Angelo Tydings Lynch

Women should be afforded the legal protection of a minority

group because they have and continue to be discriminated against just
as minorities have been. Despite the fact that women are not a
minority in the traditional sense, they have experienced many of the
same kinds of discrimination that minority groups, such as AfricanAmericans have experienced. In the past women were treated like
property, first of their fathers then of their husbands. They have been
refused rights, such as the right to vote as well as access to education
and jobs. The Constitution, to this day, still does not guarantee the
equality of men and women.
The opposition to equal Constitutional rights for women (the
Equal Rights Amendment) was led by Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the
Eagle Forum and one of the conservative pro-family movements
loudest voices. One of Schlaflys earliest arguments against womens
rights was that the American woman was extremely lucky, stating in a
1972 article A man may search 30 to 40 years for accomplishment in
his profession. A woman can enjoy real achievement when she is
youngby having a baby. (Schlafly). Her main argument against the
ERA was (and is) that radical feminists try to destroy the American
family by encouraging women to reject the traditional values of being a
housewife and mother. In her Stop ERA brochure she states that the
ERA cannot benefit women in employment because our employment
laws are already sex-neutral. (Schlafly). But, in her argument claiming
the ERA is a fraud, she misses the point entirely. Though employment
and other such laws are technically gender neutral in the wording,
they still dont prevent women from being paid less than men for the
same work, which is still a regular occurrence to this day. The ERA was
created as a way to prevent discriminatory practices like that from
occurring in the workplace and elsewhere.

Pornography cannot be classified purely as hate-speech towards

women, but it does promote many of the same perspectives that hatespeech against women exhibits. Pornography warps the human
perspective of who and what women are as people. It does this
through how it depicts women as objects of sexual pleasure
(particularly for men) and promotes the idea that all women are
submissive to men. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan addresses the
issue saying I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by
racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate
and promote this form of inequality and that the uncoerced
disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.
(Kagan) Meaning that things like pornography dont help and even
worsen the issue, but cannot be coerced into illegality by the
government because of the First Amendment right of free speech.
Pornography promotes the idea that women are objects to be used and
can lead to hate, but it itself is not a form of hate speech and cannot
be outlawed by the government however detrimental it is to our
society and rights of women.
Given the current state of women in our country and around the
world evidence suggests that women are still far and away not equal to
men. For example when looking at the laws around rape, theres still a
lot of room left for improvement for rape victims. Susan Brownmiller,
in Against Our Will states: in order for sexual assault to qualify as
felonious rape in an American courtroom, there must be forcible
penetration of the vagina by the penis, however slight. In other words,
rape is defined by law as a heterosexual offense that is characterized
by genital copulation. Sexual assault in our day and age is hardly
restricted to genital copulation nor is it exclusively a male-on-female
offense. In addition to this, spousal rape is still a prevalent issue that
hasnt been and needs to be sufficiently addressed by government.
The rights of women in our country have been great improved over the

last forty years but there is clearly still a long way to go. Affording
women the legal protection equivalent to that of a minority group
would help advance womens rights much more quickly and take us
closer to a society in which men and women are truly equal.