More Feminist Nonsense

I agree with one of Charlene LaVoie's major points in her December 21 article, "America's Bill of Rights— An Unfinished Story," that we must constantly be working to enforce the rights protected by law. But her statement that the Constitution as originally written "was a deeply flawed document despite the inclusion of the Bill of Rights" is a serious misreading of history and of the purpose of the Constitution. It was this "flawed" Constitution that provided the mechanisms to achieve the reforms that Attorney LaVoie says were so badly needed. It was also this same "flawed" Constitution that set up a federal system of government so that states could free slaves and grant women the right to vote long before the Constitution was amended to do those things. Charlene LaVoie makes the same mistake that most liberals and progressives make: they look at the Constitution not as a basic structure of government but as the source of rights and freedoms. In a democratic republic our freedom is best served by having people in office who believe in freedom and will not allow, or at least who will work against, encroachments by the government.

Attorney LaVoie also made a patently false statement, that the Constitution and Bill of Rights as originally written "did not apply to women." Is she saying that women did not have the right to a jury trial? Or the benefit of habeas corpus? Or the right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures? Or the right to choose their own religion? Or the right to pick up a musket and shoot a rapist? Even black slaves, when accused of a criminal act, had the right to a jury trial! And the suffragettes from the time of Susan B. Anthony certainly had no problem meeting in conventions and speaking their minds. Harriet Beecher Stowe was not prohibited from publishing Uncle Tom's Cabin. If she tried to sell it in the South, she might have been arrested, but not because she was a woman.

Also, nothing in the original Constitution limits its benefits to males. If a woman could pull it off politically, there was nothing in the Constitution that prohibited her from being elected to Congress or being appointed to federal office. The United States Constitution never prohibited women from voting. It was the states that determined voting rights. The Constitution provided for that, but the Constitution did not stand in the way of the woman's vote. During the Jacksonian era, the right to vote was extended to many white men who did not have it in 1789. Before the end of the 19th century, several Western states granted women the right to vote. In 1916, several years before the Nineteenth Amendment, a Republican woman from Montana, Jeanette Rankin, became the first woman elected to Congress. Women have had the vote since the 1920 election, but we have not yet come even close to electing a woman president. That is not because of the Constitution. That is simply politics.