It's become fashionable among the "elite" in Washington and on college campuses to decry the U.S. Constitution as sexist against women.
These people argue that because the Framers didn't mention a woman's right to vote or hold federal office, the Constitution as a whole is fundamentally flawed. Our founding document doesn't deserve respect and admiration, and the Supreme Court should feel free to re-interpret it to align with the times.
But that argument is itself fundamentally flawed. As Prof. Rob Natelson expertly argues in the Epoch Times, that line of thinking ignores both history and the text of the Constitution. New Jersey allowed women to vote, for example, and the Constitution never barred women either from voting or from holding federal office.
On the contrary, Natelson writes, "the document’s framers carefully avoided sex-based tests for voting or office-holding, just as they avoided tests based on race, property, or religion."
The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention were consciously writing for the ages. They surely realized that female suffrage could spread beyond New Jersey. Politics being what it is, the power to vote would encourage women to run for political office as well. The framers, therefore, made the document agnostic on the subject of gender. Any restrictions based on sex would have to be imposed at the state level, because the Constitution didn’t impose them.
The records of the convention show that gender neutrality was the dominant assumption from its early days. The Virginia Plan, the outline used to kick off the debates, was gender-neutral. Judge William Paterson’s competing New Jersey Plan followed his state’s basic law by referring to participants in public affairs as “citizens,” “inhabitants,” and “persons.” Only once in the New Jersey Plan did “man” or “men” appear, and that was in the phrase “body of men” to describe a presumably armed band of men defying federal law.
Click here to read Prof. Natelson's full historical analysis.
Socialists seeking to dismantle our country will do everything they can to discredit the Constitution and the men who wrote it. That's why we must shore up our founding principles, and the best way to do that is via a Convention of States.
An Article V Convention of States is called and controlled by the states and has the power to propose constitutional amendments. But under the Convention of States Resolution (passed so far by 15 states), the Convention doesn't have the power to propose amendments that remake the Constitution. Rather, these amendments will restore the principles of fiscal responsibility and limited federal power the Framers enshrined in our founding document.
Amendments proposed at a Convention of States can once and for all limit the power, scope, and jurisdiction of the federal government. Amendments can also limit the amount of money Congress can spend, which will forever stop the socialist agenda from becoming a reality.
In their wisdom, the Framers gave us a method to propose and ratify amendments to the Constitution. Some of those amendments, like women's suffrage, were necessary to give power and dignity to all Americans. Today, we need amendments that limit federal power, shrink the federal coffers, and mandate term limits on federal officials. Washington will never propose these amendments, but We the People can with an Article V Convention of States.
