My last post said Trump’s honest is good for a recovering racist America. The same is almost true for sexism. America is sexist. Perhaps the next step is to become a recovering sexist country.

A week ago, one of my posts quoted Congressman Lou Gohmert in Texas, a socially-ultra conservative. He recently voted against a bill intended to promote the recruitment of women scientists. He said:

“women were created for one thing and one thing alone,” … “Women are beautiful creatures, no doubt about that. We marry them, we look after them, we provide for them and we love them, but that does not mean they are the same as us. It is the job of a woman to stay at home, to maintain the household, to bear children and look after them after they’re born. Nowhere in the scriptures does it say that women should be chasing after fancy titles and knowledge. The only knowledge they need is the one we men allow them to have.”

Trump is known for his appreciation for women. Well, not the ones he deems ugly. Or fat. To those women, he’s demeaning, insulting.

Gohmert wasn’t disrespectful to any particular woman. He’s just a polite sexist. He’s insulting to every woman.

America is a sexist country

America is sexist. Parts are not sexist. Parts, like Gohmert’s Texas, are very sexist. Some evangelical Christians interpret the Bible as justifying the inferiority of women. And with good reason. Women were property for millennia. It’s not that they were treated like property, it’s that, to most people, they were property. To most people, that was fact, not opinion.

In America, women were granted the right to vote in 1919, 145 years after America declared itself to be an independent nation, 55 years after slavery officially ended. Culture is slow to change. Most Americans, most humans, are too stupid to embrace new concepts quickly. Many can’t see the wisdom of them at all, like Gohmert.

The 1960’s saw the beginning of the end of legal racism in the US, about 95 years after slavery ended. It was a difficult time. Racist assholes fought for their right to discriminate. They fought hard for the right to deny others rights.

By that timeline, we should be seeing the end of legal sexism about now, 96 years after women were given the right to vote. By this timeline, 1970, when Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, was too early. Yet it was close. But over the next decade, not quite enough states ratified it, and in 1980, the Republican party withdrew its support.

Should America become a recovering sexist country?

If Hillary Clinton becomes president, probably we should try to pass the ERA again. Currently, America is a sexist country. If we can pass it, we could move to the next phase, being a recovering sexist country.

Do we want to do this? Gohmert doesn’t. Many men think feminism is sexist- they’re still in denial. They have some notion that sexism is bad, but they haven’t moved on to the stage of admitting they’re sexist. That’s okay. They need time to adjust, and more mothers and colleagues and daughters, and enlightened men, to work on them.

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