Three Democratic attorneys general have sued the U.S. government in hopes of convincing people that the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified and is now part of the Constitution.
Virginia’s legislature voted this month to ratify the ERA. Technically, that makes it the 38th state to ratify, which satisfies the three-fourths requirement to add the amendment to the Constitution. Feminists everywhere rejoiced.
“Women are not treated with the same value as men in America, and that stands to reason, as they have no value in their own Constitution,” actress Patricia Arquette claimed while lobbying for the ERA last year.
Finally, after so many years, women can be equal to men. Since, apparently, they weren’t already?
There’s just one problem. The Equal Rights Amendment, which Congress passed with two-thirds majorities in 1972, explicitly states that it can only be added to the Constitution if ratified by 38 states prior to 1979, or (if Congress can extend the deadline with a simple-majority vote, which it probably can’t) 1982. Hence the lawsuit by the attorneys general from Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia. “After generations of effort,” they state, “the women of this country are entitled to their rightful place in the Constitution.”
According to the Justice Department, and prior court precedent, it’s simply too late.
“It seems absolutely clear to me that the Constitution leaves Congress the power to create deadlines, extend deadlines, and remove deadlines,” Jane Mansbridge, professor of politics at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book, Why We Lost The ERA, told the Washington Examiner.
The legal realities did not stop ratification from becoming the feminist rally cry of 2020. But either way, ERA has little to do with women’s rights and everything to do with enacting other liberal measures.
Women already have their rights protected under the 14th Amendment — ”No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” etc. — making the ERA legally superfluous. However, what it would do is open the door to a list of liberal policies. One of them is taxpayer-funded abortion, which Connecticut and New Mexico have both imposed using their respective state Equal Rights Amendment. The Superior Court in Connecticut ruled that failure to fund abortion is actually “[d]iscrimination against pregnancy … when it is medically necessary, and when all other medical expenses are paid by the state for both men and women …”
The ERA could also make it possible for women to be drafted, separate-sex bathrooms to be eliminated, and preferential treatment for single mothers and pregnant women to evaporate in the name of equality.
Democrats, who need a good civil rights issue for our era, need the Equal Rights Amendment. Women, on the other hand, are better off without it.
