Whenever I spoke with Gloria Steinem on my program over the years, I always got a sense of a person with both incredible charisma, intellect, and a real grasp of what power was and how to use it. She was a force of nature.
When the announcement that she’d passed away at 92 hit the news yesterday morning, it perfectly juxtaposed against the story the major “conservative” site Townhall had published titled, “No, the World Would Not Be a Better Place If Women Ran It.” Their point was:
“Anyone who went through middle school, junior high or high school knows full well the kind of nasty behavior that females are capable of.”
Nobody planned that coincidence; there’s so much hate against women floating around in Republican circles these days that if it wasn’t that piece it’d be something else, but it highlights a worrying trend in American culture and politics, one with echoes of a troubling past.
Back in 1972 Louise and I got married, and when she went to get her first credit card in her own name I had to co-sign for her. Not because I was more creditworthy; she’d been supporting herself by working since she was 15. It was the bank’s requirement because she was a woman.
That year was a bit of a touchstone for the women’s movement.
It was the year Steinem’s Ms. magazine sold out its entire 300,000-copy run in eight days; the year that her first issue ran a “We Have Had Abortions” statement signed by 53 women including Steinem, Billie Jean King, and Susan Sontag all confessing to what was then a crime; the year Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states; and the year Title IX became law.
And even though our culture was racing ahead, my bank still demanded a man’s name on the signature line. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 that a woman — of any age or income — no longer needed a husband, father, brother, uncle, or male friend to co-sign for credit, a mortgage, or pretty much anything else. And, more often than not, the credit history belonged to the man and didn’t mention the woman, so a divorce or a death could erase everything she’d built.
While this may sound both dystopian and like ancient history to today’s young people, it’s a world that many within the GOP are actively trying to recreate.
Pastor Joel Webbon, for example, has been preaching for years that women shouldn’t have a voice in American politics because, he says, a woman’s political voice properly comes from her husband, and if she isn’t married, from her father, brother, uncle or whichever man in her life “loves her most.” That’s the same list Louise’s bank used: husband, father, brother, uncle, family friend...
Webbon helped write “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel” alongside Oklahoma state Senator Dusty Deevers and former Trump administration official William Wolfe. His “Right Response Conference” has put Doug Wilson, Stephen Wolfe, Steve Deace, and Auron MacIntyre on stage. He’s endorsed candidates, and he sat for a ten-part interview series with notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
He’s part of the “TheoBros” network, which is connected to Republican officeholders mainly through Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s church membership and VP JD Vance socializing with people in it.
Whiskey Pete belongs to Doug Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), and last year our SecDef reposted a CNN segment in which Wilson and other CREC pastors proclaimed their belief that women shouldn’t vote. Instead, they argued, an entire household should have a single vote, and it should be exclusively cast by the man of the house.
In February of this year, Pete invited Wilson to preach at the Pentagon’s monthly worship service, itself a violation of the Constitution, stood beside him on stage, and broadcast the entire event on the Defense Department’s internal TV network.
In the Pentagon, Hegseth has become obsessed with pushing women out of leadership roles and instituted mandatory testosterone screening in the name of “lethality.” And over at HHS, the former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer with no medical training whatsoever Trump put in charge seems equally obsessed with his own masculinity and testosterone levels.
These are the men Republicans think should be role models for the generation of boys and young men coming up today:
— Hegseth paid $50,000 in a confidential settlement to a woman who told Monterey police that he took her phone, blocked the door of a hotel room, and assaulted her as she kept saying, “No.”
—Kennedy kept a 398-page journal in 2001 with a ledger in the back listing 37 women by first name, each rated on a scale of one to ten according to how far things had gone. His wife Mary Richardson Kennedy found it, and her family has always believed his promiscuity contributed to her death by suicide in 2012.
