Welcome to social justice in a ‘man’s world’
High court has never ruled women are ‘equal citizens’ with men under US law
It astounds me that the Supreme Court can’t see that the U.S. Constitution prohibits bans on abortion. To say nothing of the systemic patriarchal interests in this government that still consider women’s bodies to be a legal form of property. Either men’s personal property, as women were literally from the beginning, or still a form of “government” property, that enables any branch of it to declare women’s bodies do not belong to them and mandate they pay for being victimized by men. That’s social justice in a “man’s world,” right?
Sure, I know the Equal Rights Amendment giving women have equal rights with men under the Constitution hasn’t passed. The Supreme Court, however, should at least uphold its own precedents regarding women’s U.S. citizenship. But, apparently it’s not going to. Here’s the rub. When the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, it extended civil rights to all citizens, but it defined “citizens” as “male.” In fact, Section 2 of the Amendment was actually written as a penalty clause for states that still supported seditious slavery, as Section 3, which refers to the strengthened loyalty oath of Congress makes very clear.
However, even though this section of the amendment only included the word “male” in reference to national elections, the Supreme Court chose to uphold a prior Illinois Supreme Court case, in 1872, declaring “barring women from the bar” in that state didn’t violate the Constitution. In fact, in the opinion of one justice, “The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”
Even though the Supreme Court overturned the Bradwell decision, ruling in 1976 that the 14th Amendment applied to both men and women, the Supreme Court has never ruled that women were “equal citizens” with men, under the law. So, accommodations here and there have been made, but when the U.S. turns 250 years old in 2026, will the Supreme Court be remembered for upholding the 50-year-old landmark decision that ruled discrimination against women was illegal in 1976, or is it going to reach back into its early “post-Civil War” decisions and rule that women’s bodies are still technically property of men’s patriarchal government and not their own?
Not that I am in favor of abortion, but to begin with, I don’t believe that any man’s government has the right to tell women what to do with their bodies. Nor do I think that the U.S. Constitution entitles the court to rule in favor of the rights of any unborn child, without recognizing the rights of its mother first, which it has yet to do.
Nor do I think any “citizen” of the United States, man or woman, is entitled to claim their religious rights should, and can, be enforced on every other citizen of the nation — especially when they’re not paying the bill or providing any reparation for the damages it causes when, in fact, the pregnancy and raising of any child for 20 years entails very high costs. What kind of justice does that position support? It sounds like the ultimate unfunded mandate to me.