For a while now, the consensus has been that “woke” is fizzling out after peaking in 2020. There is some truth to this. Kamala Harris has declined to foreground her identity in the presidential campaign. Liberal publications, once fearful of young woke staffers, are telling them to take a hike. Democrats have memory-holed “defund the police” and sidelined anti-Israel zealots in their own ranks. Corporations are downsizing bloated “DEI” departments. Free speech is back.
But New York Democrats apparently haven’t gotten the memo. And if they manage to fool enough voters into supporting Proposition One today, they will turn the page back to the insanity of 2020, enshrining that era’s race and gender dogmas in the state constitution.
If you’re a religious believer or a parent, beware: Proposition One, the “Equal Rights Amendment” on New York’s ballot, empowers activists to target houses of worship, religious schools, and other private institutions that refuse to bend the knee to gender ideology, including pronoun diktats and the invasion of women’s sports and intimate spaces by biological men. The measure could also disempower parents of all backgrounds—religious or secular—from having a say over their children being put on puberty blockers or subjected to irreversible transgender surgery.
Put another way: Under the guise of “anti-discrimination,” Proposition One discriminates against parents and faith institutions. Incredibly, the measure encourages judges and politicians to break older anti-discrimination rules—protecting familiar categories like race, sex, age, and creed—if these get in the way of woke activism.
Voters reading the benign summary that appears on the ballot wouldn’t have a clue about any of this, however. That’s what makes it so devious. The summary says that the measure would simply ban “unequal treatment based on ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes, as well as reproductive healthcare and autonomy. The amendment allows laws to prevent or undo past discrimination.”
New Yorkers detest unfair treatment. The authors of Proposition One are hoping to take advantage of this righteous attitude to smuggle some of today’s most extreme ideological tendencies into the state’s fundamental law.
The language of the proposed amendment contains two sections. The first adds a host of new categories, including the bit about “pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes, as well as reproductive healthcare and autonomy.” That’s supposedly aimed at shoring up abortion rights. But since abortion rights are in no way under threat in New York, the real purpose seems to be to use the new “anti-discrimination” amendment to punish anyone who opposes progressives’ abortion maximalism. Could a Catholic or Muslim school uphold pro-life views among staff without running afoul of the new amendment?
Then there are the gender additions, which are notably framed as “gender identity” and “gender expression.” Adding these terms to the state constitution amounts to giving activists a blank check to bully New Yorkers who treat gender as a bodily, biological category, rather than one based purely on subjective mental states. The inane pronoun rules that are the norm among progressives could be coercively enforced in schools, including private and religious ones. Religious and private schools would be barred from requiring students to wear uniforms conforming to their sex.
The legal protection of women’s sports and private spaces—something an earlier generation of feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg fought for—would give way to the demands of biological boys and men. And given current progressive orthodoxy, the new regime could deprive parents of the right to have a say over whether and at what age their kids change their gender.
Which brings us to the second section—the one that goes completely unmentioned in the summary that appears on ballots. This provides that “nothing in this section shall invalidate or prevent the adoption of any law, regulation, program, or practice that is designed to prevent or dismantle discrimination on the basis of a characteristic listed in this section.”
Get it? Older anti-discrimination laws can be thrown out the window, if activist judges or politicians claim to be protecting one of the newfangled categories. So if you’re, say, an Asian New Yorker whose children are disadvantaged by a racially discriminatory law that gives preference to other groups—well, tough luck. You have no recourse to the older anti-discrimination laws if activists claim that their new form of discrimination is necessary to “prevent or dismantle discrimination.” Older rules protecting people of faith can likewise be erased in the name of advancing the new gender norms.
Progressive activists are trying to take advantage of ambiguity to have their way, but New Yorkers should have no doubt: Voting “No” is the only way to save our most cherished ideals.
Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact magazine and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc.
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