# Letters to LR (Jan. 1981)

**URL:** <https://www.libertarianism.org/essays/letters-lr-jan-1981>

**By** Various Authors

**Published:** January 1, 1981

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“The sadness is not that the Republicans have repudiated the ERA, but that they have accepted so many of the premises of its proponents.”

## Women and Republicans

Joan Kennedy Taylor (September) views the Republican Party platform positions on the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion as a kind of systematic retrogression of the Party away from liberty: however, it, and her ruminations on its failings, indicate intellectual disarray more than anything else.

The ERA, for example, is not that single, abstract ban on unequal treatment under law that Ms. Taylor seems to think. The Republicans chose to affirm their support for what they (and most of the non-libertarian supporters of the ERA) believe to be its substance: equal pay for equal work; affirmative action; non-discrimination in extending credit; no discrimination against pregnant women or the mothers of small children (with perhaps the corollary right to provision of child care by employers). In other words, the panoply of state-enforced privileges that we have seen given to other traditionally disadvantaged groups in society. This is how many of the Congressthings who served at the time the amendment passed interpreted what they were about and, since judges will look to the legislative history of the amendment in construing its applicability, we may be sure that these pseudo-rights will be found, regardless of literal interpretation.

The sadness is not that the Republicans have repudiated the ERA, but that they have accepted so many of the premises of its proponents. Even conservative Republicans might reason that they can have all the good things “we are all for,” without taking away the discretion of insurance companies to give preferential rates on auto and life insurance or, without opening the way for drafting women, etc.

I wonder if the dichotomy between the interpretation other supporters have given ERA and her own has given Ms. Taylor pause. She might also ask herself: Why single out discrimination in law on the basis of sex at all for the object of a Constitutional amendment? Why not the Constitution’s permissive attitude toward bias with respect to race, religion, citizenship, sexual orientation, and age— none of which is forbidden to be used as the basis of discriminatory law? For example, under the category of age, there has been more discrimination in the U.S. than on the basis of sex, as in our treatment of children as chattels of their parents.

The underlying problem is that if one recognizes no distinction between legal and natural rights, or fails to see that others are confused, one is liable to misinterpret what is going on.

Thus, Ms. Taylor indicates that the “Human Life Amendment” supported by the Republicans would take away women’s right to control their own bodies, as if there were such a recognized right under law with respect to abortion. One need only read the _Roe v. Wade_ decision to see that the courts and the government are operating on the premise that they are balancing “compelling state interests” (not recognized by the Constitution) against the “right to privacy” of women (also not recognized by the Constitution). “Rights” constructed out of thin air tend to evaporate quickly, and are not subject to the test of contradiction. Hence, the Nazis felt free to outlaw abortion for certain groups of women, while mandating abortion and sterilization for others in pursuing compelling state objectives. Hence, some supporters of abortion are concerned with population growth and the size of the welfare rolls, not individual rights. Regardless of what Catholic judges once ruled, there is at present in the U.S. only a tentative legal right to abortion, which is not based on a judicially recognized absolute or natural right.

Ms. Taylor’s fear that guaranteeing the rights of the unborn would lead, in effect, to the creation of pregnancy police, an enlarged court apparatus, etc., is worth remarking. For, even in the case of born children we have not seen the establishment of agencies of surveillance, control, and punishment, even though the rights of millions of children are violated each year by their parents. Not only that, but children lack almost any guarantees, including due process. The goal of the therapeutic state, instead, is to rehabilitate those parents who physically and psychologically “abuse” their children, as if the parents were suffering under some compulsion to torture small animals, instead of committing aggression. Perhaps this is because our society holds that born children, like the unborn, are not “fully human”?

The question of rights (what they are, and who has them) is an important one, making it all the more regrettable that in her understanding of them Ms. Taylor seems not to have gone much beyond the Republican Party and Betty Ford.

JOE PAUL BARNETT Washington, DC

…The editorial by Joan Kennedy Taylor, “Where is Betty Ford now that they need her?” compelled me to make this response. There is no law in this country which subordinates a woman to a man unless she voluntarily marries and agrees to serve his pleasure. There is no law in this country which prevents a woman from taking whatever contraceptive measures her husband permits whenever she serves his pleasure.

How can Libertarians support a Constitutional amendment which not only is totally unnecessary but gives Congress “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article”? The relationship between man and woman is the most complex and intimate of all human relationships. To give the federal government power to regulate this relationship is the most unlibertarian measure imaginable.

As for abortion, the murder of the unborn child, a basic premise of Libertarian philosophy is renunciation of the initiation of force or violence. What can be a more unjustified initiation of force and violence against the most innocent of all individuals, the unborn baby, than abortion?

