The ERA: good for men, good for women, bad for feminists.

. The response to 'special interest feminism' should not be 'special interest masculinism'. We can do better than that. Men and women NEED one another.

The struggle for equality is a struggle for hearts and minds. Feminists are facing a backlash because they are overreaching

There's also the Titanic-style 'children and women first'. Would that be repelled under full gender equality? ;-)

We don't come from Mars and Venus. We're one species.

maxdancona wrote:

The gender inequality in sentencing is across the board. For example, women receive the same preferential sentencing in the case of vehicular homicide while intoxicated (a crime that has nothing to do with gender).

You have some actual statistics on that you'd care to post?

Women may have gained some kind of recognition in the court for violence committed after years of abuse through the creation of the legal category 'battered wife syndrome', but this does not always mean justice is served. Women who kill violent partners often end up with harsher sentences than men who have killed their partners without such abuse. Campaign group Justice for Women have examples of such inequality in sentencing on their website.

Compare the example of Brian Steadman, jailed for just three years in 1995 for killing his wife by hitting her 13 times with a hammer after pleading diminished responsibility because his wife constantly nagged him, with the example of Zoorah Shah who had experienced 20 years of sexual and physical violence from her partner - who then began to abuse her eldest daughter - and was given 20 years for his murder.

Justice for Women tells us she remains in prison.

There are lots of other examples here which illustrate that women are not allowed to be violent, the reasons for their violence are rarely taken into account and the idea of what is acceptable provocation in the law is gender-biased.

'Nagging' is seen as acceptable provocation; years of abuse is not.

Another example of a harsher sentence being meted out to women for lesser crimes of violence is that of the Scott sisters in the US who were given a double life sentence each for an armed robbery in which no one was killed or injured and less then $12 was stolen (see the Huffington Post for a quick overview of this case). The fact these women are black adds another dimension to the reasons for this extremely harsh sentence being served.

The other issue is conscription. No one has commented on whether the next time that there is a draft, young women should be forced to fight in war along with the young men.

Should women be drafted?

Civilian leaders who have never served lack the institutional feel, and knowledge, that can help prevent disastrous adventures such as the Iraq War.

Two weeks before he was to graduate from Yale, George Walker Bush stepped into the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Field outside Houston and announced that he wanted to sign up for pilot training.

It was May 27, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Bush was 12 days away from losing his student deferment from the draft at a time when Americans were dying in combat at the rate of 350 a week. The unit Bush wanted to join offered him the chance to fulfill his military commitment at a base in Texas. It was seen as an escape route from Vietnam by many men his age, and usually had a long waiting list.

Bush had scored only 25 percent on a "pilot aptitude" test, the lowest acceptable grade. But his father was then a congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics.

If there were a draft, the male death toll would still probably be higher, since men would fill more combat role, on account of their superior physical strength.