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The Albany legislators who put Proposition 1 on our Election Day ballots should go back to the drawing board and not come back until they have an honest ballot proposal to show us.
The Prop 1 we’re considering Tuesday is deceptive, malicious and sleazy.
First, the bait: Prop 1 has been falsely marketed as an amendment to the New York state Constitution that’s critically needed to protect abortion rights after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Well, that’s just demagogic scare-mongering, because abortion has been legal in New York since before Roe was ever decided.
New York is not even remotely affected by Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that nullified Roe — and abortion rights in fact were expanded in the Empire State after Dobbs was handed down.
But fine, if legislators want to add redundant abortion protection to the state constitution, then propose an amendment that does so straightforwardly.
Maybe something like this: “Every individual who becomes pregnant has the fundamental right to choose to carry the pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child, or to have an abortion.”
That’s language straight from Article 25-A of New York state’s Reproductive Health Act.
Voters would understand what that means and we would pass it, unnecessary as it may be.
But that isn’t Prop 1.
Now, the switch: Many families in New York are alarmed and outraged that Prop 1 would create special rights for transgender minors .
It certainly does that.
Section A of the proposed amendment bans discrimination on the basis of “gender identity, gender expression” and “age,” among other categories.
Protecting “gender identity” and “gender expression” alone gives biological men the right to participate in women’s sports (and to injure them physically), to live in women’s dorms, to wash in women’s gym showers, and to be incarcerated in women’s prisons — all controversial actions that are already happening, albeit without explicit legal validation.
But because Section A also protects “age,” it creates transgender rights without age discrimination — meaning full rights for children, not just adults, to alter their “gender identity” and “gender expression.”
“Full rights” means parents can be legally liable for stepping in to stop their own child’s choice, based on an all-too-common passing fancy, to receive irreversible chemical treatments or surgical procedures.
Prop 1 activists disavow these consequences, but Section A’s “equal rights” for “gender identity, gender expression” plus “age” leave judges no alternative.
Still, if Albany legislators want to expand non-discrimination protections to transgender adults and to transgender minors, bring us an amendment worded to do just that.
We would understand what it says and we can vote on it.
Just don’t roll abortion rights up with transgender minor rights into one single ballot proposal, using one as a Trojan horse to smuggle in the other.
Many New Yorkers support abortion rights, but not transgender minor rights.
Worse still, Section A sneaks bans of a whopping 11 new categories of sweepingly, vaguely defined discrimination into the state Constitution, all within the Trojan horse of abortion rights.
That’s not democracy in good faith.
Finally, the con: Most sleazy is Prop 1’s Section B.
It takes away equal rights from politically out-of-favor people.
Disguised by convoluted legalese to resemble innocent boilerplate fine print that voters will dismiss — it’s not even mentioned in the ballot’s officially publicized description — Section B gives a free pass to any discrimination that would otherwise be banned by Section A, as long as that discrimination is alleged to “prevent or dismantle” another discrimination.
In effect, Section B legalizes reverse discrimination, legal scholars assert.
Moreover, the word “prevent” in Section B allows for anticipatory reverse discrimination — to repair alleged discriminations that haven’t even happened yet!
Prop 1 activists mutter that whatever (reverse) discrimination Section B may allow, we’ll still have anti-discrimination protection under the US Constitution.
That’s hardly reassuring: The federal reverse discrimination lawsuits culminating in victory in 2023’s SFFA vs. Harvard cost millions of dollars and decades of injustice.
Why even append Section B, which has nothing to do with abortion, transgender rights, or any of the other new Section A categories, and actually deprives some New Yorkers of their rights?
Still, if Albany legislators want to reiterate abortion rights, create new transgender rights, or even legalize reverse discrimination . . . bring us separate, clear, honest ballot proposals for each of those purposes.
Don’t trick voters.
Meanwhile, New Yorkers: Let’s vote down this deceitful, sneaky and damaging Prop 1.
Wai Wah Chin is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York.