Ms. Taylor (I assume that she prefers that title) states that abortion was once a woman’s common law right. Slavery was once recognized under the common law, also. Our legal system has gone farther to guarantee liberty than any other, until it was perverted fifty years ago. It is long past time to extend the protection of life and liberty to the unborn. Libertarians should be in the forefront of the right to life movement.

Naturally, a woman has the right to defend herself. If the pregnancy would truly menace her life, she has a right to terminate it, but this right should be very carefully balanced by the realization that the second life cannot protect itself.

As I understand Libertarianism, it is a rational philosophy. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of feminism. By trying to unite the two movements in a forced, unnatural marriage, your editors are doing grave damage to the Libertarian movement.

I hope that you will renounce the force and violence and extension of governmental power which are inherent in the so-called Equal Rights Amendment and the related abortion movement and return to true Libertarian principles.

DAVID MACKO Solon, OH

## Taylor replies:

Although Mr. Barnett is correct in his observation that many non-libertarian supporters of the ERA assume that it is just another affirmative action measure, the long and heated and principled discussions that took place at the time Congress acted upon it show an opposite legislative history. In the three Congressional hearings held in May 1970, September 1970, and March and April 1971, every legal expert, whether testifying for or against the amendment, agreed that it did not address private discrimination but government action. The major opponents of the ERA at the time were labor unions and representatives of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor who championed protective labor legislation for women. That was the issue that united the amendment’s opponents then, and it is the specific reason that Ronald Reagan gave in his debate with Jimmy Carter for preferring legislation to an amendment.

All of the measures to outlaw private discrimination mentioned by Mr. Barnett are already the subject of federal legislation—no one in Congress or anywhere else has ever suggested that an ERA is necessary to legitimize them constitutionally. What ERA is necessary for is to invalidate the thousands of state and federal laws that discriminate against women not only by mandating special working conditions but in establishing domicile, in mandating unequal criminal sentences, and in home ownership, to name but a few areas. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the equal protection this fact in pretending that all that women want is the affirmative action which they are cynically willing to provide.

An article in _Ms._ in May 1976 about the conservative campaign against ERA ratification said, “A peculiar historical evolution has left ‘conservatives’ supporting protective units, the ‘radicals,’ in effect, advocating the free market. Classical economists would smile more sweetly on the supporters of the ERA than on its opponents.” The issue is government discrimination, primarily protective labor legislation; the ERA will restrain legislatures, which is what F.A. Hayek said is the purpose of a constitution, and that’s why legislators don’t want it.

If Mr. Macko is suggesting that the ERA is exclusively directed at regulating the relationship between the sexes, I hope I have shown that this is not the case. However, the state governments do presently regulate this relationship, by setting the conditions under which people may legally marry and divorce and cohabit, and many states invalidate any private marriage contract in addition to the one embodied in state law as being against “public policy” if it excuses the man from the duty of support, or the wife from the duty of providing sexual or other services.

Is Mr. Macko suggesting, by speaking of a woman’s “taking whatever contraceptive measures her husband permits whenever she serves his pleasure,” that men have the moral right to force their wives to bear children against their will? If so, I would emphatically disagree. As for abortion, the fundamental question, it seems to me, is who is to decide what may or may not be done to a woman’s body—the woman, or the state? I think that the right to abortion is like the right to suicide—a person may be wrong, and even immoral, in exercising it, but the right is inherent in our nature, and therefore should be legal. (I meant to argue from the position that a just legal system would make natural rights into legal rights—sorry if that wasn’t clear, Mr. Barnett. You are quite right that no court has recognized an unequivocal right of women over their own bodies.)

## A reader disagrees

Victoria Varga’s _Viva Scum_ \[August 1980\] voiced perhaps the first reaction of many at the thought of a hundred thousand Cubans escaping Castro’s tyranny. Good for them! They made it!

The second and third reactions are more troubling. I will boil them down a bit to two: the effect on the United States and the effect on Cuba.

Despite the disclaimer of the Florida banker who said, “Everyone said there was no room, no jobs, but things worked out well and they will work out again,” things are not working out well in Miami. It is another American prejudice that Americans have cornered the market on prejudice. They haven’t; the native Floridians are running into a xenophobia from the Cubans that stuns them.

No matter how many times the argument “No room, no jobs” has been used before (and not always with validity) it is becoming increasingly true. The fact that the boy had cried “Wolf!” before did not make the wolf any less real when it came and devoured the villagers. The wolf is on its way, and Americans sense it.

