Hyperbole much? In Monday’s Maine Voices column, Nancy Murdock says that “women have been held hostage” and that an Equal Rights Amendment “will help women, families, children and men. We all benefit when our working women are paid fairly … and when there is a strong defense against sex being used as a weapon.”

But this is why the column isn’t balanced. Men are tacked on the end almost as a grudging afterthought. The only “equate” is equating “equal” with “retaliation.” We’re already doing a test run called affirmative action. If she isn’t deflecting our objection to something, she outright gets even because she doesn’t like how we said something. Otherwise, we’re not wooing her enough in our presentation under their coy and extrapolated “right to choose” everything.

Thinking they have made evidence for women’s equality, the opposite has occurred. Whereas at one time, men could “see through the hedges and stretch the envelope” to “move the ball down the field” (resolve issues), women saw it as keeping them as housewives. Nowadays, the she replacements can only mimic and administrate, meanwhile keeping intact the biggest deferment to ever come down the pike, affirmative action. So, fail on count one.

Although seemingly true in the veneer, there is a fallacy to “equal pay.” I never got equal pay for equal work; it depends on what you bring to the table at hiring. The notion of affirmative action was to employ people with deficiencies and get a tax credit for doing so, hence making allowances for the candidate with less-than-ample backgrounds: the handicapped, veterans, senior citizens, women, etc. But the enactment doesn’t say employers can’t pay them accordingly.

And thirdly, does the author really want to bring up using “sex as a weapon”?

The ongoing experiment shows that women have only gone from “the fairer sex” to the gilded cows.

William Capistran

Kennebunkport