Recent actions by Betsy DeVos, Trump's secretary of education, show that the Trump administration is ready to pick up the banner of men's rights as a legitimate civil rights issue.  The feminist jihad against men started fifty years ago with the bald-faced lie that the "system" had been constructed solely by men for the benefit of men.

This was always absurd.  What feminist pretended was that non-equivalence, which is to say recognizing that men and women are fundamentally different and having laws and mores accept this, is the same as oppression.  The wicked silliness of this is manifest to any honest and serious mind.

Consider the inability of women in some states to enter into contracts in the 19th century.  In fact, this was a protection for women denied men.  Women could enter into contracts, but unlike men, women were immune from being sued for breaches.  Men had to carry the burden of litigation and financial responsibility, and women were exempt from that burden.

Consider also some of the first "progressive" laws passed – the laws that denied employers the right to use women or children for dangerous and dirty jobs like mining coal.  What this meant was that the worst jobs, the deadliest jobs, and the nastiest jobs were left to men.  This reflects how women generally feel about work.  Although women are more than welcome to work as crews in wastewater and water lines, very few seek such jobs. 

Consider also the profoundly offensive idea that women have been unfairly "denied" the right to serve in combat roles in the military.  Few men truly wanted to serve in combat roles, and those who did can relate what hell it was in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.  The "demand" that women be allowed in combat roles came only after combat was made incomparably safer than it was in those wars. 

Feminists ignore the fact that women spend most of the money in America, regardless of who sweats in unpleasant jobs to earn that money.  Feminists perversely insist that we ought to devote more money and attention to "women's health" issues, despite the fact that only in the last century, women have moved past men in life expectancy and that women have become, since the end of World War II, a majority of Americans for the first time.

In short, feminism is not about justice, and it is not about equality, and it is not about fairness.  Feminism blindly supports women, whether women are wronged or not.  So when law enforcement suggested in the 1980s that in cases of rape without evidence beyond the statements of both parties, both parties should be given a polygraph test, feminists strongly objected.  When men at Duke University were obviously defamed by false rape accusations, feminists rallied to the side of the pathologically dishonest female accuser and have never apologized at all for their persecution of these innocent young men.

Anyone familiar with the child support program in the latter part of the last century knows how often and flagrantly women lied about the child support they had received, sometimes accusing men who had never missed a child support payment of never making a child support payment.  Nothing, of course, happened to these women.

Anyone familiar with federal guidelines on domestic violence knows how the rules have been constructed so that no woman, except perhaps for one holding a smoking gun over their husband's body, could ever be arrested, and because these same guidelines demand that someone must always be arrested, countless innocent or battered men had their lives destroyed by abusive wives.  Federal programs that give billions to domestic violence shelters for women do not give a dime to any domestic violence shelters for men (which are practically nonexistent and solely supported by private donations).

It is high time for courageous conservatives like Betsy DeVos to take up the cause of men in America, who, unlike women a century ago, do not have some rights that the other sex does not, but rather are in every sense and in every way a maltreated, mocked, and abused minority in our land.  Men's rights ought to be the clarion call of everyone truly interested in civil rights.  But the left could not care less about civil rights for all Americans.  The left cares only about power.