Painting by Avron Soyer
Everybody needs a lobby. That includes women.
Yes, we nurture, we care give, we organize, we achieve. Like water off a ducks back, it’s easy. What’s hard is to form a lobby.
Why is that? How can we change that?
Well, there are about125 million adult women in a population of about 324 million folks in the U.S. Lobbying would work given those numbers. We’re plenty rich in numbers. What might we be lobbying for? Well there’s the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment.
Don’t we have equal rights on the U.S. constitution?
According to the last go round in the US Supreme Court, the answer is no. (In fact, we are the only segment of population who are constitutionally not accorded the equal right to pursue happiness or equal pay.) According to the last Scalia driven – Supreme Court interpretation ruling on the ERA, our constitution never intended that women be equal, reading as it does that “all men are created equal.”
Let’s be heard. Let’s show our strength, even if it means raising our voices stridently, and voting for a woman who has stayed in the battlefield when most of us would have had the good sense to stay away. Let’s be a great big, powerful, clever, celebratory, sexy lobby for women in all the ways that it took to get the vote 96 years ago. Better late than never, let’s use that vote and become a great and powerful lobby.
