Dark Money, Anti-Feminist 'Women's Groups' Using Anti-Trans Scaremongering to Oppose The ERA

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- A marcher holds a sign that says "ERA NOW" during the Woman's March in Manhattan, New York City, Jan. 18, 2020.
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- Dark Money “Women’s Groups” Are Using Anti-Trans Scaremongering to Oppose ERA, Truthout, March 22, 2022.

March 22 marks 50 years since Congress voted to send the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would outlaw sex discrimination, to the states for ratification. By 1977, the ERA appeared to be a done deal with bipartisan support and 35 of the necessary 38 state ratifications to amend the Constitution. Then the anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly mobilized right-wing women to oppose the ERA, playing a major role in stalling the amendment.

Schlafly passed away in 2016, but her anti-feminist legacy very much lives on through “Eagle Forum” and other women’s groups funded by dark money — funding sources whose donors are kept secret from the public but are used for significant expenditures intended to influence elections, judicial nominations, ballot measures, and legislation. The ability to traffic in dark money gives corporations and the wealthy undue sway in politics with little accountability.

Today, Eagle Forum and right-wing women’s groups like Concerned Women for America (CWA) and Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) continue to oppose the ERA as well as the Equality Act, a bill that would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Some of Schlafly’s arguments, such as “the career most women want is marriage, home, husband, and children,” as she said in 1982, are not likely to resonate with most women in 2022. Instead, today’s right-wing women’s groups have adopted a new tactic: using attacks on transgender people — the GOP’s new boogeyman — to try to undermine support for the ERA and the Equality Act.

The Origins of the Anti-Feminist Women’s Groups Fighting the ERA...

- More, https://truthout.org/articles/dark-money-womens-groups-are-using-anti-trans-scaremongering-to-oppose-era/
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- John Birch Society (JBS): The John Birch Society is an American right-wing political advocacy group. Founded in 1958, it is anti-communist, supports social conservatism, and is associated with ultraconservative, radical right, or far-right politics. The society's founder, businessman Robert W. Welch Jr. (1899–1985), developed an organizational infrastructure of nationwide chapters in December 1958. The society rose quickly in membership and influence, and was controversial for its promotion of conspiracy theories.

In the 1960s the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review pushed for the JBS to be exiled to the fringes of the American right. More recently Jeet Heer has argued in The New Republic that while the organization's influence peaked in the 1970s, "Bircherism" and its legacy of conspiracy theories have become the dominant strain in the conservative movement. Politico has asserted that the JBS began making a resurgence in the mid-2010s, while the JBS has argued that it shaped the modern conservative movement and especially the Trump administration.

Writing in The Huffington Post, Andrew Reinbach called the JBS "the intellectual seed bank of the right." Originally based in Belmont, Massachusetts, the John Birch Society is now headquartered in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, a suburb of Appleton, Wisconsin, with local chapters throughout the US. It owns American Opinion Publishing, which publishes the magazine The New American...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society

[Faux pas]

1. Kickin' with disgust!

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2. IK, making people like Bircher Phyllis Shafly proud!

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4. Lol

it's really sad when you're hoping to make dead people proud, huh?

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5. Dark money 'Womens' & 'Parents' groups are quite active

with many issues now, books in schools, etc.

[IngridsLittleAngel]

6. Yep. Some people are being used... Maybe gladly so.

While TERFs think they're being tough and eliminating "phony women" with the wrong "chromosomes" and "biology", they all fail to get that some of the very people convincing them that trans women are worse than the devil are using them to hold back the ERA and rights for all.

But go on... Bully the trans community - especially women. Tell us Lia Thomas is worse than Drumpf. All the while, Phyllis Schlafly smiles up at you.