| THE 19TH AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION: NECESSARY AND PROPER, OR TRIVIAL AND INANE? Lucas Heffer AP Government/Politics 15 February 2002 A. On Monday, May 19th, 1919, the sixty-sixth Congress of the United States of America convened in Washington, D.C., where the House of Representatives introduced the Joint Resolution proposing the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which would allow women to vote in national elections (19th 1). More than 80 years after ratification, many citizens, especially males, regard this as one of Congress� biggest mistakes. Although the revision explicitly guarantees suffrage to women, many in that gender group are unaware of the privilege allotted them, and so it should be denied to further generations as a consequence of ignorance. Apparently the following, taken verbatim from the Constitution is unclear: �The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation� (�Constitution� 9). Many women often confuse suffrage, the right to vote, with suffering, an experience of physical or psychological pain, as proven by two intrepid television personalities (Compilation�). Logical theory states that females of voting age would not miss the opportunity, if they were unaware or confused about its existence. For that reason, and a few others, I submit for review the twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America: The repeal of the 19th Amendment. The passage of this alteration would undoubtedly quell the conflict between spouses of different political affiliations, since women could not legally vote, and many feminists nowadays ignore the third provision of traditional marriage vows: to obey one�s husband (�Wedding�� 2). If it were intended for ladies to vote in the first place, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia would have expressly granted that right in the first draft. Our Founding Fathers must have known better. A widely accepted belief regarding females is their propensity for vacillation. Far too many elections since 1920 have been decided by less than1 percent of the total voting public, including the most recent presidential race of 2000. If women voted as a cohesive bloc, there wouldn�t be a discrepancy in the office as there was immediately following Election Day. Since feminine amalgamation is an ostensible impossibility, the simple solution is to discontinue female suffrage across the board. B. The proposed Amendment would indubitably encounter difficulty in achieving support in Congress, or, at least publicly. It is so far left-wing liberalist in nature that it could be political suicide to candidly substantiate such an extreme proposition, but an audacious Senator or Representative would go down in infamy as a champion of men�s issues, a seemingly forgotten issue in modern politics. If any political party should choose to adopt this resolution as part of its platform, it would most likely be a fundamentalist Islamic party, or another as yet un-established affiliation. The Democratic Party is the one of the two major parties that might entertain such a notion for even just a little while, since it is the more liberal of the two, but its concern for the public�s perception would probably entice the party discontinue consideration. Support for the repeal of the 19th amendment would be drawn from most well educated men, especially Caucasians, whose rights are being perpetually trampled to meet racial-/gender- based quotas, but that requires a separate dissertation. Some women would also advocate its annulment, based on the fact that it is redundant; Women are incontrovertibly citizens of the United States, so clearly delegating them the power to vote is superfluous. These women too miss the point: the intention is to abolish the legal right of women to vote, not simply revoke an extraneous Amendment. A swing group would be Freudian psychologists, those who purport that, men, in enacting this motion, would subjugate women to fulfill their own delusions of superiority, and those who counter that dismissal would be the result of an Oedipus complex, in which the integrity of the motherly female is preserved by the lascivious male (Rowell). Freud�s theories are complicated that way; they are open for interpretation. |