“State legislatures should enact legislation that would prohibit consideration o f sexual or affectional orientation as a factor in any judicial determination of child custody or visitation rights. Rather, child custody casesshould be evaluated solely on the merits of which party is the better parent, without regard to that person’s sexual and affectional orientation. ”
Right-wing women consistently spoke to me about lesbians as if
lesbians were rapists, certified committers of sexual assault against
women and girls. No facts could intrude on this psychosexual fantasy. No facts or figures on male sexual violence against women and children could change the focus of their fear. They admitted
that they knew of many cases of male assault against females, including within families, and did not know of any assaults by lesbians against females. The men, they acknowledged when pressed, were sinners, and they hated sin, but there was clearly something
comforting in the normalcy of heterosexual rape. To them, the
lesbian was inherently monstrous, experienced almost as a demonic sexual force hovering closer and closer. She was the dangerous intruder, encroaching, threatening by her very presence a sexual order that cannot bear scrutiny or withstand challenge.
Right-wing women regard abortion as the callous murder of infants. Female selflessness expresses itself in the conviction that a fertilized egg surpasses an adult female in the authenticity of its
existence. The grief of these women for fetuses is real, and their
contempt for women who become pregnant out of wedlock is awesome to behold. The fact that most illegal abortions in the bad old days were performed on married women with children, and that
thousands of those women died each year, is utterly meaningless to
them. They see abortion as a criminal act committed by godless
whores, women absolutely unlike themselves.
Right-wing women argue that passage of the Equal Rights
Amendment will legalize abortion irrevocably. No matter how
often I heard this argument (and I heard it constantly), I simply
could not understand it. Fool that I was, I had thought that the
Equal Rights Amendment was abhorrent because of toilets. Since
toilets figured prominently in the resistance to civil rights legislation that would protect blacks, the argument that centered on toilets—while irrational—was as Amerikan as apple pie. No one mentioned toilets. I brought them up, but no one cared to discuss
them. The passionate, repeated cause-and-effect arguments linking
the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion presented a new m ystery. I resigned m yself to hopeless confusion. H appily, after the conference, I read
Schlafly explains: “Since the mandate of ERA is for sex equality,
abortion is essential to relieve women of their unequal burden of
being forced to bear an unwanted b ab y. ” 19 Forcing women to bear
unwanted babies is crucial to the social program of women who
have been forced to bear unwanted babies and who cannot bear the
grief and bitterness of such a recognition. The Equal Rights
Amendment has now become the symbol of this devastating recognition. This largely accounts for the new wave of intransigent opposition to it.
Right-wing women, as represented in Houston, especially from
the South, white and black, also do not like Jew s. T hey live in a
Christian country. A fragile but growing coalition between white
and black women in the New South is based on a shared Christian
fundamentalism, which translates into a shared anti-Semitism. The
stubborn refusal of Jew s to embrace Christ and the barely masked
fundamentalist perception of Jew s as Christ killers, communists
and usurers both, queers, and, worst of all, urban intellectuals,
mark Jew s as foreign, sinister, and an obvious source of the many
satanic conspiracies sweeping the nation.
The most insidious expression of this rife anti-Semitism was
conveyed by a fixed stare, a self-conscious smile and the delightful
