Cast Off the Shackles of Yesterday

New Drive Afoot to Pass Equal Rights Amendment

The above article is from the 3/28 Washington Post and is about a new drive to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA. To date, women are not guaranteed equality with men in the Constitution.

I wanted to briefly address this paragraph:

In the 1970s, Schlafly and others argued that the ERA would lead to women being drafted by the military and to public unisex bathrooms. Today, she warns lawmakers that its passage would compel courts to approve same-sex marriages and deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows.

For starters, an ERA should make women should eligible for military draft. Even if the military continues to refuse to put women on the front lines, they can still serve invaluably in support functions, like as trained medical staff. And sacrifices which are expected of men can and should be expected of women, assuming that women have been granted the same privileges as men.

Second, the issue of possibly being forced to use unisex bathrooms (and who would want them so badly they would use their constitutional right as a basis for suing for unisex bathrooms is beyond me) pales in comparison to the fact that women are not guaranteed equal pay for equal work or equal consideration for promotions.

We'll skip over the same-sex marriage business, as I think it has been discussed enough in this blog for everyone to know how I feel about it. I'm not even sure that the argument is reasonable, though I suppose I could petition that my right to marry a woman should be equal to a man's right to marry a woman, and that a man's right to marry a man should be equal to a woman's right to marry a man. But any judge could say that everyone in society has the right to marry a person of the opposite sex, so there's no sex-based descrimination.

Finally, equality between the sexes wouldn't mean that widows and housewives don't get support. It would mean that widowers and househusbands do. We now live in an era where the vast majority of women work and men are beginning to take the option to stay at home with the kids. So we need to worry about men whose wives make more money than they do as much as we worry about women who are supported by paychecks made out to their husbands.

True equality guarantees that nobody gets left behind.

Movie Review: Fast Food Nation

On Friday my Father and I watched Fast Food Nation, a recent delivery from Netflix. This movie very much held my attention for the first 80 mintues. The last 39 were iffy, but then my movie threshhold only tends to last for 80 minutes anyway. Hence my preference for children's movies. Anyway, this movie was good. I've recently come to recognize the brilliance of Richard Linklater. Whether it's because he's a good director or he picks good topics for movies (or a combination of the two), his movies are intense and thought-provoking. Fast Food Nation is a fictional adaptation of Eric Shlosser's investigative book of the same name. It chronicles the effect that fast food production has on immigrant laborers, family ranchers, and the quality of our food. A lot of the information has been covered to some degree in this blog. However, the movie will sell it in a way that I never could. It doesn't pull punches. There were a number of times when I had to close my eyes in horror, fearing to watch something horrible happen to a factory worker or animal. And horrible things did happen. As they do happen every day in real life. The movie also shows what happens when good people fail to educate themselves, when bad people fail to care, when good people get educated but feel constrained into doing the wrong thing anyway. Which is why I beg you, dear readers, to get educated, to keep caring, to not let yourself get convinced that doing wrong is the only way to survive in this world.

Review: "This Film Not Yet Rated"

This past weekend I watched This Film Not Yet Rated, a documentary on the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) rating system and rating panel. Certain aspects of the documentary were interesting and spoke to deeper prejudices of American society. The academy is stricter with sexuality, particularly "deviant" sexuality (and conversations about sexuality)than violence, homosexual relationships than heterosexual relationships, female sexuality than male sexuality. They are also hypocritical, fail to follow their own protocols for rater eligibility, and frequently are more generous with studio productions than independent film productions.

What I found less relevant was the frequent bandying about of the word "censorship." For one thing, no matter what rating the MPAA gives a film, this rating is in no way a public ban on the film. Though many theaters refuse to show NC-17 rated films, this is a decision of the theaters, not the MPAA. The other issue is that the MPAA describes the goal of its rating system as a guide for parents deciding what is appropriate for their children. This means that yes, a documentary on soldiers in Iraq that features violence, sexuality, and prolific use of the "F" word, should not be rated for a general audience, regardless of the fact that it is all unscripted footage. Now, it probably does not deserve the NC-17 rating, as most teenagers are developed enough to be educated on political issues, and probably coarsened enough to know profanity anyway. Especially if they have a parent with them.

The movie also featured interviews which talk about the fact that in order to receive military assistance, the film has to be approved, from screenplay to final production, by the military. Once again the spectre of totalitarian censorship was raised. However, I find the idea that the military owes assistance to film makers, particularly of fictional films, to be ridiculous. Frankly, I'm more upset that the military gives assistance at all, given the expense of this stuff, than that they demand editorial approval over movies.

So, basically, much of this documentary was interesting, but it was a very self-involved investigation which was mostly relevant to the film industry, rather than the movie-going public.