Ms. Memo: This Week in Women's Rights

September 27, 2023

From the ongoing fight for abortion rights and access, to elections, to the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment, there are a multitude of battles to keep up with. In this weekly roundup, find the absolute need-to-know news for feminists.

The Supreme Court’s Blindness to Gender Violence

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) announces a joint resolution to affirm the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment on Jan. 31, 2023 in Washington, D.C. In April, she also filed a discharge petition, which seeks to compel the House of Representatives to vote on H.J. Res. 25 to remove the arbitrary deadline for ratification. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

BY VICTORIA F. NOURSE |If you thought the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade was the end of the Court’s war on women, think again. Now gender violence laws are under attack. Case in point: last term’s decision in Counterman v. Colorado striking down a stalking conviction as unconstitutional. This upcoming term, the Court is poised to deal another blow to domestic violence laws, in a case about guns: United States v. Rahimi.

Though the Court drapes its opinions in the language of liberalism—of free speech and rights—the result is the same: The Constitution somehow becomes the enemy of popular laws devised to protect women. The only way to push back against these Court rulings is for Congress to take the steps necessary to affirm the Equal Rights Amendment.

The petitioner in Counterman, Billy Raymond Counterman, sent at least hundreds of Facebook messages to C.W., a local musician in Denver whom he had never met. Some of the messages were deemed “prosaic” by the Court, like when he wrote, “Good Morning Sweetheart.”

Then there were messages showing Counterman was surveilling C.W.: “Was that you in the white Jeep?” and “A fine display with your partner.”

And then there were the death threats: “Fuck off permanently”; “Staying in cyber life is going to kill you”; and “You’re not being good for human relations. Die.”

Not surprisingly, a Colorado jury convicted Counterman of stalking.

But the Supreme Court reversed Counterman’s conviction based on the First Amendment. Traditionally, the First Amendment has had an exception for “true threats.” Many laws criminalize threats: Threaten the president, for example, and that is a federal felony. No one thinks those laws violate the First Amendment. Most of our laws against hate crimes, along with civil rights laws, employ the legal standard of true threats (for instance, a white supremacist saying, “We will kill you if you vote”). Yet the Supreme Court found Colorado’s stalking law unconstitutional because it would “chill” speech.

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What we're reading

Because it's hard to keep up with everything going on in the world right now. Here's what we're reading this week:

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