I'm so angry about this
| | | | | | | | Happy 2020, dear readers! Things got a bit hairy at the end of the year and I dropped the ball on sending you a few updates, but you’re reading now. Great!
Less great is, well, the news. With the exception of a certain duchess who rescued her prince in an epic reverse fairy tale, things are bleak.
What’s got me the most upset right now is a group of Republican attorneys general — and Trump’s Justice Department. They are actively trying to block the Equal Rights Amendment from making into our Constitution.
You’ve probably heard of the ERA? It is a proposed amendment to the Constitution and it is just one sentence long. One. Sentence. All it says is that people should be treated the same under the law regardless of sex. Right now, they are not treated the same. Women are not protected from disparate treatment under the Constitution. Discrimination against women is not subjected to the highest levels of judicial scrutiny. Gun owners are in the Constitution. Women are not.
That means, for example, there are relatively weak laws around sexual harassment, equal pay and domestic violence. Pregnant women and new mothers are not really that well protected from discrimination. (This piece in The New Republic has more on why the ERA is still necessary.)
Women have been trying to get the ERA into the Constitution for almost a century. First proposed in 1923, the ERA was overwhelmingly approved by Congress in 1972 and sent out to the states to ratify. But amid an insane backlash — dire warnings of women being abandoned by their husbands and having to fight wars, as well as the usual abortion fearmongering and even some gay marriage stuff — the ERA fell three states short of ratification before a 1982 deadline imposed by Congress.
In recent years, women have revived the ERA. Nevada and Illinois ratified the amendment in 2017 and 2018. And we’re on the brink of getting that third state across the finish line. Equality activists believe the deadline issue can be overcome — either by Congress enacting a new deadline or, some argue, because the deadline is unconstitutional.
Anyway, this seems like a technicality. Who would be against equality for women anyway? Surely, we can all agree in 2020 that women should have equal standing under the law.
This is when the rage starts.
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