Conversation with Erika Bachiochi

[Music] hi my name is fran mayer and welcome to another napa institute webcast erica bakiyaki is a scholar specializing in feminist legal theory catholic social teaching and sexual ethics she received her law degree from boston university school of law and currently serves as a fellow with the ethics and public policy center in washington dc and also as a senior fellow at the abigail adams institute in cambridge massachusetts where she founded and directs the wall stone craft project her latest book the rights of women reclaiming a lost vision will be published by the university of notre dame press later this year and she and her husband live in the boston area with their seven children erica thanks for being with us today thank you fran it's an honor to be with you you know i i had the pleasure of um reading some of your book uh thanks for sending the text and it really is terrific i i strongly endorse it it's an excellent piece of work it's not just that the content is so strong and so interesting because a lot of people haven't heard about the material that you deal with but i found the style very accessible so and that's hard so congratulations on that thank you um if you had to describe the purpose and substance of the work that you do in in your scholarly work erica uh how would you describe it in a you know a few words as anyone who knows me i guess it's hard for me to do much in a few words my book is a very long book um but i guess what i've tried to do um is to engage feminist legal literature kind of on its own terms while while trying to correct kind of wrong-headed views about equality rights and freedom um and sort of use the resources of i think um sort of older understandings of equality rights and freedom and especially when it comes to the kind of cinquanon of the modern day feminist movement which is this putative you know constitutional right to abortion so that's where i've really mainly um been doing you know my legal scholarship is there and then i um in this new book um i really look more into wright's theory and kind of the understanding of rights that um informs that new feminist vision and then kind of an older view of rights that um that informed the early women's rights advocates yeah that was one of the that's my next question actually i mean the you you make a big point uh early in your book about the difference between the moral vision that informed the early women's movement and which benefited women and men equally uh and and the kind of vulgarity and callousness that seems to have crept into modern mainstream feminism how did we get there yeah that's right i mean i um as you know i start the book with this kind of juxtaposition of the 2017 women's march which um lots of women there with kind of vulgarity placed right upon their heads but then also i don't know that you did this but i um listened to the you know main stage and there was really just um it was quite horrible i mean they weren't kind of making reasoned arguments against this controversial new president president trump um but it was just it was rather vulgar not everyone but a lot of them and so then you have this contrast with the very famous women's suffrage procession 100 years prior you know where they're kind of depicting the virtues of charity and and um justice and all of this in like literally in costume and doing this kind of you know beautiful beautiful um kind of and and their arguments were much more reasoned in fact that was the whole basis of their argument for women's rights is that women were rational creatures just like men um and also you know that reason had certain ends and that was um you know sort of striving for excellence in all all that we do so uh reason had the end of of you know striving for truth um and so women should be able to speak the truth in public and things like that um and you know they grounded the their rights um in the shared capacities human capacities but also in shared responsibilities of men and women so if you just look at like seneca falls so the first women's rights convention in 1848 and you look at this question of vulgarity so there's an issue there's always been an issue among women's rights advocates with the you know what's known as kind of the sexual double standards so basically the idea that you know women are much more harshly punished for kind of sexual escapades and um than men are and so the way they respond to that was far different i mean they didn't want to answer bulgarity with vulgarity which is kind of what i think we see more and more in the modern day feminist movement instead they you know demanded that men meet women at this high standard of mutual responsibility and care so i want to read one resolution because it's just so telling um so they one of the resolutions of the seneca falls um you know this big meeting was they say this that the same amount of virtue delicacy and refinement of behavior that is required of women in the social state should also be required of man and the same transgression should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman um so i think you know that's clearly a very different vision they also had a very very different vision when it comes to children and you know unborn children especially and that's where you see the the real divergence happen is um you know their understanding of rights was very much based on responsibility so they would be totally untenable to say that you could have a right to take the life of your own child because the whole point of rights was to enable you to fulfill the special duties of care you had to that child so that's where in the big you know right around late you know 1960s early 1970s when there's a real um kind of i think capitulation um to what i call the logic of the market you