page 4 - Out in the Mountains

 

 

ERA—The Real Issues

by Charlotte Dennett

lt hardly needs to be said that
lesbians and gay men have become the
brunt of an increasingly virulent
STOP-ERA campaign. those titillating
purple pamphlets that purported to
show the "ERA/GAY/AlDS connection"
may have slipped into well-deserved
obscurity, but the gay-baiting continues
through deceptive telephone
polling(Would you still vote for the
ERA if you knew it would lead to
homosexual marriages?) and slick radio
spots ("They say (with an ERA) that I
should have the right to marry a

Colby

woman and my brother the
marry a man.").

How voters respond on November
4th may tell us something about how
deeply the vein of homophobia runs in
this state. But I have no doubts that
the “hunting season on... gay people," as
Euan Bear so aptly put it (OITM,
February l986) will extend far beyond
election day. And it will do so, I would
argue, for the very same reason that
the hunting season is open on women
and minorities, HIV sero-positive
individuals, drug-takers, and day-care
operators. Robots and computers are

right to

 

00
O
O

O

135 Pearl Street

COME HOWL WITH US!
HoHoween hHght-
$3.00 Cover: _9_ to Closing

Open 7 Days a Week
Mon.- Fri. Open at 5pm
Sat. + Sun. Open at 8pm

0 Downstairs Is Open Tues., Thurs., Fri., and Sat.

Burlington, Vermont

5
O

Tues. Ed's $1 Bud Night
Wed. Ladies Night
Thurs. Boys Night Out

       

Ffiday

O
O O

O

802 863 - i343

taking away jobs by the millions. Who
works and who stays home (or is
segregated, quarantined or somehow
removed from the workaday world) will
be a burning issue by the year 2,000.

Only four years ago, a former
economist with the Commerce
Department predicted in a report to
Congress that "ten to 15 million

manufacturing workers and a similar
number of service workers will be
displaced from their existing jobs." The
speed and force of robotization, he
said, would be "awesome." Two years
later, industry consultants B002 and
Allen estimated that as many as 38
million office jobs alone would be lost
to automation.

The first time l read the predictions
was during the second year of the
Reagan administration. Robotics expert
James Albus caught my eye with the
assertion in ‘Time’ that today‘s
technological revolution would "far
exceed the l9th century
revolution in its impact on mankind."
Job loss, other said, would be massive.
How, I wondered then, would society
cope? Who would be hurt?

Ronald Reagan gave the answer in
mid I982 when he told a group of
women supporters that "part of the
unemployment is not as much due to
recession as it is the increase of people
going into the job market, and ladies,
I‘m not picking on anyone, but because
of the increase in women who are
working today, and two-worker families
and so forth...‘ (His voice trailed off,
but we get the point -- working women,
not structural changes in the economy,
were being portrayed as the cause of
unemployment.)

At the same time, a coalition of
women's groups, alarmed over the
Reagan administration's cuts in women's
programs, put out .a report called
"Inequality of Sacrifice" chronicling the
systematic attacks on federal ‘policies
that gave women access to the
workforce, whether job training
programs, family planning counselling,
or day care assistance.

The witch-hunts against working
women had begun. And they got uglier
-— starting with a wave of
media-hysteria over child abuse in day
care centers. Few people know that a
Los Angelcs District Attorney, in
February of this year, dropped charges
against five of the seven teachers
originally accused of molesting children
in the famous McMartin Pre-School
Case which by I984 had sent
shock-waves across the nation and
ultimately destroyed the careers and
reputations of teachers in a number of
related cases. Few mothers concerned
for the safety of their children have
read, for instance, that children in
Jordan, Minnesota have admitted that
they made up stories about having
sexual orgies with adults in that

continued, page 5

industrial-