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Spring Fever Lowell Ponte Saps again are running in the trees, as well as in this cycle's presidential race, as spring's warm and lengthening days reawaken the world. In last Thursday night's Democratic presidential candidate debate, the greatest truth was spoken by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who hopes to become America's first half-spanic president. Noting that Cuban caudillo Fidel Castro cannot live much longer, Gov. Richardson declared that we should begin preparing for "a post-Democratic Cuba." Richardson's Freudian slip spoke volumes about the similarity between Castro's self-aggrandizing communist dynasty and the far-Left socialist ideology of today's Democratic Party. Bill Richardson, when he was America's U.N. ambassador, was the guy President Clinton asked to create an $80,000 a year government job for Clinton's mistress Monica Lewinsky to buy her silence. Richardson has a deep understanding of the Democratic Party. This year Democrats have hoisted a white and green flag — white for unconditional surrender in Iraq, with a withdrawal timetable that is manna from Allah for our Islamist adversaries, and green for radical environmentalism, not capitalist greenbacks. Another radical weed popped up in the March 27 Washington Post, an op-ed article by feminists Eleanor Smeal and Martha Burk resurrecting the hoary — if we dare use this word in a post-Don Imus era — ghost of the Equal Rights Amendment. Story Continues Below
Thirty-five states ratified the ERA during the 1970s, three short of the three-quarters of states required for it to become part of the U.S. Constitution, prior to the proposed amendment's own seven year expiration date. Smeal and Burk on Friday raised the possibility that the new ERA, resurrected as the "Women's Equality Amendment" (WEA?) by liberal Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats, could count the previous 35 state ratifications. This seems implausible, because on second thought five of those prior ratifying states — Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Tennessee, and South Dakota — rescinded their ratifications. Somehow Smeal and Burk left this inconvenient fact unmentioned. Although it has the potential to cause no end of lawsuits and legal mischief, the ERA (or WEA) could do many pro-male things. Let us count the ways. Nowadays, on their 18th birthdays, young men are required to register for possible future military conscription. Young women are not, and this is clearly sexual discrimination. Feminist President Bill Clinton could have changed this because draft registration was set to expire early in his presidency. Himself a draft evader, Mr. Clinton could have declared conscription tantamount to slavery or involuntary servitude and ordered it abolished. Or, as one who supported a woman's right to become a general or admiral in the military, he could have insisted that women be drafted exactly as men could be. But Mr. Clinton chose to renew our discriminatory draft registration system. Too bad. Without the ability to obtain cheap, abundant cannon fodder through conscription and impressment, our gray-haired politicians might find wars harder to wage. Wars would be much less popular politically, too, if women were drafted in equal numbers with men to fight them. And, of course, because women comprise 53 percent of our population, we would have to disproportionately draft women until their numbers in the military matched those in civilian life . . . if our goal is to have equality. Women comprise only 14.9 percent of America's armed forces. The U.S. Air Force is 19.6 percent female, highest of all services. Lowest is the Marine Corps, six percent female. One of seven U.S. soldiers in Iraq is female. But equalizing our fighting forces, male and female, is only the first of ERA's blessings. We would also need to outlaw separate-but-equal public toilets, college dormitories, and other currently sex-segregated facilities. Smeal and Burk went down the usual feminist list of how women — who often take time away from their careers to raise children — earn less, are poorer, and face other manifestations of gender discrimination than men. But let's look at what they left unmentioned. Although one of every four arrests in America are of women, females account for only 7 percent of those serving time in prison. This strongly suggests that our society, police, and courts go far easier on women than on men. To judge by this disparate impact, our legal system appears to discriminate against men. We should not rest until women make up 53 percent of those in prison. And our courts also give every benefit of doubt to women over men in divorce and child custody matters. Ask actor Alec Baldwin of the brilliant sitcom "30 Rock." Do we need an ERA to guarantee that men will be regularly granted equal child custody in most divorce cases? A favorite toast among male chauvinists used to be: "To the ladies, once our superiors, now our equals." We should think of the new Equal Rights Amendment not as bringing women down, but as lifting men up. Spring fever is sweeping the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, too. In England a big issue is whether robots will someday soon turn on their human masters. This follows a report described by the London Daily Mail as "rather silly" by Great Britain's Department of Trade and Industry. The report discussed giving robots "human" rights — including the right to vote and to receive welfare benefits, free housing and robot health care. In Japan a big issue is poodles — or what an estimated 2,000 Japanese victims paid $1,250 to $1,600 apiece for, believing they were poodles. What these people, including one Japanese movie starlet, were sold instead were sheep whose wool was cut to resemble French poodles. These ignorant, greedy buyers — real poodles cost twice as much in Japan — were literally fleeced. But before you feel superior, consider how many millions of Americans have been conned into buying Al Gore's extremist propaganda about global warming in this record cold and snowy springtime. Yes, 2,000 Japanese bought a sheep in wolf's clothing. Wolf? Your pet dog can mate with a wolf and bear fertile offspring. Your dog, therefore, remains a wolf like its canine ancestors. We are easily fooled by appearances.
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