know women want to get into the you know workforce and so they kind of capitulate to this idea that you have to be this you know unencumbered um you know sort of uh individual um you know shorn of any responsibilities and that's been harm to everyone to men you know who want to take part really um in the family as well you know one of the things or two of the things that i noticed in your writing is the the your emphasis on the early women's movement you mentioned a moment ago the early women's movement uh emphasis on the word chastity applying to both men and to women which of course is a classically christian perspective but i mean it gets deluded in in the way that the cultures have been lived that's the first thing the second thing is that i thought was very striking was your mention of how charity dropped out of the vocabulary and got replaced with this much more amorphous thing called love in terms of uh what what the exhortations were for uh from uh from the platform on uh in the march the latest march on washington the one that you know uh met trump's inauguration i thought that was fascinating because karitas charity is a little bit more demanding than a a word like love which can mean virtually anything you want uh erica you make a a big deal about mary wallstone crafted and i had never heard of her and i think a lot of americans had never heard of her so why don't you tell me why you focused on her and uh why is she important for now yeah so mary wollstonecraft um is you know someone i read i mean sort of the history i have the background i have is sort of interesting i think and places me in kind of a special position to be able to do this work in the sense that when i was a college student i was actually a women's studies student i was a leader of the women's center at the very liberal college middlebury college up in vermont i actually um had sort of a socialist moment where i worked for bernie sanders volunteered for bernie sanders up there um in any way i mean i i came around to sort of um you know first uh first questioning um abortion actually because i read mary anne glendon's book rights talk and she's really with mary wolfman craft the real heroine of this book i would say what my argument i'll i want to spend a lot of time explaining craft my argument is basically that that mary and glendon the corpus of marianne glennon's work is really the true culmination of the vision the moral vision that mary wollstonecraft set out and that it was really um you know taken off course in the 1970s um so anyway um so mary wollstonecraft so i read mary wilson craft you know among all the sort of feminist greats of um of that time but i uh you know it was only in rereading her much more recently in the last five years or so that i just realized wow this woman this philosopher i mean she is the 18th century author of the vindication of the rights of woman and was really the intellectual hero of the early women's rights movement um i kind of i what i s what i try to show in my book is that the late sort of the later um feminist movement really takes its bearings much more from enlightened other enlightenment thinkers like john locke but especially john stuart mill and so there's a real split um in kind of philosophical understanding because of the very large differences between a wilson crafty and kind of vision and a million understanding um so what wilson craft um you know her book you'd think vindication of the right to woman is all about rights and certainly she is you know making a defense or argument for women's rights but the book is really mostly about virtue and that's what's really incredible to read it today i mean kind of post my you know conversion after studying a lot of political philosophy um really being in for myself an aristotelian a thought and then going back and reading this woman and then reading all the secondary literature and realizing people she's kind of re-emerged once there are more women political theorists now there's this real re-emergence of kind of virtue ethics in in the academy i think probably because of alastair mcintyre's great you know book in the in the 80s after virtue but so you see in her so much aristotle and it's really incredible and this is secondary literature too this is not me just reading it reading you know what i want in there but what you see is that her argument is basically that um so women like men have this they're endowed with this enabling power to reason this beautiful line she says is to rise in excellence by the exercise of the powers implanted for that purpose and so she very much is a kind of teleological thinker so she sees reason um as having an end and what's that end while it's imitation of you know divine wisdom um which is really quite beautiful i wouldn't say she's a she's not a thorough going kind of catholic thinker she's not certainly not orthodox in her um in her christian views but she was raised in anglican i think adhere to her angle confused but sometimes she reads more like kind of a um an old like a utilitarian or sorry unitarian like john adams or something like that well that's not more sympathetic to religion than somebody like or closer to traditional religious sensibilities than somebody like locke yeah yeah i think that's right and so john adams actually loved her abigail adams called herself wilstercraft's pupil and they actually both um they were together um kind of worshiping together and listening to uh their both of them kind of their teacher this richard price um so anyway you know the kind of what what you see come out of wilson craft's work is this idea that kind of virtue is the end of life it's the happiness of life it's the purpose of life um and that it's learned little by little it's practiced in daily obligations and kind of the circumstances of life