that indeed the Mississippi delegation had strong Klan participation and leadership; more generally, it was not only male-dominated but male-controlled, almost martially controlled. The Utah
delegation with its supporters who dared to mingle with the enthusiastic feminists who numbered in the thousands acted with a different kind of conviction: the women were especially concerned with stopping abortion; they were passionate advocates of their values, tied to the Mormon Church, perhaps under direct orders, but nevertheless speaking for themselves with emotional conviction. A
state legislator from Utah, an official delegate, was stern, forbidding, serious, and willing to exercise what power she had in the service of her beliefs: the Equal Rights Amendment legalizes abortion; * the Supreme Court, in saying that all women could have abortions, opened the door for the state to say that all women must
have abortions; pro-ERA women are ignorant and malicious; she is
a feminist and introduces legislation in behalf of women, but finds
that pro-ERA feminists do not know what the interests of women
are; the interests of women are in a strong home and strong laws
protecting the family in which the man, not the state, protects the
woman; also the federal government in following any kind of feminist program takes freedom from her directly as a state legislator, which she finds a violation of states’ rights. Another Utah delegate
said she attended the convention because she did not want her tax
money to go to pay for abortion. I asked her about Viet Nam War
tax resisters: they withheld taxes because they did not want their
money to pay for the war; did she withhold taxes to keep her
money from paying for abortion? Yes, she said. Then, as an afterthought, she said that actually she didn’t pay any taxes at all. Did her husband pay them, I asked. She thought so.
During the ratification of the resolution supporting homosexual
rights, I sat in the audience. There was yelling and cheering;
*Sec chapter 1, p. 33, for an explanation of this non sequitur.
balloons were let loose through the whole hall when the resolution
was finally ratified after some debate. The scene was one of wild
exhilaration: the thousands of delegates and observers were celebrating. In the highest balcony I spotted a group of Utah women, dressed in their black dresses all the same, slowly, grim ly exiting.
There were maybe ten of them; they had seen it through to the
end; they were not happy. I raced to the high balcony to talk with
them. It was deserted up there; all the noise was hundreds of feet
below us; them and me.
T hey were somber. How did they feel about this, I asked. It
was horrible, the end of everything, the death of the country, an
affront to God; homosexuality was a sin that deserved death, and
here women had voted for it, were clapping and cheering in behalf
of it. T hey were mortified, ashamed of women, ashamed of the
ignorance of women’s libbers. T hey admitted to never having
known any homosexuals; they admitted that churchgoing men in
their own communities were sexually molesting their own daughters; they admitted that they were surrounded by men who went to church and were at the same time adulterers. I asked them why
then they were afraid of homosexuals. One woman said, “If you
had a child and he was playing out in the street and a car was
coming you would move him out of the w ay, wouldn’t you? W ell,
that’s all we’re trying to do—get homosexuality away from our
children. ” I began to argue that the car coming down the street was
more likely to be a heterosexual male neighbor, or even daddy,
than a male homosexual or a lesbian. One woman stopped being
nice. “You’re a Je w , ” she said, “and probably a homosexual too. ” I
found m yself slowly being pushed farther and farther back against
the balcony railing. I kept trying to turn m yself around as we
talked, to pretend that my position in relation to the railing and the
fall of several hundred feet was not precarious; I kept talking with
them, lowering the threshold of confrontation, searching m y mind
for pacifist strategies that would enable me to maneuver away from
the railing by getting them to turn at least slightly toward it. T hey
kept advancing, pushing me closer and closer to the railing until
