It’s time to revive effort for Equal Rights Amendment

Mary Sanchez We lie to young girls. We tell them that they can be anything that they want to be, that nothing will hold them back from their aspirations but their ability to dream big.

Lean in, women are told in mid-career. Keep your head down, be diligent and network. You’ll reach your highest goals.

But women in their 60s and older suspect the truth. Women still are not regarded as full equals in America.

They know because they remember.

In 1982, the Equal Rights Amendment fell short of being ratified. It needed three more of the 15 holdout states to reach 38.

Mention this to younger women and they look puzzled. Women aren’t protected as equals under the U.S. Constitution? No, we are not. We skipped a crucial step.

What about the 14th Amendment, goes a common reaction, with its equal protection clause?

Here is what the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had to say on that: “The Constitution does not protect women from sexual discrimination. No one ever thought that’s what it meant. No one ever voted for that.”

This huge lapse is pertinent every day of the year. But let’s play the calendar game and use Wednesday’s annual International Women’s Day to grab some attention.

If you do one thing this International Women’s Day, make it be this.

Download the 2016 documentary “Equal Means Equal” directed by Kamala Lopez. Buy the book by the same title by Jessica Neuwirth, former director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Both works shake complacency to dust.

Well-sourced, both walk through a range of problems that are exacerbated by the lack of an amendment: disparities in pay, sex discrimination cases, sexual assault, unequal access to health care, poverty.

For middle-class women, this might not seem all that relevant. It is relevant, however, albeit perhaps less piercingly than it is to their AfricanAmerican and Latino sisters and to those who are less economically stable. Wherever gender disparities exist, women of color suffer at greater levels.

Women earn less than men, on average, in virtually every occupation, including nursing, where women far outnumber men.

This ought to be mobilizing information. A bill to support the Equal Rights Amendment passed the Nevada Senate recently. And other states have pending proposals, as well. The Republican Party can be counted on to object, but getting them to articulate why is key.

You have to wonder whether our sexist president would indeed be the commander in chief if the ERA had been ratified.

History will likely judge Donald Trump’s electorate harshly for its attitudes about women in 2016. While there were many reasons people chose Trump, it also required strenuous mental gymnastics for them to dismiss his glaring misogyny.

If women were considered full equals, if they had the Constitution firmly behind them, the nation never would have seen fit to elect a man who held such heinously backward views of women.

Our president is a grim reminder of how far women have yet to go to be treated as equals in America ... and perhaps the best advertisement there is for a new equal rights amendment.