and very much with the nurture and direction of parents and teachers and so we're created as endowed with these capabilities right but that they need to be held and they're directed they're naturally directed toward these ends of virtue and wisdom but they really need to be we need our parents and teachers help to get us there because otherwise we'll use our freedom for ill reasons and we'll become like beasts she says um so what are kind of the moral duties she talks about well she you know she talks about um the moral duty uh to develop one's rational faculties to master one's appetites um you know to to strive to understand you know to seek truth um and especially um with regard to the family so to care for dependent children but also for elderly parents um and you know to be useful in one's work um and to see dignity across the social spectrum i mean she's a critic of um aristocracy um because of its uh you know she thought it kind of allowed um you know the wealthy to kind of sit back on their laurels and not strive after virtue and she thought it you know what it did to the poor was made them kind of uh strive to imitate the wealthy in their sitting back on their laurels and so she thought it didn't help anyone strive for virtue um and then the real final point is that so where do rights come in well rights are then necessary for us to fulfill the duties so the first um you know um the first kind of reality is our obligations to others because those help us to live out and to practice virtue which is really the end of our lives and then rights are therefore necessary in order to if i have a duty to do something well i must have to have a right to do it if i have a duty to worship god or seek the truth then i must have a right to do those things um and so that's how rights kind of come in so she really you know envisions this kind of freedom for excellence erica you're aware well aware that um edmond burke is a big hero to to english and american conservatives uh but not so much to marry wallstonecraft i mean she she was quite critical of some of his thinking and could you get a little bit into that and what drew them into conflict yeah i actually really appreciate this question um because i think so wilson kraft's first work before the vindication of the rights of women was the vindication of the rights of men um and so it is really a critique of burke um and his defense of the monarchy and their aristocracy and so her work this piece she actually wrote it anonymously and then comes out and says that you know it's hers later um so no one knew it was written by this woman um and and she she you know it's a complicated text um because part of it is that she's trying to defend this teacher richard price who she thought that edmond you know that edmund burke had kind of taken down unnecessarily and not recognize the virtue his virtue and his desire for sort of for virtue um but the other thing the other reason i'm really glad that you mentioned it and asked the question is because you know wilson craft is kind of lumped together with thomas payne who is a thorough going kind of liberal thinker and um and wilson craft actually agrees much more with with burke on many things so for instance um wilson craft very much agrees with burke on kind of the givenness of moral duties i think i kind of try to spell that out in the in the last um question but you know the kind of natural unchosen obligations with family most important because family and kind of the virtues that were taught by both mothers and fathers there you know that was the foundation and really happiness of both individuals and the whole society but but again she so she really disagrees with him about the kind of familial and social structures that would kind of lead toward virtue so that's where their main argument is i think um she also really disagrees with him and his views of what you know he calls prescription um and she kind of argues that if you you know if you build your whole worldview or your whole kind of understanding of things on just the wisdom of the ages then you have no means to critique something like the egregious practice of slavery and i think she might have gotten to him there because he ends up later kind of taking more of a natural law view to critique slavery um and so you know you could say that um you know wilson craft kind of takes this middle route she's not you know this kind of hardcore liberal like i would say locke um uh but she um is not you know just a conservator of english traditions though she you know is very much um uh you know kind of um loves kind of you know english traditions as well but she's more of a natural law thinker so she kind of takes this middle approach and so what can you know wilson craft teach us about today is that conservatives don't want to be conserving those things that are really a fro an affront to natural law right we want to kind of use reason to think about um about kind of old opinions so here's here's a line of hers and then i'll let you get on to the next question but she says we ought to respect old opinions though prejudices blindly adopted lead to error and preclude the exercise of reason um so she really wanted and again remember for her reason is not like disconnected from the you know the creator you know she very much sees reason she doesn't use the language of a participation the way that kind of we catholics would or thomas would but she um but she talks about our reason as a shadow of the creator so it's always connected um uh to the source of of reason why is she if i can ask you this i mean just from your description and my preparation for this interview um i i don't understand why she would ever be associated with tom payne i mean tom payne was a ferocious i mean he really attacked foundations i think he was an