Speaking of Gender and Marriage...

Test question

Please select the answer which best describes the following passage:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.


(A.) Fucking right

(B.) Wait... why isn't that a law already?

(C.) Wow, that's a really "dumb idea."


If you answered (C.) to the above, the University of Washington is interested in granting you an honorary degree for your services to the cause of patriarchy.

Link goes to an interview with arch-anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, a woman so androcentrist that what she really deserves from Washington U is an honorary penis. The text is from the Equal Rights Amendment, the American constitutional amendment which would grant full legal equality to men and women in the U.S., if it hadn't been rejected every year it was proposed since 1920. Schlafly has spent a good chunk of her long political career opposing the amendment, which, in her words, "was a dumb idea in the first place."

The interview also contains a few other nuggets from Schlafly, who apparently believes that once women have married, they're not allowed to refuse sex to their husbands - and if they do, their husbands are allowed to "rape" them. I use quotation marks because Schlafly says it isn't rape at all, and that getting married is equivalent to giving consent in perpetuity.

In a way I suppose it's not surprising that women of the religious right like Schlafly oppose the Equal Rights Amendment - it was, after all, first proposed by a Quaker activist, and the political views of Quakers and conservative Christians usually go together like water and oil.

The Church of the Orange Sky calls upon all universities to forestall this ludicrous and demeaning practice of granting "honourary degrees." It is a holdover from medieval simony and should be treated as such.