Equal rights for women (I'm for)

All institutions that grant certain rights and privileges from the state limit themselves to certain people. For example, you mentioned driver's licenses. We currently don't discriminate by gender in the United States when it comes to that issue but we do discriminate by other factors: visual impairment, drunken driving, history of crime. It's not a question of "How would blind people feel if we denied them the right to drive?", it's a question of "Does this group of people promote the initial reason why the institution was created or the right was granted in the first place"? It's not about being fair or equal, it's about serving a purpose for society. That goes for various rights and licenses the state gives -- the right to vote (which we deny to felons), medical licenses (which we deny to people who haven't graduated medical school), legal licenses (which we deny to people who don't pass the bar exam) and so on. You may think it's offensive to hear "Women shouldn't be allowed to vote or drive or be represented fully in court" but there's a reason that countries and cultures instituted those laws. They're cultural rights, not natural ones. The mere fact that they can denied is proof that they don't exist in nature. These occurrences, which you probably look at as grievances, are not mere arbitrary decisions. It wasn't accidental, for example, that women weren't allowed to vote in the United States for a century and a half. The Founding Fathers didn't just accidentally forget about women. Even if you cite sexism as an explanation, it's still a reason why people instituted these ideas. It wasn't random process, it was methodical. Thus, every debate about extending an equal right to men and women has to delve into whether the intrinsic differences between the two will allow for the purpose of why the right was given by the state in the first place. Certain races were denied the right to vote not because nobody cared about their feelings but precisely because white people felt that it would not fulfill the purpose of why voting was invented in the first place. It would pave the way for their loss of power, which they were using to establish the voting system in the first place. Discrimination did not just affect women and blacks --- it affected plenty of whites. There were plenty of restrictions "--age limits, land property ownership, tax contributions -- that prohibited white people from voting. The Founding Fathers realized that giving everyone the right to vote was unsustainable. This is best expressed by this quote, often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy" The reasoning is the same -- we want to establish democratic rights in order to give people control over their government. But giving everyone democratic rights will result in the loss of control over government. Therefore, to maintain why the institution was created in the first place, we shall not give everyone these democratic rights". I'm not going to specifically debate whether there is something different between men and women that means only the former should vote, be allowed to drive, be allowed to leave the house etc. My only point is that the differences between the two have to be considered when deciding whether to grant them a legal right, much like the differences between blind people and people with normal vision are considered when deciding who gets the right to drive. Simply saying "Men and women are equal" does not make it so, and the "equal rights" which you seek, even if you deny it, are the direct conclusions of that belief. Each issue should be considered by itself.