atheist if i'm not mistaken and and uh you know almost ended up being executed in france because of his nuttiness during the french revolution so i mean how does she get associated with him in any way yeah so i think there's a number of reasons um well first i mean she really is making there's i would say that the vindication of the rights of men is a much more inelegant piece than the vindication of the rights of women which is really quite beautiful it's not particularly substantive so it's hard to make your way through or um sort of systematic so it's hard to make your way through kind of you have to really study it so there's a lot of ad hominem attack toward burke again because i think she felt insulted that he um really attacked her you know her teacher um but i think there's other reasons too you know this is obviously during the french revolution and she is defending the early french revolution against burke's critique of it now when you look at historically the reason we have such high regard for burke i mean one of the reasons is because he his view is vindicated right i mean once the reign of terror comes along he is entirely vindicated she actually was in paris to experience the reign of terror and so she um really gets very distraught with this idea her earlier idea that sort of there was this potential for kind of like uh potential that politics would kind of bring about this um the ideals that she hoped you know if you have more equality then of course you'll have more virtue she she starts to be more skeptical of that view that politics is kind of the way about it she i would say um really looks to the american revolution and what sort of is going on in the americas or sorry in um in the new republic in america because of the emphasis on virtue there um and so she starts to want to distance herself from the french revolution but of course the piece that's written is um a defense of kind of um more of those the principles that led to that the other reason i think would just be that you know as a woman i think that you know she's well she must not have said anything particularly interested we'll just lump her together with pain so it's not until really the last 20 years um that she's been really taken seriously actually there's one other very important reason and that is that after she writes both of these treatises um she is at that point she's like a 30 year old virgin and she's a head you know a school mistress she's a writer um she goes on after the french revolution to um engage in um well it's a very complicated story that i lay out and i don't think it's um it was fairly depicted um by biographies that were done of her early on um but she doesn't have i would say what we might call unity of life but she doesn't live out the vision that she articulates in the education of the rights of women very well and so she's really kind of a person on grata in her own country for a long time and so it's almost like we needed to get through you know that kind of the reputational problems and then also get through all the 1960s and 70s feminists um you know saying rah-rah here she is look at her way of life and then say well wait a second let's look at her ideas instead um because that's really where um you know she gives us so much to chew on you uh talk uh in the text that you're working on about ruth bader ginsburg and you have a complicated view of her i mean both positive and negative i mean what are her strengths from your perspective and what are what are her weaknesses yes i do have a complicated view of her i think um so i guess i would say i mean it's easy in the sense that i think i would applaud um the work she did as a an advocate in the 1970s i mean i guess you could say that if wilson crafts basic principle was that women and men share this kind of common rational capacities and therefore ought to enjoy you know equal civil and political rights that ginsburg kind of elevates this principle to a legal or constitutional argument and so you know she wants to argue that um the law cannot assume that a man could administer a state better than a woman simply because he was a man or the law cannot um prohibit a woman from practicing law simply because she was a woman i mean those you know the anti-discrimination laws that we have that enable women to kind of take part in you know educational professional life um are you know around because of of her advocacy but when she gets on um i mean another thing i would say i really love about her i wrote a piece for america after she died um just about really the the way in which she spoke about um kind of the shared duties of caregiving in the home and that she really wanted to draw men into that and so um you know she lived that with her husband very much so um i think that she is really off track with how she thinks we're going to get there by her really ardent promotion of abortion but the vision itself is a beautiful one and it's frankly a vision that you know we're actually recording this on the feast of saint joseph so for like catholic men this is just basic to being a father is really being entirely engaged in the life of of the home and whether that means you know your wife works or not um and generally speaking you know most women who have small children would like to be home with them um we see that still today but during you know when when when uh ginsberg's growing up there's less of that i guess there's less engagement of fathers in the home so she really wanted to see that um uh and so her you know big mistakes which i think that you know as a um as a supreme court justice i think there's all sorts of things that you could say are faulty in her way of thinking um but i really focus on her her views of about of abortion um she's really um she borrows thinking from others but she really is