“Mother’s Day and Equal Rights” May 12, 2019 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States
or by any state on account of sex.”
The Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923, has not yet been approved.
One of the first times that I got in trouble in church was when, on my very first year, I failed to preach a Mothers’ Day sermon on Mothers’ Day. My rural Kentucky congregation was shocked, shocked I tell you, by my insensitivity. I had a whole bag full of reasons that I offered in self-defense, the first which was that I was a biblical preacher and there was nothing about Mothers’ Day in the Bible. I later excused my uncommon refusal to talk about Mothers’ Day by the more pastoral awareness that there are many people who don’t have a really good feeling about the greeting card holiday…. Some always wanted to be a mother and never had the chance. Others are mothers and children are estranged from one another. Some have recently lost their mother and some mothers have lost a child. All of which spelled some real need to just not assume that everyone was feeling the same loving and respectful nostalgia on this day as everyone else.
It is difficult to simultaneously give the accolades that loving and sacrificial mothers deserve, while consoling all of those who spent years in the greeting card isle looking for a card that, rather than saying, “you were always there for me,” or “you will always be my best friend,” and are, instead, looking for the one that just says, “You’re my mom.” So, applause for the mothers who loved, encouraged, emboldened and defended your young! Congratulations to those of you who won the “mom lottery.” Just try to be aware that your experience is not universal. . . and maybe it isn’t even the norm.
But if I may be allowed to go behind the curtain of the original sentiment of Mothers’ Day, that is really more about appreciating women generally than it is throwing roses at women for doing the one thing that men can never do.
In the 21stcentury, I am less concerned about applauding the often invisible and unappreciated work of mothers and housekeepers, as laudable as that obviously is. What concerns me in 2019 is the women who go to office buildings and businesses and do the same work that men do and yet still make significantly less.
There have been arenas of real progress over the past half century. Discrimination is harder to hide in union shops where there is a specific job description or in government employment. But even when you take those equal pay situations into account, on average, women will make significantly less than men who are doing the same jobs.
Of course, Joe was making $8 million dollars a year, so still, her salary was nothing to sneeze at, but the incongruity was outrageous and it has spawned a whole industry of “Know Your Value” books and conferences in which she encourages women to fight for more equitable compensation. And, it is true enough that pay differences in the whole of the Hollywood and TV industries has been criminal. But I am more concerned about the millions of employed women who are not famous, who are not, like Mika was, fighting the injustice of only making $570,000 per year when Joe was making $8 million. It was wrong, but still, when I hear Mika say that she couldn’t pay her babysitter and keep up her on air wardrobe for a half a million dollars a year, I still throw up in my mouth just a little.
The difference between a half a million and 8 million dollars a year is unjust, unfair, and indefensible . . . while being misogynist and insulting. But the difference between making $15 an hour and making $8 an hour can be a difference between barely getting by and suffering the ravages of the violence of poverty.
None of this is hard to see. There is no one here, no one listening to our podcasts or watching this on YouTube who doesn’t get the point and I doubt that there is anyone who would defend the status quo. So why, in 94 years of trying, have we not passed the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States?
On the wonky side, it will take 38 states to ratify the amendment for it to pass.
In the 1970’s, it looked like it had a good shot, but we never got past 35 states until 2017, when Nevada became the 36thstate, and last year, Illinois became the 37th.
So, we need just one more, right? And Missouri is one of the states that has not ratified the ERA, which is why it is in the news all of the time? Right . . . the states we are waiting for are, predictably: Missouri, and our neighbors - Arkansas, and Oklahoma, and our political cousins in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and, of course, Utah and, sadly, Virginia. Again, as much as many people like to say that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, it should be noted that of the 13 hold out states, they all have Republican controlled legislatures.
I spent the first 30 years that I was in the ministry, never putting a political sign in my yard, never commenting on candidates, and trying my best to believe that there were good people on both sides of the aisle. But facts are stubborn things. It is not that we have a good party and bad party in our two-party system. It is that we have a pro-business, pro-military, party that fosters a tax and economic system that favors the rich, and then we have the Republican Party that does all of that and adds misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia to the mix.
I am inclined to believe that Plato was right, we should be ruled by philosopher kings . . . we would have a judicial system that was just, an economy that was fair, and we could root out prejudice but then everyone would have to listen to rulers quoting Kierkegaard and Bertrand Russell all of the time, so everyone would still be unhappy. But I digress . . .
Legislators in these conservative controlled states go into hysterics saying how our country would fall apart if women were guaranteed constitutional equality but, the fact is, we are the only western constitutional government whose constitution does not include such a provision. The French constitution provides that the law guarantees in all spheres the rights of women are equal to the rights of men.
The German constitution provides that men and women have equal rights and that nobody shall be prejudiced or favored because of their sex. The constitution of India provides that the state shall not discriminate on the basis of sex.
And, you know, after WWII, when we were guiding many nations in the writing of a democratic constitution, we always included a provision for gender equality. We just never brought that insight home. Experts in this arena say that 94% of Americans favor gender equality. The problem is that most of them think we already have it, so a small minority of largely right-wing religious misogynists keep southern states trapped in the 14thcentury.
It will not always be this way. I was in Jefferson City this week with several of you and hundreds of others from around the state, to lobby our legislature to restore Medicare reimbursements to Planned Parenthood for medical care given to poor women. I didn’t actually get to speak to our representatives but if I had, what I wanted to say to him is that I am not asking him to switch parties. I just want him to think about the future of the Republican Party rather than the past.
The next generation of Republicans will be pro-business and they will predictably keep trying to shift the tax burden onto the poor and the middle class as they have for the past century, but they will not perpetuate this anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, racist stuff that mobilized voters in their base in the past.
Those people are all quickly exiting to some version of Memorial Gardens and no matter how hard they try in the Carolinas; it is becoming increasingly difficult to vote from the graveyard. What I would say to my legislator, who is a man about my age who learned about government by doing swimming pool maintenance . . . I guess the Harvard Kennedy School was all full when he applied . . . I would say to him, “Craig, if you want to keep being re-elected for enough terms to draw a pension from the state of Missouri, you are going to have to think about future voters rather than past voters.” I have all but given up on compassion and reason with our legislature, but surely some measure of enlightened self-interest is bound to be persuasive at some level.
But I caught myself before I started yelling, realizing how pathetic his position on this matter was. And I just told him, you have already lost. You are on the wrong side of history. Justice will come to the gay members of your staff, either now, or in the near future when you have been removed from this office. And that is where we left it, and, as you know, I was right, and he was wrong. It happens more often than you might think.
You may recall that Missouri was the first state in the union to pass a constitutional amendment in 2004 defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. We led the way in denying civil rights to gay people. We are now one of the 13 holdouts preventing the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. I would love to see Missouri go from being the first to institutionalize homophobia 15 years ago, to becoming the last state to push the ERA over the goal line . . . what I saw in Jeff City this week did not give me much hope of that, but I believe that Virginia may do, this fall, what we have refused to do. But whether it is Virginia, or Missouri, or Utah, somewhere, the mentality of patriarchy will fall, and America will join the ranks of civilized nations.
Now, let’s not be naïve, passing an amendment will not change the way that people think over-night, but just like the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same sex marriage did not end all discrimination against gay people, but it sure was an important mile stone and it pointed our feet in the direction of progress.
