The ERA is way overdue
Some readers may size up today’s topic and feel they’ve been transported back to the 1970s, when the push for the Equal Rights Amendment was loudest.
American life has changed tremendously in the decades since, largely for the better, but one key fact remains the same: The amendment has not been added to the U.S. Constitution. In other words, the document that guides the operation of this country still does not declare that women are equal in the eyes of the law. Nothing in the Constitution prohibits sex discrimination.
That’s astonishing. It’s also embarrassing, given that the United States is unusual among the world’s democracies for not explicitly saying in its constitution that women have the same rights as men.
Nearly 50 years after the Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress, that can still be changed, of course. In fact, the House of Representatives recently approved a bill that would remove the 1982 deadline for the amendment to be ratified by the constitutionally required 38 states — a bar attained only last year, when Virginia
lawmakers added their state to the list.
If the Senate also removes the deadline, the amendment might be good to go, depending on how the move is viewed by the courts. (The Constitution says nothing about a time limit for amendments.) But even if the process must start fresh, there’s no excuse for inaction.
In either case, let ratification, or a new push for it, be an opportunity to debate the ERA in the context of modern conversations about workplace discrimination, criminal justice, health care, education and athletics. Let the debate show how the Equal Rights Amendment can be both a sign of progress for women and a tool for future gains on equal pay, sexual harassment and other issues.
And let Republicans in Congress and state legislatures explain why so many elected officials in that party continue to stubbornly oppose an amendment supported by, according to a recent Pew Research poll, 78 percent of Americans, including 66 percent of Republicans.
The depth of that support might seem remarkable in a deeply divided country that often feels incapable of agreeing on, well, anything. Yet to read the simple text of the Equal Rights Amendment is to understand there should be nothing controversial about it, despite the cockamamie arguments raised by opponents.
“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
Who, in the year 2021, could fairly object to that? And if Congress was willing to adopt that simple statement of equality in 1972, when it had only 15 female members, why would it not reaffirm that commitment when there are 103?
That American voters are willing to elect more women provides evidence of the advances the country has made toward gender equality. Yet the embarrassing failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment proves the work is hardly done.