As Peter Wright recently penned so succinctly on the pages of this website, the men’s movement, after a hundred years of antecedents that were more anti-feminist than pro-male, has entered a new era.

We have, after many internal struggles, and much work to rise above the fog of social programming, finally ushered in a second wave, relieved not just of the dictates of ideological social engineers, but of the outmoded and archaic demands on men that led us to feminist governance and puppetry in the first place.

We have shaken ourselves from the trance of mainstream politics, from the shame and control of religiosity, and from the terminal, toxic propensity to measure our innate worth by the capricious judgments of women and costly approval of traditional men.

And it has laid a path of autonomy and self-actualization that was unavailable till now because we simply did not dare to imagine it.

This website, though I think the word website is no longer an adequate description of this place, is a place critical to that imagining. And while we have never pretended to speak for all men, our voice has caught the attention of a growing legion of men and women hungering for a better way.

It is with that better way in mind that I am pleased to make an announcement and to issue a challenge to all organizations that purport to support the cause of a just and fair society.

The Equal Rights Amendment, written in 1923, is a proposal to make freedom from discrimination based on sex a matter of Constitutional Law in the United States. Its wording is as clear as it is brief.

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Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex;

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article;

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

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After discussion with the editorial staff of this website, we have agreed that this proposed amendment, precisely as it is worded above, is in the interest of all citizens. It is our considered opinion that resistance to this amendment primarily stems from the desire to maintain the status quo of the disposability of men and boys. And indeed we find that the activism that prevented its previous success stemmed from political conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly, who successfully campaigned to keep men in deadly servitude to their culture for the benefit and enjoyment of women.

With that in mind, we issue our support for the Equal Rights Amendment and pledge our activism to push for ratification. We also challenge all human or so called equal rights organizations to support this with their own redoubled efforts to demand ratification, as failure to do so will be identified as the supreme hypocrisy of the age.

With that, I am also issuing a request to the editors and contributors of A Voice for Men, and issuing an advisory to the same effect. From this day forward, it is the editorial policy of AVFM to refer to the movement of which we are a part as the Men’s Human Rights Movement, or MHRM.

That too is a simple idea whose time has come. While we are focused in the inequalities of law that have a disproportionally negative impact on the lives of men and boys, we do not claim the need to do so at the expense of any other group. This is, in one of its rare forms, a movement for human rights. It is only fitting that we identify it as such in our lexicon.

On behalf of the editorial staff of A Voice for Men,

Paul Elam

Dean Esmay