2017 might have been the year of the woman. Women stepped up, together, and made their voices heard in a variety of ways, from the Women’s Marches to the Me-Too movement to Times Up. A spotlight on the challenges that women face in the workplace, and in life in general, drove attention to issues that could no longer be ignored and many powerful men, and I suspect many more less powerful men whose names didn’t make the evening news, paid a price for very bad behavior toward women.
There is more to be done. Much more. But 2017 was a good year.
There is one area that is still begging to be addressed and that is providing women equality under the law within the U.S. Constitution. The vehicle for this is an Equal Rights Amendment.
If you’re like most people, you’re probably reading this and thinking “Is the Equal Rights Amendment still a thing?” The answer is yes. And it will be until it is passed.
Five years ago, I was at CPAC – the Conservative Political Action Conference – to hear a friend of mine speak. The speaker before her was Phyllis Schlafly, of Eagle Forum fame, who spoke of all her accomplishments as a conservative leader. The accomplishment of which she seemed most proud was her role in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment. My friend and I looked at each other quizzically and had to sheepishly admit that we didn’t even know what the Equal Rights Amendment said, but assumed it was some kind of liberal, sexual revolution ploy by bra-burning women to crap all over men. Imagine our surprise when we read the language and it said:
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
We both laughed and said, “Uh, I think I’m for that.” I started doing a little research to find out why it never passed and who was behind it and who opposed it.
So here is a little history lesson for you:
Initially the Equal Rights Amendment was supported by Republicans very strongly and was even in the Republican Party platform. It was overwhelmingly passed in 1971 in both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. From there it had a deadline by which 38 states needed to ratify it. Thanks to Schlafly and her army of supporters, it was ratified in only 35 states by the deadline. “Many people who followed the struggle over the ERA believed—rightly in my view—that the Amendment would have been ratified by 1975 or 1976 had it not been for Phyllis Schlafly’s early and effective effort to organize potential opponents,” political scientist, Jane J. Mansbridge wrote in her book “Why We Lost the ERA.”
So designated equality for women failed to become a Constitutional protection.
In 1980, support for the ERA was removed from the Republican Party platform at the behest of Schlafly, who had become a general in the culture wars on the side of conservatives and values voters. Schlafly continued her influence with the Republican Party right up until her death in 2016, regularly serving as a delegate to the Republican National Convention and regularly exerting powerful influence over the platform committee. Now, I can see that Phyllis Schlafly has done some good things for conservatism and for Republicans. However, I don’t believe that a woman who said, in a 2007 speech at Bates College, “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape” really had her finger on the pulse of the modern, conservative woman. Is it possible that her influence within the Republican Party outlasted the validity of many of her arguments? I think so.
So here we are in 2018 and we still don’t have Equal Rights for women enshrined in our Constitution. So, a group of us have come together to get the ball rolling. The Human Campaign is an effort to get the ERA passed and ratified by 2020 – the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment which gave women the right to vote. We think that 100 years after women got the right to vote, it’s about time that every protection which men enjoy in the Constitution applied to women.
Nobody is suggesting that without the ERA, we are on track to follow the path portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood which portrays an America taken over by a totalitarian regime and women are stripped of all rights in the new patriarchal society. (Although some days it doesn’t seem impossible…)
But there are strong indications that those charged with interpreting the Constitution as it is written don’t believe that women are protected.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg recently indicated that “We the People” meant something very different during our country’s formative years than we expect it to mean today. She said, “if there is one amendment to add to the Constitution, it would be the ERA. I’d like to tell my granddaughters that they live in a country where men and women are actually of equal stature.”
And Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, said in September 2010 “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t.”
These two constitutional law experts didn’t agree on much during their years on the Supreme Court, but they agreed that protection for women in the Constitution is not expressly provided.
The language is simple. “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” This shouldn’t be controversial. Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on this, at a time when they don’t seem to agree on much.
We have come a long way in the last 12 months. But it is time to do more. Let’s pass the Equal Rights Amendment.
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