The Commonwealth of Virginia becomes the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), but the deadline to make it the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expired years ago. The courts may now decide. What’s wrong with looking the other way on the niceties of the law, and letting women rejoice in knowing they enjoy full equality under law with men?
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6 replies on “Women Rejoice as ERA Passes! Virginia is 38th to Ratify Constitutional Amendment”
Just women? What about the other 73 sexes?
“why not enshrine the accomplishments in the Constitution to show how serious we are about …” Sure, we can LOOK serious but the Democrats are generally doing that when they try, and fail horribly, to solve some claimed problem and just make things worse.
Also, if we have (and I would say we have) actually DONE the thing we’re SO VERY SERIOUS about… doesn’t that say a lot more about how serious we are? If people would rather see our talk than our walk, I don’t think we need to take THEM seriously.
There’s nothing the left likes more than vague, open ended legislation within which penumbras and emanations of almost anything can be ‘discovered’.
It has expired and only the left would drag it up from the dustbin of history. Their way of saying: “Look we actually really really did something” It is decades late and without meaning, but we did it.
What about all the new genders the left has come up with? Where would a transgender fit in, or a non-binary or any other the others?
Exactly. I have no doubt that as soon as this amendment was grafted onto the Constitution, we would have lawsuits by all the new gender flavors trying to use it to claim that sex is meaningless and that they are a protected class as understood in federal law and 14th Amendment jurisprudence. This would outlaw bathrooms and locker rooms for opposite sexes, not to mention schools, priesthoods, convents, gynocologists, etc. It would enable pathways of argument for smaller and smaller subsets of identities to to claim equal outcome-based rights, thus making a complete mockery of individual rights. It would enshrine identity politics in the Constitution. This is definitely a hill worth dying on.
Serendipitously, I picked up a novel from my shelf yesterday (bought at an estate sale some months ago). A newspaper clipping fell out, dated San Jose, California, September 12, 1977, and from the NY Times News Service. The headline was: “Women activists vowing final effort for ERA.”
The article discusses a convention of the National Women’s Political Caucus (“attended by 1250 feminists”), quotes Gloria Steinem, and alleges that opposition to the ERA came from a “backlash” from the “radical right,” including “conservative groups ranging from right-wing Republicans to the Mormon Church and even to the Ku Klux Klan,” plus Roman Catholics who oppose abortion.
They were not optimistic of getting 38 states to ratify the amendment before the March 22, 1979 deadline.