— Trump has been held liable by one jury for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and by a second for defaming her about it. The Epstein files the Justice Department tried to keep buried include FBI interview summaries in which a woman alleged that Epstein introduced her to Trump when she was somewhere between 13 and 15, that he forced oral sex on her, and that he beat her up when she bit his tiny penis. He publicly cheated on all three of his wives, and bragged to Billy Bush that he could sexually assault any woman he wanted because, he said, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
— Then there’s Musk, who’s fathered at least 14 children with multiple women. While Hegseth, Trump, and Kennedy seem to think the sole role of women is to be arm candy and to provide pleasure in bed, Musk apparently thinks they’re most useful as toaster ovens for white babies.
These are the men writing the rules for our daughters and granddaughters.
And that year Louise and I got married seems to have been one of history’s hinge points. Lewis Powell wrote his infamous Memo in 1971 and Nixon put him on the Court to carry it out the following year. My old debating nemesis Phyllis Schlafly started her Eagle Forum to fight ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972.
The Heritage Foundation was founded the next year, in 1973, the same year the Supreme Court decided Roe, and it all laid the foundation for Rush Limbaugh to spend decades trash-talking “Feminazis” and pushing his Hillary Clinton Testicle Lock Box. Andrew Tate carries on his crusade, as does Trump’s former body man, John McEntee, who joked that when conservatives said they wanted mail-only voting “they meant male, spelled m-a-l-e.”
Many men and businesses think they benefit when women can’t have an economic life independent of them, can’t start a business, or take a risk, or even negotiate on their own behalf. Women’s liberation gave half the American workforce the power to walk away from a bad marriage or a bad job, and Republicans are resentful of it.
But the cost to both women and society for this resurgence of naked misogyny is huge. ProPublica found, looking at 7 years of Texas hospital data, that after that state banned abortion, sepsis rates jumped more than 50 percent and that maternal deaths have been climbing in Texas while falling in Blue states.
Texas’ Attorney General is right now pushing criminal charges and a $1.6 million bond against a Houston midwife, while in Missouri Republican legislators are pushing a state registry of expectant mothers they can then monitor to make sure they don’t get an abortion.
Elon Musk’s Grok AI has generated an estimated 23,000 sexualized images of children and a reported 1.8 million sexualized images of women in just 11 days, after which Musk posted that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero,” as his company put the feature behind a paywall, monetizing it.
Meanwhile accused rapist Andrew Tate — whose $8,000-a-year War Room ran a PhD course on seducing, isolating, and pushing women into sex-cam work — has cultivated the president’s youngest son, with an associate telling the New York Times he’d given Barron dating advice while Tate became a big brother to him.
This is all incredibly damaging to young men, as well. These views of women and male dominance produce men who can’t ask for help, can’t be a real partner, and can’t ever truly get close to anyone including their own families. And these incels blame their loneliness on the women, sometimes with murderous violence.
One of the great missions of Gloria Steinem’s life, as she told me more than once on my program, was the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced in 1928 and re-introduced in 1972, that says, simply:
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
It’s impossible to measure how many discoveries and accomplishments for the human race we’ve already lost to the suppression of women’s agency and rights, but now is a great time to take the next step toward ending this horror.
The Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified by 38 states, the number the Constitution requires, but Republicans are still fighting it by claiming that they weren’t ratified before 1982 and therefore aren’t valid. The Republicans on the Supreme Court refuse to examine the case.
Two weeks ago, the new Archivist of the United States told senators he’ll stick with his predecessor’s refusal to certify it, following a Justice Department opinion rather than the plain text of Article V of the Constitution, which doesn’t mention dates or times for constitutional amendments at all.
Congress can settle this and establish women’s rights by law with a simple resolution with a majority vote.
So, call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative and both senators you want them co-sponsoring the resolution affirming ERA ratification. Then check your registration at vote.org, because Republicans are again openly discussing repealing the Nineteenth Amendment that gave women the vote.
I signed for Louise in 1972 because the bank required it; nobody should have to do that ever again. We need to put women’s rights into the Constitution, where no rightwing politician can again challenge them.
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