“THE ERA!!!”
Caroline,
Susan, and I visited DC last week as part of our Baltimore/Shenandoah Valley/DC
tour, which ended with Caroline and I doing a dialogue sermon on the
Palestinian woman challenging Jesus in Matthew 15:21-28. In our sermon we had referred to her as a
Gentile woman (see my previous blog), and I am grateful for my long-time friend
Ed Loring offering the suggestion to see her as Palestinian in these days,
which she was.
Though I
have grown cynical and jaded in my old age (especially in these days of the
Trumpster), I still do get a thrill by being on the Mall in DC. Although we are so far short of the central
idea of “equality” that is part of the heart of the American experiment, I
still have some hope in the possibilities.
I have this hope because so many people, who were intended by the
framers to be shut out of the circle of equality, have heard their names called
and have responded, refusing to be defined by the white male heritage that
continues to seek to shut them out.
One of
those places of equality, just off the Mall in DC, is the Belmont-Paul National
Women’s Monument. It is actually a house
which commemorates and notes the work of the women and men who enabled the 19th
Amendment to pass in 1920. Yesterday was
the 98th anniversary of the adoption of that amendment, and we give
thanks for a legion of women who led the way.
It started almost from the European beginnings of this nation, and it
was kick-started by the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. We had the blessing of visiting Seneca Falls
in 2009, while Susan was living in Westfield, NY. From Lucretia Mott to Elizabeth Cady Stanton
to Susan B. Anthony to Alice Paul to Ida Wells to Carrie Catt to Mary Church
Terrell and many others, the Belmont-Paul house is a story of perseverance,
ingenuity, and endurance in seeking to expand the idea of equality to include
more than propertied white men.
We were
also reminded at the Belmont-Paul house that we are now just one state short of
ratifying the ERA. I thought that was
over and done with (and defeated), but most scholars believe that, with Nevada
and Illinois recently ratifying the ERA, there is just one state left. Thirteen states have yet to ratify, and to no
one’s surprise, nine of those states are in the old Confederate States of
America (only Tennessee has ratified it out of the Confederacy, and they later
rescinded it, but that doesn’t seem to count!)
The other four are Missouri (a slave state), Oklahoma, Utah and
Arizona. Of the states left to ratify
the ERA, 77% of them held slaves, and it doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to see
the intersection between holding people as slaves and oppressing women. So, if
you are like me and live in non-ratifying state, let’s get to work! We hope that Stacey Abrams will be elected
governor of Georgia, and that will be a help to many things, including the
ratification of the ERA.
There were
other signs of hope for us in these difficult days. One was our visit with my “adoptive” father
Gay Wilmore in DC. He will be 97 in December, and he was sharp in our visit. He was remembering many of the struggles to
break the hold of neo-slavery in the old Confederacy and to obtain the right to
vote for those of African descent in the USA.
That right is always under peril, as we saw last week in the attempt to
close polling places in majority-black Randolph County in my state of
Georgia. We white men see the
demographics coming, and we are taking measures to blunt them, with all kinds
of schemes to limit the voting power of people of color. We talked with Gay about that, and it was
good to hear him urge us to work and stay strong, even in and especially these
days where we have a President who wants to be king.
It’s on us
now, and I’ll share more of our tour from the National Postal Museum to the
National Portrait Gallery to the Museum of the American Indian to Charles Town but
for now, be certain that you are registered to vote and that your friends,
colleagues and neighbors do the same.
These monuments remind us of how difficult it is to break into the
circle of equality and of how many white men are working to kick so many people
out of that circle. Let our lives be a
litany of widening the circle, not shrinking it.
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