Jeff Jacoby: There's only one way to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution

I rather like the ERA. It would knock out favoritism to women, including transexual "women". Both at present have favoured rights, not equal rights

IT WAS a running joke in the early days of NBC's "Saturday Night Live." Chevy Chase, the news anchor for "Weekend Update," would announce the night's top story: "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."

Like the late Spanish autocrat, the Equal Rights Amendment is also still dead. Approved by Congress in 1972, it was sent to the states with a seven-year ratification deadline, only to die when the clock ran out in 1979. Just 35 of the required 38 state legislatures had ratified the amendment, so it never became part of the Constitution. Yet some members of Congress now insist that the ERA didn't fail and actually was ratified. Or, to be precise, that it will have been ratified "to all intents and purposes" if Congress simply adopts a joint resolution retroactively cancelling the ERA's deadline.

Like Chevy Chase, they make their pronouncement with a straight face. Unlike him, they're not funny.

Their claim is self-evident nonsense. Congress cannot undo the results of an amendment ratification process any more than it can undo the results of a presidential election. Yet at a recent Capitol Hill press conference, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland put on a show of amendment denialism that was as divorced from reality as the 2020 election denialism of former president Donald Trump.

On what basis can anyone insist that the ERA never expired? Pressley, Cardin, and the others make much of the fact that three additional state legislatures — in Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia — did eventually vote to ratify the amendment, purportedly bringing the total to the required 38. They did so, respectively, in 2017, 2018, and 2020. That was four decades after the ratification cutoff date established by Congress had come and gone. No matter, the amendment deniers say. That was merely an "arbitrary deadline" and should not be considered binding. It's a ludicrous argument, as preposterous as the claims by some Trump lawyers that he could be "reinstated" as president.

It should be noted that five of the state legislatures that ratified the ERA had a change of heart and voted — within the original seven-year window — to rescind their approval. Yet the same ERA advocates who maintain that any ratification, no matter how belated, is binding, are adamant that a state's timely decision to withdraw its ratification is "a nullity" and that recissions "don't count."

Like the 2020 stolen-election conspiracy theories, the ERA-was-actually-ratified theory has been litigated in court and rejected as meritless.

"Congress set deadlines for ratifying the ERA that expired long ago," ruled Judge Rudolph Contreras of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. "Plaintiffs' ratifications came too late to count." Any finding that the amendment should nevertheless be deemed ratified, he held, "would be absurd." (The case is now on appeal.)

Perhaps the ERA's proponents are merely striking a pose. Maybe, while realizing that the amendment is a dead letter, they find it politically useful to pretend otherwise. But if that's not the case, they ought to quit playacting and heed the admonition of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

An iconic champion of women's equality, Ginsburg was a lifelong backer of the ERA. She was also a sober jurist who would not pretend that an expired deadline could somehow, magically, be reopened. During an appearance at Georgetown Law School in 2020, Ginsburg said the only way forward for the amendment was to restart the process. "I would like to see a new beginning," she told the Georgetown audience. "I'd like to start over."

Ginsburg also acknowledged that the main benefit of an Equal Rights Amendment at this late date would be its symbolic value. As a matter of substance, an addition to the Constitution is no longer needed to guarantee legal equality of the sexes.

In 1972, when Congress approved the ERA, the Supreme Court had not yet clarified that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment protects women from unfair sex discrimination. Things are different now. As far back as 1997, the legal scholar and journalist Jeffrey Rosen wrote that the Equal Rights Amendment had effectively been enacted "by judicial fiat," thanks to Supreme Court decisions holding sex discrimination to be nearly as repugnant to the Constitution as racial discrimination. He quoted Ginsburg's view that "there is no practical difference between what has evolved and the ERA."

Another prominent legal thinker, University of Chicago Law School professor David Strauss, made the same observation in a 2001 Harvard Law Review article. The Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, he wrote, yet "today it is difficult to identify any respect in which constitutional law is different from what it would have been if the ERA had been adopted. For the last quarter-century, the Supreme Court has acted as if the Constitution contains a provision forbidding discrimination on the basis of gender."

In other words, there is a strong case to be made that the campaign to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution achieved its aims even without winning ratification. Symbolism aside, it is hard to see what would be gained by making the ERA the 28th addendum to the Constitution. But if Pressley, Cardin, and their colleagues are intent on enshrining the ERA in the nation's supreme legal charter, their only option is to follow Ginsburg's advice: "Start over." The original ERA is as dead as Generalissimo Franco. Denialism won't bring it back to life.

https://jeffjacoby.com/26748/there-only-one-way-to-add-an-equal-rights

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Righteous Tyrants

They sure don’t make tyrants like they used to.