the stalwart advocate for this view of abortion as necessary for women's equality she talks about women you know abortion is necessary for women's equal citizenship you know so think of how different that view is from uh the view of you know the earlier women's rights thinkers um it really flips that view right on its head and there's lots of um consequences to that when you start talking about abortion is necessary for women's equality um you know i think that you know the the easy abortion that roe um brought about you know it i think it really relieved men of of their these mutual responsibilities that she wanted to see um you know uh that that that should accompany sex um and that you know um that you know father should be involved um you know equally whether that means equal time or not but whatever have equal affection for their children in the home and obviously we've seen that not to be the case since roe since kind of the tearing of um of uh you know allowing women to tear children from their own wombs but then also that you know the way in which that impacted marriage rates and um and um the rise of of single motherhood and the way in which how hard that's been for those single mothers right when fathers aren't around obviously there's lots of causes for that but i think um i try to make a case that's been made you know i've made elsewhere and others have made elsewhere that um that easy abortion really leads to that kind of thing there's also other assumptions that she makes in that kind of thinking that um that in order to be equal women have to be kind of full market equals you know have to participate equally in in the marketplace have um bring in as much you know bring in the bread as much as um men do and it's so it really discounts the really primary and foundational um good of the work of the home i think in which um so many uh women um really pride themselves on on on the work that they do there repudiation of mutual dependence an absolute appreciation of interconnection and mutual dependence that's right um the next question obviously is based on the on the material we've just been talking about if you take ruth bader ginsburg and then you drop in an amy tony barrett and uh they're i mean she's an extraordinary woman the latter they both were but i mean the latter is you know a mother a wife a former professor now supreme court justice and yet she's utterly rejected by mainstream feminism as i suspect you are i mean it it you you say things that are true but unwelcome as she does and i mean what are your impressions about the whole barrett experience over the last two years the last 18 months yeah i mean that's what i i mean it's not surprising to me that she's rejected i mean clearly abortion has become the san juan out of the movement and so anybody who stands kind of a thwart that view is going to be rejected canceled whatever i mean that's clear um but the thing about um now justice barrett that was just so impressive to me is just the grace that she was able to kind of show under pressure enormous pressure um and just to see how her husband you know she it's funny because she and her husband really share you know work and home exactly how ginsberg envisioned and so you know it's a point i try to make in a political piece that i think is you know one of the only pieces i've ever written that's gone viral um and that i got a lot of hate now for um but you know those are the shared responsibilities that um that ginsburg envisioned now a lot of women aren't gonna want you know amy coney's barrett's life a lot of men are gonna want um uh jessie conan you know jesse barrett's life but i think it's you know to see the possibility of something like that and to see the real you know reciprocity between the two of them in marriage and to see how carrogate caregiving like the life of the home always comes first always came first and i think that's really um the most beautiful part um and you know it's funny because i'd written this book it was like you know with the publisher and i knew amy coney barrett um i really hoped that she would be picked you know ahead of kavanaugh um i don't know her personally but i just knew her by reputation and so it was amazing to have me like right on the eve of starting to talk about my book have this woman in flesh you know kind of live out um the principles that i was that i was really trying to enunciate and most especially with regard to her husband i mean with regard to her too of course but just her husband's real commitment to the life of the family is just such a beautiful beautiful thing eric one of the things though that and this gets to the economic issue too it seems to me that at the heart of uh i mean the marriage that you have with your husband that i've had with my wife and that i know all of our friends are catholic and they have more or less the same kind of relationship it's covenantal it's non-trans transactional right and it seems like everything in american life has moved to a state moved to kind of like a transactional equation that in a sense depersonalizes the whole the whole covenantal quality to i mean the idea of sacrificing yourself for the person that you love is at the heart of every good marriage and every good family and um there's sort of an escape clause in so much of american life that prevents that from happening i wonder if you've had that some of those same thoughts yeah i know i think there's no question that there's sort of this contractual view of marriage um that actually you know i show sort of um starts with actually with elizabeth katie stanton so she's one of the early she's the earliest um i think she's sort of the first real feminist um who is very much a follower of john stewart mill and his view that you know marriage should just be a partnership and should be