On Thursday, Virginia, Illinois and Nevada, the last three states to “ratify” the Equal Rights Amendment, sued the National Archivist to force him to officially record the controversial measure as the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Two other lawsuits concerning the ERA were recently filed, one for and one against the Amendment’s ratification. This makes the third. And there may be more.
In addition, Democrat Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) has introduced legislation in the House of Representatives to retroactively extend the already expired 1979 (extended to 1982) deadline.
The dispute over the ERA’s validity reached a peak when Virginia’s General Assembly passed a resolution approving it on January 15. But before that vote, on January 8, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a legal memo to the National Archivist advising him that the ERA was no longer viable after the 1979 and 1982 deadlines passed without the requisite 38 state ratifications.
The reason only blue states are still interested in passing the ERA has nothing to do with equality for women. They not only have two constitutional amendments that address that – the 14th and the 19th – but numerous federal laws as well, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its employment protections, equal pay laws and protections for pregnant women, for example.
The real reason we are in a legislative and legal fight over the ERA in 2020 is, unsurprisingly, the radical Left’s desire to enshrine abortion into the Constitution using the vague language of the amendment to get them there. Here’s what the amendment says: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
How can any abortion regulation stand up under such an amendment? Should the U.S. Supreme Court ever overturn Roe v. Wade, it won’t achieve anything for the cause of saving pre-born babies if the ERA is in place. The amendment will be invoked to prohibit Congress and all 50 states from passing any law or regulation limiting or eliminating abortion. That’s exactly what abortion supporters are seeking.
Also, since the amendment prohibits discrimination on the basis of “sex” but doesn’t define the word, it will also ensure, with a future court’s blessing, that biological men who claim to be women will forever be able to compete against women in high school and college sports, completely overturning Title IX’s promise of opportunity for the female sex.
And it will no longer be permissible for public bathrooms and private ones that are located in “public accommodations” to be separated by sex. The same will be true of locker rooms at health clubs and schools. Women will be required to sign up for the draft, and fight our foreign enemies.
If, as many legal scholars have opined – including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – that the ERA is dead and the only recourse its current supporters have is to start over, it’s not hard to predict a red state/blue state result, leaving a future ERA with less state ratifications than the first one. The Left realizes this, and it’s why they are attempting to resurrect this amendment rather than starting over.
Hopefully, the result of this latest round of lawsuits involving the ERA will be to end this legal subterfuge by the Left to force its agenda on Americans who have no desire to see this bad idea rise again.