Arkansas Blog

Max,

It does not look good for getting this out of committee tomorrow. It appears that the disinformation opponents may have picked off enough votes to kill it in committee.

This group is flooding reps with emails re abortion, gay arriage, etc.

The "pro" lobby has some ground to make up and fast!

ARK. BLOG: Sorry to hear that. Maybe David Pryor's appearance will give some backbone to some of the wimps.

Regarding the unisex bathrooms, have you seen the lines to get into women's bathrooms? I can just see Zelda gathering up a bunch of sisters and crashing our men's room.

I'm all for the ERA, but we don't need to get carried away. We men have a good thing going with the short lines in the men's room.

ARK. BLOG: I was waiting to see a Broadway play in NYC last year. A huge line stretched outside the women's room door. The men were moving expedtiously. Time for the curtain was drawing near. You guessed it. Revolt. The women charged the men's room. No man made a peep.

Mr EY already DOES his own laundry. I say, this household has absolutely nothing to fear from the ERA.....and neither does any other.

Mr. Brantley wrote in the column: "The Republican Religious Right ... is screeching that the ERA would lead to gay marriage and partial-birth abortion. There's no controlling legal precedent to support that. You could just as credibly argue that the ERA would force men to wear skirts. The U.S. Supreme Court isn't going to use the ERA to legislate laws in areas the amendment doesn't mention, certainly not to override specific state limitations on gay marriage and abortion." On the Arkansas Blog, he commented further, "They'll quote out of context long-ago utterances of individuals and mention a minor court ruling or two -- none at the precedent level, such as a state Supreme Court."

Well. To say that the Supreme Court is not going to apply the ERA "in areas the amendment doesn't mention" is downright silly, because the ERA doesn't mention any "areas" at all. Rather, it would add to the federal Constitution an absolute prohibition on any abridgement of rights "on the basis of sex." While Mr. Brantley was lazily parroting the shopworn party line that the ERA does not "mention" abortion, he didn't notice that NARAL sued the state of New Mexico for tax funding of Medicaid abortions, arguing that since only women get abortions, the state policy against funding abortion (which funding other procedures, like prostate operations) violated the state ERA(which contains language very similar to the proposed federal ERA). Briefs in support of this doctrine were filed by the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the League of Women Voters, among others.

On Nov. 25, 1998, the New Mexico Supreme Court -- that's "Supreme Court," Mr. Brantley -- ruled 5-0 in favor of the doctrine that treating abortion differently violated the ERA, and that the state must fund abortions for Medicaid-eligible women. Of course, the same argument could as easily be applied to partial-birth abortions. Only women seek partial-birth abortions, right? Indeed, the ACLU has already pubished a booklet advising lawyers on how to use state ERAs to attack state laws that require parental notification or parental consent for abortion. Arkansas has such a law -- for now.

If the federal ERA is adopted, of course the U.S. Supreme Court will use it to override state statutes and state constitutional amendments (and acts of Congress, for that matter) that are deemed to be inconsistent with it. That's why some people want to enact it so badly -- it would allow them to obtain by litigation policies that they could never get enacted through the normal democratic processes.

To read the New Mexico Supreme Court ruling and related documentation, visit this page: http://www.nrlc.org/Federal/ERA/index.html

ARK. BLOG: Or better yet, rather than read an anti-abortion group's political interpretation, read the actual court decision which turns on equal treatment and a difference on determining medical necessity between men and women.

The link:

http://www.supremecourt.nm.org/pastopinion/VIEW/99sc-028.html

Personally, I'm ready to flush most members of the Arkansas General Assembly down the toilet -- men's or women's; I don't care -- and start over. The problem, of course, is that all that crap they're full of might overload the sewer system.