Incongruties....

Last night I was looking through some old video tapes to see which ones actually had stuff we still needed to watch and forgot about in the course of two moves in a year, and which were reusable. In the course of so doing, I came across an episode of The West Wing from the second season, "17 People", in which Toby figures out that something is going on, which in turn leads him being told about President Bartlet's multiple sclerosis. So, I sat down to watch the episode, which was a pretty good one.

One of the subplots of the episode had Sam Seaborn and Ainsley Hayes (the blond Republican lawyer who was played by Emily Procter before she left the show for CSI Miami) arguing about the merits of the Equal Rights Amendment. Toward the end, Ainsley pretty much ends the argument with this bit of impassioned dialogue:

"Becuase it's humiliating. A new Amendment we vote on declaring that I'm equal under the law to a man? I am mortified to discover there's reason to believe I wasn't before. I am a citizen of this country, I am not a special sub-set in need of your protection, I do not have to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old, white, men."

Upon hearing that line again, last night, I was immediately reminded of this: the ceremony at which President Bush signed the ban of partial-birth abortion into law:



Interesting bit of congruity, that.