you should be able to enter and exit it just like you would kind of a commercial partnership although it seems like there's it's harder to exit a commercial partnership sometimes than it is a marital partnership um yeah but i think that that's absolutely right and um and that's you know it who does that harm the most i mean it certainly harms you know poor single mothers the most um when you know childbearing and and um you know the union the sexual union is not um seen as you know very much within marriage and within this kind of beautiful responsibility to one another in marriage because women are left you know poor especially poor mothers are left having to do you know both um you know provide for their children and care for their children which is today especially in today's economy just an impossible task yeah tim riker a very good catholic economist about a decade ago wrote a piece in first things about doing a purely economic analysis of contraception and its negative effect on women the larger issue of women in the economy um how do you interpret the structure of the american economy in terms of its impact on women right now i mean is there is there a structural problem in in in the american econom in american economic assumptions that work against women being valued well i think single women know not at all i mean i think the work of you know ruther ginsberg anti-discrimination law you know if you can prove your medal like a man you're good in this in this culture economy you know if you can make kind of decisions like a unencumbered man or you know independent man you're fine i mean i think it's really families um and uh women with families and potentially even you know men with families who have the hardest time in the economy today i think there's all sorts of reasons for that um certainly the cost of life's necessities have gone up housing health insurance while especially for lower income people wages have stagnated and what are the causes i mean again globalization you know the the sort of falling of um the manufacturing sector the rise of the service sector where you know it kind of tends to be toward uh women's maybe gifts more so i think you also see i think a big big big reason for um the difficulties for um uh and the cost of everything is really assortative mating what's been called assorted mating right where you know highly educated women and men mate and marry and then bring in two incomes because they have flexible work where they can do that and have child care and spend time with their children and all that um at very at the very very high end two professionals than uh you know ceo or something like that whereas at the low end you've seen wages decline you have very inflexible workplaces i mean the you know one of the things that i've looked at a lot which is just um amazing to me i mean just in flexibility you see with low wage work is this kind of just in time scheduling which is like you get your schedule a week or just a few days before and you're trying to figure out trying to negotiate how to how to you know care for children if you need to work and that's the problem is that in this economy now we need two people to work um so i mean i think oren cass in his book um i think it's called the once and future worker makes a great point in his great work at american compass of you know how could the economy be so much better i mean we've seen this booming economy right gdp is growing for decades or whatever and and now we need two incomes to to just pay for life's necessities i mean obviously college loans there's all sorts of reasons for all of this but i um i do think it makes it a lot harder for just uh especially low-wage and then middle-class families to get by you know people are saying they're not having the children the number of children they want because they really can't afford it yeah i mean amazon talks a lot about creating tens of thousands of jobs and they do and amazon provides a service but it's a very very demanding environment to work in right i mean if you're not running it it's an extremely demanding environment and not one that pays a whole lot of money so i mean a lot of people are stuck in that i think your point there is is really very well taken um so that leads into the next question which is you've been sympathetic to the discussion of the creation of a family wage and uh what does that exactly mean and and how would that look i mean you you point out that there are a lot of different policy approaches to this but the discussion is extremely valuable for the for the culture why don't you elaborate a little bit on that yeah i think um you know i'm i've just been really heartened by the discussions that i think have taken place especially since um senator romney proposed his family security act now he of course is looking for a child allowance so it's like a monthly distribution to families with children based on the number of children you have and even while your you know child is in utero which i think is quite beautiful but that's in there um others you know again like oren cass have proposed something that's a bit more tied to work um so is um a kind of a buffed up wage subsidy like the eitc the earned income tax credit right um i'm just so pleased that all of these discussions are happening it actually reminds me of uh the communitarian moment in the 1990s which is actually when i became a conservative um is just seeing kind of the importance of of a corrective um to you know the real devastating effects on the family again it's not just the economy that has affected the family certainly the sexual revolution has had a huge um a huge role in that but it's almost like you know feminism sort of the sexual evolution feminism tied together and kind of globalization have conspired together against the