Tyrants once rose to power the old-fashioned way: defeating the opposition on the battlefield or at the faux ballot box. Despite their atrocities, these despots at least had some swagger—perhaps a way with the ladies, a good sense of humor, strong persuasive abilities, commanding verbal skills, pride in their appearance.

Not so with modern-day martinets. Our 21st-century tyrants possess nothing more than useless degrees from woke institutions and deep contempt for at least half the country, likely born out of a lifetime of social isolation. History, after all, shows that outcasts often seek revenge against their childhood tormentors later in life.

Such appears to be the case with the former Twitter executives who testified before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Unimpressive by every measure—looks, personality, intellect, persuasiveness, grasp of the facts—the Twitter Four should serve as a reminder of what the defenders of freedom are up against. Thankfully, our enemies, while powerful for now, have the mental, physical, and emotional appeal of overcooked spaghetti.

James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, and Anika Collier Navaroli took the quasi-stand this week at a House Oversight Committee hearing to explain their roles in colluding with the government to suppress free speech during an election year, particularly related to the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020. Baker, the former general counsel for the FBI when the bureau used fabricated political opposition research to defraud a secret federal court and obtain a warrant to spy on Donald Trump, was fired by Elon Musk as Twitter’s general counsel after it was discovered Baker was vetting company files made available to independent journalists.

Roth, Gadde, and Navaroli were considered the “custodians of the internet,” Roth boasted in a New York Times opinion column published in November, shortly after he resigned. “The work of online sanitation is unrelenting and contentious,” Twitter’s former head of “trust and safety” lamented. Roth then outlined a series of steps the government, private companies, and Big Tech oligarchs should pursue to rein in Musk.

“In the longer term,” Roth warned, “the moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online.”

That sort of hubris was on full display this week as the Twitter Four defended their crusade to censor users on the Right, including the suspension of Trump in January 2021. In the process, these self-proclaimed warriors of truth and integrity revealed themselves to be nothing short of petulant foot-stompers unfit for employment anywhere outside of Silicon Valley or the government. Further, all four were clearly guided by their hatred for Trump and his supporters, contrary to their solemn assurances that decisions were based on unbiased considerations to protect the site from insidious content.

For example, Gadde retweeted a Nicholas Kristof piece in 2016, emphasizing Kristof’s conclusion that he had “never met a national politician in the U.S. who is so ill informed, evasive, puerile and deceptive as Trump.” She, like 98 percent of people working in Silicon Valley, is a generous contributor to Democratic Party officials and candidates.

She reportedly cried when she learned Musk had acquired the company.

But Gadde’s attempts to hide her partisan stripes failed this week. In a nonsensical explanation only an Ivy Leaguer could love, Gadde told committee members about the inner workings of the social media giant.

“Defending free expression and maintaining the health of the platform required difficult judgment calls,” claimed Gadde, who was largely responsible for the decision to ban Trump’s account after January 6, 2021. “Most applications of Twitter rules were fact-intensive, subject to internal debate, and needed to be made very quickly. We recognized that after applying those rules, we might learn that some of them did not work as we had imagined and that we would need to update them. At times, we also reversed course.”

Coincidentally, just like occurrences in the traditional media, those rules and course reversals only affected one side: the Right. But when challenged to explain the imbalance, Gadde played dumb. She said she could only “make a guess” as to the application of a “search blacklist,” a tool that was frequently used by Twitter to hide the accounts of conservative influencers.

Vaccine-injured Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) angrily confronted Gadde about Twitter’s censorship of contrary views on COVID-19, especially vaccine efficacy. After forcing Gadde to admit she did not graduate from medical school, Mace presented tweets with CDC data on vaccine side effects that Twitter nonetheless labeled “misleading.”

Gadde told Mace she was “not familiar with those particular situations,” to which Mace snarked, “Yeah, I bet you’re not.”

Roth, a big talker behind the scenes and on the op-ed pages of regime-friendly newspapers, sheepishly confessed he “regret[s] the language he used” in some tweets including one that referred to the president and his administration as “actual Nazis.” He then complained that he was subjected to threats after Musk shared what Roth insisted was a “defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia.” Roth said he was forced to sell his house in the aftermath.

