to make money for themselves with it.

[B]attles were raging for and against the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex," ran its apparently anodyne text. The majority of the public supported the idea; respectable moderate Republican ladies being its main base of support, the Republicans had endorsed it in every one of their party platforms since 1944 and President Eisenhower had asked a joint session of Congress to approve it in 1958. They did so, finally, in 1972-- at which the movement to achieve the constitutional requirement in two-thirds of state legislatures, thirty-eight to be precise, took off like a rocket, with thirty ratifications by the end of 1973.

Then the progress became as slow as molasses.

Perlstein wrote that "Only four more states voted passage by the spring." The backward, reactionary states from the Old Confederacy had no intention of giving women any kind of equality and Perlstein points out that "a frantic right-wing movement" led by a crazed and militant Republican Party activist Phyllis "I'd like to thank my husband for letting me be here tonight" Schlafly, always brimming with hatred and bile, stop the process. Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, Virginia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and, of course, Utah and Arizona all refused to ratify it and several increasingly right-wing oriented states, like Tennessee, Idaho, Nebraska and Kentucky, rescinded their ratification votes. Schlafly spent her time screeching about how the Amendment would lead women being drafted and to unisex bathrooms. Schlafly warned her fellow Republicans that giving women legal equality would lead to homosexuality and that it would "remake our laws, revise the marriage contract, restructure society, remold our children to conform to liberal values instead of God's values, and replace the image of a woman as virtue and mother with the image of prostiture, swinger, and lesbian."

One frightened conservative woman in Florida, typical of the kind of people who got taken in by Schlafly and other neo-Nazi activists within the Republican coalition said that "I do not want to share a public restroom with black or white hippie males." Florida never did ratify the ERA. No war on women here, though.

Perhaps next Will will take on the Hagan-Tillis race with his slick dunderheaded propaganda: