When New Yorkers go to the polls this year to choose our next President, the back of our ballot will have six ballot proposals. The fringe left of the NYC ruling class is pushing hard for the first one.
“Prop 1,” as it is known, is being heralded by its supporters as necessary to protect abortion in New York, but the right to access abortion became the law of New York State before I was born, and the half-century-old protection was further strengthened and expanded in 2019. The subsequent overturning of Roe v. Wade, which changed absolutely nothing about legality of abortions in NYS, is a cudgel that Democrats refuse to put down.
They are using the cover of motivate-the-base “abortion access protection” to rush through a radical, rights-altering change to the State Constitution. Few New Yorkers know about Prop 1–or exactly what the imposition of extreme left-wing identity politics will mean in our daily lives.
Prop 1 enumerates 11 new categories of protected rights to be shoe-horned into the State Constitution. And this dishonest, sleight-of-hand change will inflame many of the most contentious issues of the day, particularly how the “Gender Identity” category will violate the rights of women, girls and parents.
For instance, the Amendment paves the way for State actors, such as teachers and school counselors, to practice the modern American voodoo of convincing impressionable young people that they were “born in the wrong bodies” and conceal the resulting in-school “social transition” from parents under color of constitutional law.
Same-sex girls sports? Gone. The boys who say they are girls will have a constitutional right to replace the New York girls who have trained for, and earned a spot on, the girls’ team or podium since gender identity is included in the laundry list of rights. Men who claim “women status” through their gender identity will have the constitutional right to be everywhere women go for safety, privacy, achievement, and dignity–including bathrooms, locker rooms, domestic violence shelters and correctional facilities.
How exactly does one define gender identity you might ask? The drafters and supporters of this novel Constitutional right don’t bother to say, but the Amendment attempts to do the same thing in New York what Biden-Harris attempted to do Federally in their Title XI rewrite. Federal courts all over the country have enjoined that Biden-Harris Title IX re-write precisely because their ideologically driven mad dash to enshrine gender identity in Federal Law blatantly deprives actual women of long-standing rights and protections in our existing laws.
Most Americans oppose the radical left gender identity politics that force our daughters to compete against boys for a spot on the girls team or shower in a girls locker room without naked boys. There is an unresolvable conflict between girls’ rights and boy’s demand to compete and shower in those previously single sex spaces while forcing girls to pretend they are “trans girls.”
Prop 1 made it to the ballot in dizzying time, with multiple procedural checks and balances blatantly skipped over so that Albany lawmakers could vote on the proposal the same day it was introduced. Following up on this blitzkrieg approach to lawmaking, a shamelessly partisan mainstream media is doing everything it can to suppress what should be a public education campaign and genuine conversation about the inevitable violation of rights this Amendment sets up.
The Constitution of New York State currently protects against discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed and religion–all of which sounds about right to most New Yorkers. But if you walked down the street and asked a thousand New Yorkers what would make their life better right now–you would almost certainly hear about inflation and crime before you heard “add sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, reproductive healthcare and autonomy to the Constitution.”
The radical leftist wish list of intentionally broad, vaguely defined constitutional rights undermines and renders meaningless the existing rights of women. That is bad enough, but prop 1 gets worse.
Democrats wanted to drive complacent voters to the polls with an abortion Amendment, but they got greedy and added in the kitchen sink of identity politics. Embedding highly politicized and controversial talking points in the Constitution of our state is a dangerous game that hurts the very democracy Democrats claim to want to defend. If Prop 1 is approved, and the so-called Equal Right Amendment is “enshrined” in the New York State Constitution, New Yorkers will quickly realize they have been sold a bill of goods and are years–and many political battles–away from restoring the pre-Prop 1 status quo, or as is more likely, eking out a compromise to blunt the worst of the effects.
Gender identity does not merit protection in the constitution. Women’s hard-fought and hard-won rights–which took centuries to achieve, should not be tossed aside for the identity politics du jour which insists, with increasing militancy, that “transwomen are women” when in fact they are men–some of whom are good people who have labored for years with a debilitating gender dysphoria that compels them to deny their biological reality and try to live as women–and some of whom are perverts, creeps, and groomers–all of whom will have their women cosplaying elevated to a constitutional right which wipes out real women’s rights that real women fought, campaigned and politicked for, against real oppression, misogyny and patriarchy.
New Yorkers deserve, and small-d democratic values demand, an honest, transparent, data-, science- and definition-informed discussion of each category, and an unrushed, robust conversation about what the creation and inclusion of brand new constitutional rights entails for the impacted citizenry. What necessitates each category’s creation or elevation to a Constitutional right? What are the trade-offs? Are they worth it?
What we are getting instead is political grandstanding at its most destructive. Concealed in this “Equal Rights” Amendment are sloppy and sneaky changes to our State constitution, and a rending of the fabric of social trust that a people need to participate meaningfully in true democracy.
Maud Maron is a New York City public school parent and president of the consulting firm ThirdRail.