family and so i think it's important um mary and glendon again the great heroine of my book um talks about you know a nation without a conscious family policy has a family policy made by choice sorry by chance and so the problem is that we tend to kind of imagine ourselves in our culture because of our sort of lockheed heritage as being these kind of independent individuals who run around and couldn't work and we're again unencumbered by these mutual dependencies and responsibilities and so that's the family policy that's made by chance it's kind of libertarian in um in kind of its assumptions and so we really have to then erect an affirmative family policy to counter that to say wait a second we love independence that's great but independent individuals are um only possible because of families because of the work of families the virtue that is nurture the solidarity that is virtued that is nurtured within the family and so you know let's come up with ways to really to support families and not only rhetorically support them but find ways to do this and so you know i'm not a kind of a policy wonka more of a theorist so i um i have weighed in on some of this stuff um but i just love i love the debate i love that it's happening um and i'm really eager to see you know how can we make sure that families can determine for themselves who cares for their children do they have the resources for one of them you know usually the mother to stay home and care for children or you know again has kind of the logic of the market and feminism conspired to have everyone be considered workers first and kind of everyone to assume that of course children will just be you know the care of the children would just be contracted out to um to these really well-paid uh you know uh caregivers and it's like well no because you know it's really good for children to be with their with their moms especially when they're young and with their parents and their parents want to be with them um by and large um so i think there's lots of things i also would just say that not only kind of these kind of policies of of trying to get more um support and and money for for families but also the kinds of things i was talking about in terms of just-in-time scheduling i think there should be much more opportunity for part-time work um and you know maybe part-time paid you know part-time pay equity that kind of thing so that women or men there are some you know who leave the workforce to care for children um you know they can be kind of paid commensurate with their work and not you know sort of um disproportion or disadvantage because they're they're trying to care for their children which is really the priority and should be the priority for everyone for the nation because they're you know clearly the future and what everything else is built upon eric one last question um what's wrong with the equality act so much is wrong with the equality act um yeah i mean if if you know our colleague at eppc mary hassan uh testified before congress um before the senate about this um go go find that testimony she's really terrific courageous courageous but i mean there's so much wrong it shouldn't be called the equality act clearly um because it really is you know the idea of the equality for those who don't know um i think everyone probably knows by now but it's the idea is you know it's a it's a sort of huge amendment to the civil rights act of 1964 which would change the term sex so that it includes um sexual orientation and gender identity which basically turns sex on its head because when you start talking about gender identity you're basically saying we're going to you know allow trans-identifying men they call themselves trans women into women's sports so that's title ix um you know into other protected you know female protected spaces female only spaces we're going to require that doctors um you know give you know uh you know fertility infertility inducing um hormones and and surgeries to children you know who um clearly can't you know determine um these sorts of things when they're young i mean it's clearly a craze that's going on and the fact that the medical establishment is behind this or some of it others are just scared of being cancelled i guess and so aren't speaking out um is just it's it's really going to come back to bite us and i think sooner than some of these other errors we've seen in our in the last few decades because there's going to be so many children who are going to say what did you allow me to do to myself right um so yeah i mean i think this it's it's a real um it's really you know the fact that there aren't more feminists standing against this and there certainly are um but that the fact that there aren't more and that they are you know they're not all doing this seems to me to be um you know i think it's they've lost um they've lost a lot of the ability to kind of think through things um and reason through things and see the kind of harm that this would do to women uh erica you're terrific and it's been a wonderful time conversing with you i just want to remind our audience that your book the rights of women reclaiming a lost vision will be published by the university of notre dame press later this year do you have an idea what time what what uh i do yeah it's july 15th and it's actually available for pre-order now on amazon if anybody still goes to amazon or barnes and noble or um or i think you know on the notre dame website as well no it's a one i mean the material that i read is just absolutely terrific so congratulations thank you so much frank no thank you so much erica it's been wonderful talking to you [Music] hey you

Channel: Napa Institute

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Length: 41min 28sec (2488 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021