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From: mfs@mhuxr.UUCP (SIMON)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Will the REAL women's movement please stand up?
Message-ID: <264@mhuxr.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 28-Feb-85 08:27:41 EST
Article-I.D.: mhuxr.264
Posted: Thu Feb 28 08:27:41 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Mar-85 20:16:04 EST
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Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
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A while ago, Ken Arndt posted excerpts from a Wall Street Journal article
on the Judy Goldsmith-Jerry Falwell debate. In the spirit of fairness, let
me post this rebuttal by Geoffrey Stokes in the 2/26 issue of the Village
Voice:

"What with THE SILENT SCREAM being shown at the White House and Jerry Falwell
debating Judy Goldsmith at the National Press Club, the various Washington
big-domers were much concerned about abortion last week. Even the [WSJ]'s
Suzanne Garment, who bragged that she'd 'strenuously avoided the subject' during
her seven years in the news business, at first threatened to break cover,
but rapidly went to ground in an unusually dense thicket of punditry. For her, the
Falwell-Goldsmith occasioned not thoughts about abortion, but some feminist-
bashing pseudothought.

"Having duly noted Falwell's 'equal rights for the unborn' rhetoric, Garment
said of this 'language of rights and constitutionalism': 'We have heard it in t
the civil rights movement, then in the calls for affirmative action, then
expanded to cover additional ethnic minorities, then stretched over the whole
female half of the population, then spread out to cover foreign policy, then dug g
downward to give us the movement for animal rights.'

"Further she said, 'This language of rights is the language of nonnegotiability.
It refuses to split the difference or shave the edge of issues, on the grounds
that rights are sacred and not to be abridged no mater what the cost.' And who is
to blame for this? Goldsmith & Co. 'The movement she now leads was one of the
forces in our society that worked so successfully to elevate the language of
rights and drive out the more modest language of balance and prudence.' As a
result, Goldsmith 'may now find it especially difficult to get even her
modest wishes, for the language of unabridgeable rights has little use for the
old, discarded object of its affections once it has found a new valentine.'
And of course that would serve her - and all those pushy feminists - right.

"This is, precisely, clever columnizing - the offbeat twist, the timely use
of 'valentine' - but it's also nonsense. First, that so-called 'language of
rights', for instance, was hardly invented by Martin Luther King or Betty
Friedan (something in the Declaration of Independence about all men being
'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights' comes to mind).
And second, it is hardly the language of nonnegotiability. Both before and
after the rekindling of feminism, much of the national business has involved
mediating between competing rights: free press vs fair trial; free association
vs antitrust laws; free speech vs the right to privacy, and so on. It is the
genius of this country that compromises between such rights have regularly
been worked out, without denying - as Garment apparently would - the notion
of 'rights' itself.

All in all, Garment's column is a splendid though inadvertent demonstration that
her 'modest language of balance and prudence' can be every bit as slippery
as the rights-oriented rhetoric she disdains"

The above reprinted without permission.

Marcel Simon