Column: Ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment would help all kinds of Americans — including men (via latimesopinion)
It would be some kind of symmetry if, 100 years after American women got the vote through the 19th Amendment, they finally acquired constitutional equality through the Equal Rights Amendment.
We really are in an unprecedented situation. The Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress in 1972. And when Congress passed the ERA and sent it to the states for ratification, it included in the preamble a deadline for ratification. But the deadline that Congress included on the ERA is not in the amendment itself; it’s contained only in the joint resolution of Congress that passed the amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. And as a result, it can be changed.
And we now, instead of defaulting to the mother, actually look at the best interests of the child. And instead of defaulting to a husband paying alimony, we look at the relative income of the two spouses, all of which is a much better system, obviously, because it gets more directly at the thing that the law was designed to prevent or protect.Oh, it certainly could benefit men.
We don’t have laws that people can use to challenge discrimination by the federal government in certain respects, or discrimination by law enforcement, or discrimination in how law enforcement agencies prioritize different kinds of complaints -- discrimination, for example, against women who have been raped and whose rape kits aren’t tested, or discrimination against victims of domestic violence.
A lot of the parade of horribles that Phyllis Schlafly talked about in the 1970s has not come to pass in the states that have equal rights amendments. I think the opposition is largely the same in terms of its talking points. But it’s much, much smaller. And we’re now far enough past the entry of women into the workforce in significant numbers that the issue about the fears about women working I don’t think exist anymore in the same way they did.
It did. And [Sen.] John McCain recommended it. And in fact, there was a federal judge in Texas not long ago who held that an all-male draft would violate existing rights against sex discrimination under the 14th Amendment. And I think we would see the same thing in respect to women-owned businesses. I don’t think there’s any reason to think that those would be abolished, that those kinds of protective measures would immediately be abolished, which is sometimes what you hear from the opposition.
Of course, there are concerns about what this would mean for abortion and reproductive rights, for pregnancy, for maternity leave.
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