New Drive Afoot to Pass Equal Rights Amendment By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer
Federal and state lawmakers have launched a new drive to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, reviving a feminist goal that faltered a quarter-century ago when the measure did not gain the approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures.
The amendment, which came three states short of enactment in 1982, has been introduced in five state legislatures since January. Yesterday, House and Senate Democrats reintroduced the measure under a new name — the Women’s Equality Amendment — and vowed to bring it to a vote in both chambers by the end of the session. …
The amendment consists of 52 words and has one key line: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” That sentence would subject legal claims of gender discrimination to the same strict scrutiny given by courts to allegations of racial discrimination.
Although more states are considering ratifying the ERA now than at any other time in the past 25 years, activists still face serious hurdles. Every statewide officeholder in Arkansas endorsed the amendment this year, but the bill stalled in committee last week after Eagle Forum President Phyllis Schlafly came to Little Rock to testify against the measure. [mjh: Schlafly is proof the good die young.]
In the 1970s, Schlafly and others argued that the ERA would lead to women being drafted by the military and to public unisex bathrooms. Today, she warns lawmakers that its passage would compel courts to approve same-sex marriages and deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows. …
The ERA, originally introduced in Congress in 1923, gained popularity in the mid-1960s. In March 1972, it cleared the first of two hurdles: passing both chambers of Congress by the required two-thirds vote.
Thirty state legislatures ratified it the next year. Congress extended by three years its seven-year deadline for ratification, but the decade passed without approval by the required 38 states. ERA backers have since introduced the resolution in every Congress, but only now do they believe they have a realistic chance of success.
Legal scholars debate whether the 35 state votes to ratify the amendment are still valid.
In 1997, three professors argued in the William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law that the ERA remained viable because in 1992 the Madison Amendment — which affects congressional pay raises — became the 27th constitutional amendment 203 years after it first won congressional approval. Under that precedent, advocates say, the ERA should become part of the Constitution once three-quarters of the states ratify it, no matter how long that takes. …
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The Amendment In Question
The text of the Equal Rights Amendment, as proposed in 1972 by the 92nd Congress, and as published in Volume 86 of U.S. Statutes at Large (Pages 1523-1524), reads as follows:
Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
I’ve supported the ERA from the beginning. People like Schlafly and Anita Bryant should be enough to discredit the opposition.
As an aside and a plate-of-shrimp, my longtime companion, MR, ‘discovered’ the 27th Amendment a couple of months ago — she who carries a well-thumbed copy of the Constitution with her much of the time (alá Senator Sam Irvin). MR was quizzing a young friend in preparation for a high school test on the Constitution and threw in what she thought would be a trick question: What’s the 27th Amendment? To which she received the unexpected but correct answer. I don’t know how we missed the passage of an amendment to the Constitution. We were probably busy celebrating the periodic downfall of the Republican Party. (Their success is always their undoing — note to Democrats.) mjh