I’m often asked why I live in Boulder given its intolerance to individual liberty, and now the possibility they will jail me for openly violating their bigoted gun ban. Let me answer with a true story.
Some twenty-five years ago I was working in my front yard. As I was sitting on my front stoop a beautiful, topless woman came walking down the sidewalk. As she passed I smiled at her and gave her a tiny wave. She smiled back and gave me a tiny wave.
I have gone out and sat on my stoop at the same time of day, every day, for twenty-five years now in hopes she might walk by again.
To Boulder’s credit, they don’t discriminate based on gender when it comes to indecent exposure. Wherever men can go topless, so can women. Free the nipple! (No, really, there is a movement to allow women to go topless called “free the nipple.” Be sure to Google it at work.)
This, of course, brings us to last week’s Super Bowl half time show where singer Adam Levine proudly displayed his impressive man nipples. They were a little difficult to see mixed in with his mural of tattoos, but they were somewhere north of the billboard for California, and south of what I think is a rose.
Many free-the-nipple activists immediately called for the Federal Communications Commission to slap CBS with a hefty fine to be consistent with the fine they got 15 years ago when Janet Jackson had her “wardrobe malfunction” exposing her breast at the halftime show.
If only the Equal Rights Amendment had been passed, then the FCC would have had no choice but to free all the nipples or else fine CBS again.
The ERA simply reads “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” It has been ratified by 37 of the needed 38 states needed to amend the U.S. Constitution, although there is a legal argument that it is too late to be ratified since the congressionally imposed deadline of June 30, 1982, has passed. Colorado ratified it in 1972.
For the sake of men, it is time to ratify the ERA. First, it would free the nipple, markedly improving the lives of all men. And secondly, it would protect men from the creeping discrimination of our new vengeful social justice society.
In the name of social justice, California recently passed a sexist law that the ERA, if ratified, would quickly strike down. Thanks to the progressive mindset where diversity is found between people’s legs and not between their ears, it requires the governing boards of companies to have a minimum number of women.
Because 
social justice warriors know what’s best for companies owned by others, they are messing with their freedom of association. Fighting for people’s right to organize themselves as they wish ended with gay marriage. It’s so last week.
An all-female board would be just fine (and by the way, it is if that’s what they want) but an all-male board is intrinsically sexist. Of course, if the stockholders of a company are delighted by the leadership of their current all-male board, they could vote to force some of them to identify as women.
The Denver Post recently ran an AP story in its Business section celebrating women-only business offices as a refuge for the #MeToo movement. Entering one of the establishments “felt like coming into a comfortable spa. Clean lines give way to cozy touches such as footstools covered with faux fur and a roaring fire surrounded by comfortable armchairs…There is not a man in sight.”
I’m certain a men-only office with beer taps and Playboy center-folds on the walls would get the same cuddly media treatment. Entering the establishment “felt like coming into a comfortable basement man-cave. Empty potato chip bags gave way to the stench of stale beer and old editions of Guns and Ammo Magazine …There is not a woman in sight.”
I want a world where both these places are celebrated, not where only one is allowed to exist and the other is shamed.
As the war against “toxic masculinity” rages and social identity politics starts to turn on itself like the French Revolution, men may well be the ones protected by the Equal Rights Amendment.
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
