New York voters are being asked to vote on Proposition 1, which claims to be an “Equal Rights Amendment.” Who could be against that? The answer should be: anyone who reads it.

Proposition 1 would amend the state constitution’s equal protection clause to simultaneously cover “gender identity,” “sexual orientation,” and “reproductive healthcare and autonomy,” while eliminating male and female pronouns from the clause and adding “age” — meaning children, except for the unborn — as a protected class. It also purports to protect explicit racial and other discrimination if it can be claimed to “prevent or dismantle discrimination.” It’s the whole stew of cultural leftism in one pot. The Empire State’s voters should reject this.

The proposal revises the existing text of Section 11 of Article 1 of the state constitution, while adding a second clause. The first clause of the revision reads:

§ 11 a. No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws of this state or any subdivision thereof. No person shall, because of race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, creed [or], religion, or sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy, be subjected to any discrimination in [his or her] their civil rights by any other person or by any firm, corporation, or institution, or by the state or any agency or subdivision of the state, pursuant to law.

Enshrining a euphemized right to abortion up until the moment of birth in the state constitution is bad, and it is also thoroughly unnecessary, given the state’s already-expansive abortion regime. Pro-lifers have so little power in New York that Lee Zeldin had to argue in 2022 against using state taxpayer money to bring out-of-state residents into New York to have abortions. Like other ballot proposals across the country, this would remove from the legislature any ability to compromise or place reasoned outside limits on abortion or any of the other topics it covers.

It gets worse from there. The broad-brush right to “gender identity” and “gender expression” would force every girls’ sports team and every girls’ bathroom in the state to accept men who identify as women or boys who identify as girls. Combining the rights to “gender identity” or abortion with the elimination of any ability to distinguish by age would entirely strip parental-consent rights over gender surgeries, puberty blockers, or abortions. It is hard to see how the state’s laws on age of consent to sex or marriage would survive this language. The unintended consequences — unintended, at least, by the voters — could be sweeping.

The asserted rights apply not only against the government but against “any firm, corporation, or institution” — without any explicit conscience exemption. That means that even private religious schools, hospitals, and churches face being forced to participate in abortion, transgenderism, same-sex marriage, and the rest, protected only by the extent to which this flagrantly violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Not for nothing has the New York State Catholic Conference issued a statement signed by all of the state’s bishops opposing the proposition, and had it read at Mass and distributed in parish bulletins across the state.

The new second clause has received less attention but is mischievous in its own right:

b. Nothing in this section shall invalidate or prevent the adoption of any law, regulation, program, or practice that is designed to prevent or dismantle discrimination on the basis of a characteristic listed in this section, nor shall any characteristic listed in this section be interpreted to interfere with, limit, or deny the civil rights of any person based upon any other characteristic identified in this section.

The obvious intent of this provision, which again will likely collide with the federal Constitution, is to protect programs that discriminate in favor of groups that have faced historic discrimination (but only if they are currently in political favor). While the final clause might yet be argued to preserve some measure of conscience protection for the civil rights of religious individuals, the language distinguishing between the rights of “persons” and the application of the first clause to “institutions” suggests that any such protection would not extend to the myriad forms (including churches) by which individuals gather to exercise their rights.

Proposition 1 would open a Pandora’s box of lawsuits, radical changes to society, persecution of dissent, and destruction of longstanding civic institutions. Its conflicts with the federal Constitution are as stark as its future applications are unpredictable. Nearly half a million New Yorkers fled the state between 2020 and 2023. The last thing the state needs is to abort its children, sterilize its youth, and shutter its churches, synagogues, and religious schools. New Yorkers should reject Proposition 1.