I submitted my positions to the Minnesota Chapter of the National Organization for Women (MN-NOW) in response to their request for candidate information for endorsement, and I received a D rating!! I was genuinely seeking their endorsement and thought I deserved it! They gave me a D rating!
Their two most important issues should be, and I think are, keeping abortion legal and having equal power for women in government and society. On those two issues I am better than Walz and perfectly aligned with them. I am pro-choice and, unlike Walz, I support enacting a law to guarantee the right to an abortion, and because of my Jury Democracy proposal I could get it enacted. Walz only pledges to veto laws outlawing abortion but not to try to enact a law guaranteeing a right to abortion. With Jury Democracy, I think I could get a law guaranteeing the right to abortion passed even with Republicans holding a narrow majority in the state Senate, as I explain here.
Second, on equal power between the sexes, my proposal of Jury Democracy involves selecting registered voters at random to serve on a jury and having those juries decide all important questions for government after hearing full debate on each issue. It would automatically give women 50% of the seats on the jury, without any quotas or affirmative action. So women would automatically have equal power to men in this system.
Somehow, that is not good enough for them. Perhaps NOW does not want equality for women; they want superiority for women.
So what were my sins in their eyes? I filled out the questionnaire on-line and do not have a copy of my answers, so I have to go from memory here, but it might have been my answer to a question about violence against women. I said I oppose violence against not just women but also men, and that the accused should get due process and a fair trial, whether the accused is a man or a woman. And I pointed out that men are more likely to be victims of violence than women are, so we should also be concerned about violence against men, not just against women. (Men are more likely to be murdered and victims of assault and violence of all sorts than women.) I am guessing they did not like those positions, but if they do not agree with those positions then they are in fact not in favor of equality for women but rather superiority and oppose equal treatment under the law for men.
Also, at some point in response to another question I pointed out that women are now more likely to obtain college and professional degrees than men and we should be concerned about that for men. Perhaps they did not like that either.
At least those issues have to do with gender, but they also asked about immigration and I wrote that I support enforcing our immigration laws and reducing legal immigration and eliminating illegal immigration. I don’t know why that issue should be of concern to NOW, or why it serves the interests of women to have open borders and more immigration, but I know that was the answer they wanted.
The issue of immigration has nothing to do with gender issues or equality between the sexes, but the doctrinaire liberal position is to have open borders and not enforce immigration laws, and NOW apparently just takes the doctrinaire liberal position on this, even though it has nothing to do with their mission and even though open borders harms women who are citizens as much or more than it harms male citizens by driving down wages for workers, especially lower paid workers.
In this way, NOW is like many purportedly issue-focused groups that take positions contrary to the purported goals of the organization but consistent with liberal orthodoxy. I am thinking here particularly of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and environmental organizations generally, particularly the Sierra Club.
The ACLU once went to court to support the right of Nazis to march in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago. That probably bothers most of us, but it was consistent with their mission to support everyone’s right to peacefully demonstrate, whether we agree with their message or not. The ACLU at that time supported civil liberties, regardless of whose liberties they were and regardless of whether most ACLU members agreed with the outlook of those whose liberties were at issue. In contrast, during the two years of lockdown restrictions in response to COVID, including closing churches and schools, closing restaurants and other businesses, banning gatherings including political demonstrations, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, stay-at-home orders, and restrictions on travel—all restrictions on civil liberties and collectively the greatest infringement on our civil liberties in decades if not over a century—the ACLU was silent on all of it. It supported or was silent on every one of those restrictions. It also was silent on the censorship by the tech and media platforms of voices and arguments opposing the lockdowns and even of distribution of facts and CDC statistics that painted the lockdowns in a bad light. It completely betrayed its mission. In choosing between liberal orthodoxy and its mission to protect civil liberties, it chose liberal orthodoxy to the point of completely opposing and betraying its purported mission.
The Sierra Club and most environmental groups generally also betray their mission by supporting open borders and more immigration. Overpopulation is the core problem for all our environmental issues and more people worsens all of our environmental problems including habitat loss, species extinction, and global warming. Population growth in this country is driven entirely by immigration. If we had no net immigration, we would have a declining population. So environmental groups ought to support enforcing our borders and reducing immigration if they really care about the environment. But instead, when confronted with the choice between liberal orthodoxy and their mission, they choose liberal orthodoxy.