| By Dana Goldstein - Mar 27th, 2007 at 2:58 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Senators Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer and representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler will reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress today, and will announce hearings on women’s equality in the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Conservative online media is already up in arms, lamenting the funding the ERA would likely provide, for the first time, to poor women on Medicaid who need to access abortion. Yes, the ERA would help progressives fight for women’s bodily rights. But it is also a crucial legal protection -- one first introduced in Congress in 1923 -- necessary to end workplace discrimination against women, fight wage inequality, and stop obviously sexist corporate practices, such as insurance companies covering the cost of Viagra, but not birth control pills. I remember Maloney speaking at a young women’s leadership event last summer and lamenting the Democratic Party’s move away from strong support for the ERA. Hopefully these new hearings, held under a Congress with its first female speaker, will be a step toward reversing that trend. The amendment simply reads:
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
It’s time to put the Phyllis Schlafly era behind us. What’s so offensive in 2007 about equal rights for women?
Cross-posted at TAPPED.
!
Comments are closed for this post.
Rather than feigning ignorance, why not at least try to tackle all the substantive, liberal critiques of the ERA out there?
Such as, y'know, the whole "It'd be unbelievably difficult to implement in exchange for relatively marginal benefits" thing, or the whole "It takes things that are not rights at all, merely ideals, and then calls them rights without skipping a beat" thing?
You've pulled the "it's an ideal, not a right" argument a few times over the past year and a half or so (however long we've been posting here--Christ I'm old), and each time it seems like your definition of what is and is not a right is WAY more restrictive than what is generally recognized (namely, if it's in the Constitution that something can or cannot be done under the law, then it pertains directly to rights and not simply ideals).
I would accept that, if that were the issue here. But note the amendment's name: The "Equal Rights Amendment".
In other words, it's saying that men already enjoy these 'rights' and that women do not - a situation akin to men being able to vote and women not being able to.
The ERA asserts that it is addressing things that are already rights, rather than things they hope would be rights, and then equalizing the distribution of those rights.
My point all along has been that anything codified as protected in the constitution should be considered a right, and that this is a push to get recognition for a new right (as in, a protection not currently granted by the Constitution) that's in keeping with the ideals of the nation. I still don't get where your sense of outrage comes from.
Women find it offensive that women need an amendment guaranteeing them equal rights. The assumption is that women are equal to men, and that that's a fundamental right, so codifying that in the Constitution is inherently sexist (there's no equal rights amendment for men). Yes, I read the text of the amendment as stated in the blog post, and I know that it says nothing explicit about women, but, as with all politics, this is about public perception.
I am inclined to agree. Also, we have laws against this already (to the best of my knowledge - I am not a lawyer) so this seems at best superfluous.
Federal law is not enough, because federal laws are subject to court review and the courts can be stacked. Stare decisis is only as strong as the individual judge reading precedent decides to make it. A constitutional amendment is the only guarantee we have that there will be no sanctioned or attempted sex-based discrimination by government agencies.
The 14th Amendment obviously alludes to race when it says rights shall not be denied--should we not have had that amendment because nondiscrimination based on race is a fundamental right? It seems that having the language in the Constitution that certainly is only necessary because it reflects the racist nature of society is better than allowing wrongs to continue unaddressed.
As to being "superfluous," yes there are some laws, but they a) don't cover everything, and b) the main worry by those who have fought for women's rights is that these laws could easily be altered, whereas an amendment is a very secure promise that women will not lose their rights.
So you (or Sorkin) are suggesting that when the Constitution was written it was accepted that women were equal to men?
It had to be adjusted to be clear that women could vote. You honestly think the Framers had gender equality in mind?
And the "perception" is that an amendment giving _equal_ rights to woman is _discriminating_ against... men? So, what... was the 13th Amendment "discriminating" against slaveowners?