When reasoned arguments for liberty get twisted into excuse for extreme license

First I heard of P Schlaffley was when my wife and I joined the local ERA ratification group. Heck, yeah; we edited the newsletter! Other than me, it was all women. Most were limousine lib wives, of both parties. A few were Eagle Forum infiltrators, evidently there to Concern Troll about the Amendment resulting in unisex bathrooms and other Scary Stuff. I kind-of admire that level of political infiltration, as a tactic.

On its face, the ERA shouldn't even be necessary, but we saw it as worthy, and thought the Schlaffley-ites were mad tinfoil-hatters. Nobody in their right mind would think that restricting the government from gender discrimination would undo human biology. We were just naive about the pervasive lack of right mind. As articles linked here on AoS recently have shown, They don't need an ERA to start enforcing unisex bathrooms, and I'm surprised it took them so long, really. Haha, well, at least they can't force men to share pregnancy. ... yet. (Chemically-induced menstrual periods for men, coming under Obamacare....)

So, decades later and far less naive about the Enemy, I'm fine with the ERA not having passed. I still say, it was, on it's face, simply a restatement of the Human Right, of which all enumerated and other rights are but facets. But it's not the law, it's how a law's abused.

Our idealism about Equal Rights was & is like other long-held views. I can make an argument that an abortion is sometimes the right decision, but where I'm thinking of extreme circumstances, extremely early, extremely rare, and with much lamentation for the unhappy medical necessity, such an argument gets twisted until They get casual everyday infanticide. We once had a woman engage us in discussion about marriage, and I allowed there might be workable "four-cornered" relationships; soon thereafter, she destroyed her marriage by having an affair; I suspected our theoretical discussion was mis-taken as encouragement, even if for something she'd been thinking about already anyway.

If reasoned arguments for liberty on the gray fringe get twisted into excuse for extreme license, better to keep such rarified noodling to oneself than encourage children to play with dynamite.

[TL;DR? Sorry. And painfully composed on my cell besides. I'm nutz.]