Anika Collier Navaroli perhaps best portrayed the emotional fragility and overall duncery of these social media tyrants. The “safety policy team senior expert” worked for months before January 6 to “minimize the threat of violence that we saw coming.” Part of the looming danger, Navaroli claimed, was Trump’s comment for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—a remark not made on Twitter but during a presidential debate in September 2020.

Navaroli, now a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, sprang into action. “We crafted what we called a coded incitement to violence policy to address dog whistles like this,” she told the committee. Rather than follow her orders, Navaroli complained, Twitter “bent over backwards to find ways not to approve it.”

She continued her pressure campaign to remove Trump until the events of January 6. “Two days later, when it looked like it was going to happen all over again, I asked management whether they wanted more blood on their hands,” Navaroli said. “Only then did they act.”

Navaroli seemed to detect danger in everything Trump said. “The former president said he liked to send out his tweets like little missiles. To me, that sounded like weaponization of a platform in his own words and yet Twitter was not concerned.”

She left Twitter in March 2021 after her paranoid fantasies got the best of her. Navaroli told the January 6 select committee she “could no longer be complicit in what I saw to be a company and a product that was wantonly allowing violence to occur. [The] platform was going to continue to allow people to die, and I could not be a part of that.”

Just like the tyrants of old, this current crop hides its lust for power behind a cloak of fairness and the “common good.” No, they’re not cutting off food supplies or building labor camps but these modern-day tyrants seek the same ends: crush the opposition and control the masses.

Just with a lot less talent.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/09/righteous-tyrants/

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Why Leftist Ideologies Always Fail

I want to discuss, in the brief space I have, the roots of modern Leftist philosophy, and why they believe government and force are the essentials to a more perfect society. There is an inherent contradiction in their system which would nullify it, but the Leftist’s fundamental understanding of human nature is in error, and thus any arrangement based on it is doomed to failure. And has.

Modern leftism has an interesting history, but one I cannot fully elucidate here. Though it has predecessors (Locke, Helvetius), its current manifestation is rooted in Darwinian materialism (one foundation of Marxism). According to this hypothesis, humans evolved, naturally and by chance, from “lower” forms of life. Pure, undiluted Darwinism, thus pure leftism, is atheistic—no God created or controlled the process. That means human beings are nothing more than blobs of matter in motion. The only difference between you and a cockroach is a different configuration of molecules, and that's totally by chance. You can no more help being a human than a cockroach can help being a cockroach. There is, of course, some verity to this.

However, since humans are nothing but groups of molecules in motion, we can react only to whatever environmental forces surround us. There is no freedom of choice in such a system. And no free will implies we are not responsible for what we do. Criminals aren’t guilty of “crimes”; it isn’t their fault, they respond exclusively to environmental factors. Also, poverty has been said to be a root cause of crime. Thus, by changing the environment (a “war on poverty”), human behavior can be modified. Put an apple tree in an environment of good water, soil, sunshine, etc., and bigger, tastier, juicier apples will be produced. The apples have no “choice” in the matter, they only respond to their surroundings. Since humans are, like apples, only molecules formed, by chance, into what we are, then, like apples, we will react only to whatever external stimuli we receive. People thus aren’t “good” or “bad” except as their environment dictates.

Leftist intellectuals believe that humans (especially them) have evolved to the point where they can control the evolutionary process, if only we will give them power. They will create a Utopia, by good laws and education, so that everybody can be in a “good” environment and respond accordingly.

This philosophy is, of course, contrary to Christianity and many world religions, which believe that man is, in some ways, the offspring of a Divine Creator, given freedom of choice by that Creator on how they choose to live. Most conservatives believe in a philosophy like this, whether they are “religious” or not. People are not just naturalistic, materialistic animals, with nothing but instinct and response to environment. Some environmental forces are obviously evident in human behavior (culture, tradition, etc.); no one can, or should, deny this. But, in the conservative mind, humans have free will, and can choose to rise above their circumstances and form their own destiny. Not so, says the liberal, people only do “good” or “evil” in response to their (“systemic”) surroundings, whatever stimuli they receive from without. Again, change the stimuli, change the environment, and behavior will automatically be modified. It’s “science.” When people do evil, it’s the fault of the system (capitalism is usually blamed, or now, “white supremacy” and “racism”), not the fault of the individual.

The difference between liberalism and conservatism is thus based on a fundamentally different belief about human nature. Liberals want power so that they can create an earthly paradise. They believe they can now control all environmental factors, including the climate. Conservatives believe in freedom, but a freedom that has boundaries based on eternal principles of right and wrong. Humans can be, must be, incentivized and disciplined towards virtuous conduct, and thus to use their freedom for good, not evil. Family and religion best do this, not government.

