Dear John,
Going into Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, our team here at Ms. had a pretty good idea what to expect: anti-abortion disinformation, historical revisionism, inflammatory soundbites, references to the January 6 insurrection and Project 2025. If we’d made a bingo card with all these on it, we would’ve easily won.
We weren’t all that surprised by Trump's repeated refusal to answer the question of whether he’d veto a nationwide abortion ban, and his explanation of how it was now in the hands of the states. In the hands of the states, we know what’s happened: Kamala powerfully illustrated the horrific health crises women and girls have faced in those states with extreme “Trump abortion bans.”
“Harris was particularly commanding on the one issue that polls show is most likely to motivate people, especially women, to vote: abortion,” writes the Fuller Project’s Jodi Enda in Ms. this week. “Although Americans say they are most concerned about the economy—a point underscored by the first question posed by ABC News moderators—a plurality of potential voters have told pollsters that abortion is the singular issue most likely to influence their candidate selection.” On the debate stage Tuesday night, Enda points out, Harris and Trump were able to agree on one thing: Trump’s responsibility for the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Trump also pushed back on his knowledge about and association with Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s detailed plan for the next Republican president—despite the fact that 80 percent of its authors served in the former president’s administration. We call Project 2025 the Right’s “misogynist manifesto,” and in Ms. this week, contributing editor Carrie Baker unpacks the details: from its obsession with promoting the patriarchal family and “biblically based marriage,” to its plans to dismantle women’s rights in the workplace and the classroom, to its agenda for changing democracy as we know it. Despite Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the radical wide-ranging plan, the dangers posed by Project 2025 are all too real—and women’s rights are square in the crosshairs.
Finally, this week we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act—a crucial step in the hard-fought battle to recognize domestic violence and sexual assault as a societal problem, a fight that still continues today. In Ms. this week, contributor and founder of Futures Without Violence Esta Soler reflects on VAWA’s impact, as well as the forthcoming loss of one of its greatest champions currently in office: President Joe Biden. “We should never forget his leadership and that the work VAWA funded had an incredible impact; in the years after it was enacted, domestic violence against adult women declined by more than 60 percent,” she notes.
To commemorate VAWA’s anniversary, President Biden announced a series of new initiatives, which include the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which will close the “boyfriend loophole”; supporting the housing needs of survivors; funding the Image Abuse Helpline and Online Safety Center to combat online abuse; and establishing the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
Though we celebrate VAWA today, the fight against gender-based violence continues—alongside the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA will provide the constitutional basis to strengthen laws to prevent gender-based violence, and reinstate survivors’ right to sue their attacker or institutions responsible for failing to respond to gender violence for damages in civil court—a right that was revoked by the Supreme Court in 2000.
As we celebrate VAWA’s profound impacts on its 30th anniversary, we must recommit to the fight against domestic violence—and recommit to ensuring the ERA is enshrined in the Constitution.
For Equality,
