{"id":9540,"date":"2018-02-20T07:00:03","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=9540"},"modified":"2018-02-19T17:44:34","modified_gmt":"2018-02-19T22:44:34","slug":"ed-kimmel-sex-discrimination-at-mcdcc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=9540","title":{"rendered":"Ed Kimmel: Sex Discrimination at MCDCC"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, Seventh State is pleased to present “Sex Discrimination at MCDCC” by Edward Kimmel, the first of a short series of posts on the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee’s (MCDCC) decision to switch to separate elections for male and female members of the committee.<\/em><\/p>\n

Democrats who read all the way down to the bottom of the ballot in June, 2018 will discover\u00a0\u00a0that the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee has divided itself into \u201cmale candidates\u201d and \u201cfemale candidates.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Most will think nothing of the fact that Homer cannot run against Marge.\u00a0\u00a0But I believe that this is a huge step backwards in the quest to end sex discrimination.<\/p>\n

I protested this in a piece on Facebook.\u00a0 There, I warned that such blatant, de jure discrimination that would be enforced by the\u00a0 Board of Elections (obviously, an agency of the State of Maryland) was almost certainly illegal.\u00a0 \u00a0I took down once I saw a Fourth Circuit opinion that upheld Maryland’s rule that half of the national convention delegates must be male and half female.\u00a0 \u00a0Although that opinion found that the Fourteenth Amendments restrictions against sex discrimination must be balanced against the amount of the imposition upon the First Amendment’s protection of free association, the fact that a voter who wanted to vote for only one gender of delegates suffered little because the voter’s principle decision was to vote for one candidate or another.\u00a0 That tipped the balance in favor of keeping its hands off of the party’s delegate-gender rules.<\/p>\n

I was hugely disappointed to find that political parties are, generally, beyond the reach of heightened scrutiny of governmental sorting of the sexes.\u00a0\u00a0Anti-discrimination laws that would prohibit golf clubs from obtaining tax exemptions if they have too many \u201cmen only\u201d golf tournaments would likely not prevent MCDCC \u201cmen only\u201d elections for seats on the \u201cgovernment\u201d of the Democratic Party of Montgomery County.<\/p>\n

So I gave up trying to warn them that what they are doing is illegal.\u00a0\u00a0Courts might well strike down their system \u2013 there are no controlling opinions on elections that absolutely forbid elections that pit men against women \u2013 but I was shocked to find that generally, courts that will allow girls to play on the boy\u2019s football team are reluctant to declare that competition between male politicians and female candidates may be made illegal.<\/p>\n

That shifts the debate to \u201cwhy?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Why does the Democratic Party of Montgomery County want to ban inter-gender competition in 2018?<\/p>\n

They say that this is their attempt to comply with the Democratic National Committee\u2019s\u00a0\u00a0\u201cEqual Division Rule\u201d that requires that governing bodies of Democratic state and local parties have equal numbers of male and female members.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0For years, they have been achieving \u201cgender balance\u201d on MCDCC by waiting until after the election and then adding some extra members of the gender that lost.\u00a0\u00a0As if to prove that the entire notion of second guessing the voters by diluting their choice with some appointed members, sometimes this has required them to add men and sometimes they have had to add women to achieve \u201cgender balance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not many comments on my now-deleted thread attempted to defend the policy.\u00a0\u00a0Some said that compliance with the DNC\u2019s Equal Division Rule was mandatory so that debate was nugatory.\u00a0\u00a0Some said that under the system of appointing new members of the MCDCC to bring the committee into balance, the number of members had swelled from the statutory 24 members to more than 30, a situation that will be corrected if men who resigned are only replaced by men and women with women \u2013 without addressing why they couldn\u2019t do that before.<\/p>\n

But mostly, they reacted with rage, ad hominem attacks and outright defamation.\u00a0\u00a0An officer of a state-wide Democratic organization said he was disappointed with me for suggesting that \u201cseparate is inherently not equal.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0He said that as an attorney, I \u201cknew\u201d that the Supreme Court was stating that segregated schools could not be equal because the minority schools were dingy and not maintained at the same level as majority schools were and that this was inapplicable here because male members and female members would serve in the same quarters.<\/p>\n

I beg to differ.<\/p>\n

I believe that what SCOTUS was saying was that the act of categorizing along discriminatory lines is what makes them unequal.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Drawing a line between black students and white students was what placed the stigma.\u00a0\u00a0Asserting that there is a reason to sort blacks from whites is, by itself, illegal discrimination.<\/p>\n

And so it is with gender.\u00a0\u00a0Pretending that there is something about ovaries or testicles that causes a person to make better\/worse\/different policy decisions is, itself, a slanderous statement.<\/p>\n

Finally, I don\u2019t believe that it is women who will have seats preserved on any Democratic body this year.\u00a0\u00a0Although, as the courts have noted without presentation of evidence, the population at-large may be presumed to be about equally split between males and females, I don\u2019t think that is true of Democrats and especially not of active, working Democratic activists.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My view may have been skewed by the fact that I have been among the most active Hillary Clinton supporters over the past ten years, but the events I have been to have been dominated by women.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Saying that the voters will not be allowed to elect seventy or eighty percent female leaders of our party may well be what keeps a certain amount of men at the table.<\/p>\n

It is time to allow Democratic voters to decide who they want to lead them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, Seventh State is pleased to present “Sex Discrimination at MCDCC” by Edward Kimmel, the first of a short series of posts on the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee’s (MCDCC) decision to switch to separate elections for male and female members of the committee. Democrats who read all the way down to the bottom of … Continue reading Ed Kimmel: Sex Discrimination at MCDCC<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[552],"class_list":["post-9540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mcdcc","tag-ed-kimmel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-2tS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9541,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9540\/revisions\/9541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}