Socialism is a prime example of liberal failure. The government, top-down, controls the economy. It never works because it denies humans the freedom to choose their needs and desires, rather than what the elite thinks is best. Nobody can control what another person wishes to purchase. Only the free market fits with human nature.

Liberal morality also is disastrous. Let Edmund Burke explain: "Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within [freedom of choice], the more there must be without [government tyranny]." People must use their freedom to control themselves—self-government. Or government will have to do it for them. Freedom or tyranny. The Right vs. the Left.

Thus, liberal politicians’ fundamental mistake is believing that human beings can be transformed by legislation, in effect, by force. But they are wrong, and that is why political systems, nations, and dynasties rise for awhile and then collapse. They fail in the most basic concept, viz., that freedom is in the human heart, not produced by government laws. And forcing people to outwardly conform will only lead eventually to resentment, rebellion, and revolution. That is why religion has always existed. Christianity, for example, has survived for 2,000 years through every kind of political system and upheaval. Jesus knew that humans can only truly be changed from within, in the heart, not by external laws. Therefore, religion has always existed, and will continue long after current political tyrannies have either disappeared completely or devolved into something else, something as useless and reprehensible as what they had replaced.

But, religion remains the greatest threat to the self-serving, elitist politicians who lust to control others and create the Shangri-la that gives them totalitarian power. The only people more pitiable than such politicians are the people who believe their lies, lies that have been repeated countless times throughout history, and have cost innumerable people their lives. For, what do you do with the rotten apples, the apples that don’t respond to the perfect environment you created for them?

You destroy them. As many as necessary.

https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2023/02/11/why-leftist-ideologies-always-fail-n2619421?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&recip=6139244

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Western Progressives Loved Stalinism and Maoism

I recently had the opportunity to travel to the Texas Tech University School of Law to debate the merits of capitalism versus socialism with Ben Burgis, a columnist for Jacobin and philosophy instructor at Georgia State University Perimeter College.

It was a riveting discussion, and I hope students left with not just a better understanding of the horrors of socialism but with the inherent morality of capitalism, a system that relies on voluntary action instead of force and state coercion.

There are many issues on which Ben and I disagreed, including his claim that Venezuela was not actually a socialist country, despite the widespread nationalization of private industries. I intend to address this claim down the road, but for now I’d like to focus on Ben’s implication that Stalinism and Maoism were not truly socialist models either.

Ben stated he regretted that so much of the debate involved discussions around the USSR, since he wasn’t advocating socialism along these lines. Since respectable socialists and progressives don’t defend these systems today, why talk about them?

I understand why Ben wouldn’t wish to discuss systems that starved and executed tens of millions of people, and I said as much during the debate. But it’s important to understand what socialists and progressives of the time—who unlike Ben didn’t have the advantage of hindsight—thought of them. And the truth is, they loved them.

‘An Inexpressible Look of Kindness’

In his new book The Power of Capitalism, Dr. Rainer Zitelmann chronicles in painstaking detail how much Western elites were enamored with Lenin and Stalinism, praising the oppressive and violent system in hagiographic language. Here are just a few examples.

“The reality of the ‘Soviet Republic’ is for my consciousness one of the greatest and most gratifying facts. Because here, for the first time in 2,000 years, a very honest attempt is being made to bring justice into the world through energy. If I die tomorrow, the thought of this isolated phenomenon in the midst of a timid and backward world will be the last, the only consolation.”

— German writer and theater critic Alfred Kerr (1933)

“Future historians may well regard the Russian struggle for collectivization as a heroic period in human progress … The backward section of the population would have the chance to obtain what it most needed, namely education … women would have the chance for leisure and freedom as well … whether villages preferred their dirt and ignorance to Progress or not, Progress would be thrust upon them.”

— Walter Duranty, The New York Times’ Moscow correspondent

“Here are happy workers, because they are whole men and women … Dream, thought, love collaborate in the tedious business of making electric parts, since these toilers are not working for a boss.”

— Waldo Frank, American historian and literary critic

“[In Lenin’s Tomb] is the only person in the world who is not asleep … he is the paternal brother who is really watching over everyone. Although you do not know him, he knows you and is thinking of you.”

— French writer Henri Barbusse

It’s not just that the Soviet system these individuals were praising was not a utopia; that could be forgiven. What’s stunning is that these hagiographic comments were used to describe a murderous system that ruled by terror and starved millions of people.