Varga takes note of the poll that projected 59 percent of Americans opposed to more immigration from Cuba—and lumps them with the Ku Klux Klan. Roper’s polls (in 1977 and 1980) showed a whopping 91 percent opposed to all illegal immigration, and 80 percent opposed to more legal immigration. It takes more than bigotry to get 91 percent of the American people on one side of an issue; that 91 percent cuts across too many class and cultural lines.

At least one of the reasons Americans are taking another look at the whole immigration question is the sheer numbers of people who want to come here. According to Freedom House, 70 percent of the world’s population is at least partially oppressed, and 35 percent of that 70 percent are under serious tyranny—military, religious or communist. Americans are simply too realistic to expect to solve the problem by importing people.

How, then, is the problem to be handled? What can we do with a foreign dictator? Fight another world war? Nobody wants that. A covert assassination by the CIA? Nobody really likes that idea, either.

The only real hope is a revolution (yes, just like the one that Castro led against Batista) with, perhaps, a little help from your friends. Thanks to that well-organized, independent boatlift, Castro now has a hundred thousand fewer dissidents to deal with . . . his position has been strengthened, as resistance to him within his own country has been immeasurably weakened.

America’s immigration policy—the most generous in the free world, by the way—has had the effect of contracting the free world, rather than expanding it. Who, after all, comes? the courageous, the skilled, the able-bodied. Who stays behind? The weak, the helpless, the frightened. The dictator grows bolder, because he can afford to—who is left to stop him?

SHARON LYNN Washington, DC

## Varga replies:

I am grateful to Sharon Lynn for bringing up the wider subject of immigration in her criticism of my Cuban editorial. If it is true that 80 percent of all Americans are against continued legal immigration, this does not mean either that they are right or, necessarily, that they are bigoted. It may only mean that

they are misinformed and afraid of change.

Peter Bauer, the British economist, in discussing underdeveloped countries, has said that with every mouth comes two hands. What he means is that people who are willing to work are not a burden to society, but a productive force that gives far more than it takes. They not only eat, they produce; they not only use government services, they pay for them many times over in the form of taxes.

The argument, “No room, no jobs,” is very nearly as untrue now as it was in the nineteenth century. Even if the entire population of the world moved to the U.S., we would only have a population more dense than Puerto Rico, but less dense than Bangladesh. But the entire population of the world would not move to the U.S. even if it could. It is sheer chauvinism to assume that all those in oppressed nations would prefer to live here. Not only the weak and the frightened, but also those with a great attachment to their homeland, would prefer to remain—possibly, as Ms. Lynn herself suggests, in order to fight against tyranny. In the case of Cuba, the absence of 100,000 dissidents might well help the cause of freedom in that country. The expatriates are now in a position to be an outside source of financial and psychological support for the movement toward revolution.

## A reader agrees

That was a Firstclass piece on the Criminal Code Reform Bill \[by Kathy Sharp, August 1980\].

NAT HENTOFF New York, NY

## Two views of The Empire

Concerning the film, _The Empire Strikes Back_, reviewed in _The Libertarian Review_ for August 1980 by David Brudnoy: the reasons that this film is considered to be so good is a most disturbing phenomenon of our society. It is filled with force and violence as well as frightening scenes of people nearly falling off planets, the cutting off of limbs, and dreadfully yucky creatures of sick colors.

As an art form, it is a mishmash of Tarzan, the Lost World, Buck Rogers, and Hopalong Cassidy. In short, it is a rehash of all the old has-been, worn out ideas of the good/bad conflict which accounts for much mental illness and psychological malaise. Your review was belabored and too long.

The film is actually a thinly disguised Christianity with a new face. “The Force” of course is the old concept of God—the father figure in the sky. Excalibur (King Arthur’s Knights) is represented in the glowing swords with which Our Hero and Darth Vader duel. Is this dreadful nightmare of a film preparing us for an extra-terrestrial life after the profit kings have destroyed this earth with their unconcerned pollution of water, air and soil? The popularity of this film clearly demonstrates the collective thoughtlessness of the American people. This is, indeed, a sad day for civilization.

MOLLY GILL St. Petersburg, FL

Bravo! Thank you for the best-yet review of the _Star Wars_ movies. I really do appreciate your taking the time and space in _The Libertarian Review_ to state so well the obvious importance of heroes.

I share your evaluation fully, and your open-eyed view of the similarities between the works of Rand and of Lucas is a great relief in the face of the weird justifications other reviewers have offered for the popularity of the _Star Wars_ movies.

Real heroes deserve to succeed in the end! And as long as there still are good guys in this real world, they (we) deserve the joy and celebration provided by the romantic and heroic visions of _Star Wars_.

Again, thanks for your topnotch review.

REX FOWLER Los Angeles, CA