Many would think the horrors of Stalinism would have turned even staunch Marxists away from socialism. That is not the case, however. In his magnum opus Modern Times, the late Paul Johnson showed just how enamored Western intellectuals were with Maoism scarcely a generation after the horrors of Stalinism.

French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir testified that “life in China [under Mao] is exceptionally pleasant.” David Rockefeller lauded “the sense of national harmony” under Mao, arguing that his revolution had succeeded “not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose.”

Johnson pointed out that intellectuals were aware of the horrors of Stalinism, but had convinced themselves that socialism had finally succeeded in large part because of “the extraordinary genius of Mao.”

“‘He was,’ Jan Myrdral wrote, ‘third in line with Marx and Lenin, and had solved the problem of how ‘the revolution can be prevented from degenerating.’ He ‘combined,’ wrote an American political scientist, ‘qualities which rarely coexist in one being in such intensity.’ Han Suyin argued that, unlike Stalin, Mao is extremely patient, and believes in debate and re-education,’ and had ‘an ever-present concern with the practical application of democracy.’ … Felix Greene believed that the hunger for power had been eliminated and that there was ‘no evidence of that jockeying for power or of the personal rivalry that we have seen so often in the Kremlin. Mao was not merely a soldier, a leader, a poet, philosopher, teacher, thinker and charismatic: he was also a kind of saint.”

If you think Johnson is exaggerating that many saw Mao as a saint, consider this quote from the famous Christian communist Hewlett Johnson.

“[I saw in Mao] something no picture has ever caught, an inexpressible look of kindness and sympathy, an obvious preoccupation with the needs of others … these formed the deep content of his thoughts,” he wrote.

This kind, saintly figure was history’s greatest mass murderer, accounting for the deaths of no fewer than 45 million people from 1958 to 1962, and likely as many as 65 million.

‘A Century of Failure’

This is just a sampling of quotes from intellectuals praising the socialist systems under Stalin and Mao. You can find many more examples in Kristian Niemietz’s 2019 book Socialism.

Again, I understand why Ben Burgis, like most socialists, would prefer to ignore this bloody history.

But the notion that “real” Marxists would not support the socialism of Mao, Stalin, Lenin, or Pol Pot—who, as I pointed out in our debate, literally studied Marxism and Stalinism as a student in Paris in the 1950s and founded a Marxist-Leninist student organization (“Marxist Circle”)—is belied by the historical record.

It’s easy, of course, to reject these systems in hindsight. But it doesn’t change the fact that every single political system based on the ideas of Karl Marx over the last century has failed

https://catalyst.independent.org/2023/02/14/progressives-socialism/

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Australia: Outrage after six-year-olds told they must wear 'pride shirts' to play soccer

Parents of primary school age children have been told their kids are required to wear pride t-shirts if they want to play in an A-League half-time game.

The game is taking place during the A-League's inaugural Pride Celebration round held between February 24-26, with a follow-up round on March 4 in New Zealand.

The marquee game of the round is between Adelaide United and Melbourne Victory at Melbourne's AAMI Park on February 26 - when the children will take the field during the break.

'Please note that Melbourne Victory will be celebrating Pride Cup at this fixture. As such, participants playing half time small sided games will be wearing a specially designed pride T-shirt during the game,' the registration form given to one junior coach read.

'By continuing with this registration form you agree to your child wearing the MVFC pride T-shirt,' the form seen by The Herald Sun advises.

A furious parent told the newspaper it was not appropriate and kids should be 'kept out of social and cultural matters'. 'It's deeply disturbing that the Melbourne Victory is forcing 6 year old children to be moving billboards,' he said.

'While I personally agree with the concept of pride and the safety of all LGBTQI+ persons to participate in sport, primary aged schoolchildren are not the correct avenue to express these sentiments.'

One fan wrote to Twitter that they didn't believe 'inclusion was forcing kids to wear pride shirts'.

A spokesperson for Melbourne Victory said the children were not being forced to wear the jerseys and could play another day if they didn't want to.

'The Club has not forced any of its players, staff, fans or junior participants to wear or participate in anything they are not comfortable with,' a spokesman said.

'This game is a celebration of LGBTI+ participation in sport and we have put processes in place to ensure those who are not comfortable to participate in the day as a whole, will have the option to participate in another match day they feel comfortable participating in.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11757377/A-League-pride-round-Six-year-olds-told-wear-pride-shirts.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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